When people read about alleged encounters with aliens it’s normally famous incidents in the United States (US) that get the attention – the Roswell incident, the Berry and Barney Hill encounter, and Travis Walton’s alleged abduction are three that captured the public imagination in the 20th century.

But it’s not just in the US where there have been alleged encounters with aliens or unidentified flying objects (UFOs) – the United Kingdom has its Rendlesham Forest incident and Brazil had the Varginha sightings, for example.

But Southern Africa has also had its alleged alien visitors, and while some clearly come from fantasists, others are harder to dismiss as a story by someone looking for attention.

Read how a Natal farm woman said she fell in love with a man from another star, sixty schoolchildren outside Harare who all told the same impossible story, and an absurd, forged air force memo claimed two South African jets had shot down a UFO over the Kalahari in the 1980s.

Elizabeth Klarer and the Man from Meton

Elizabeth Klarer was, on paper, an unlikely contactee. Born in 1910 in Mooi River, Natal, she had studied meteorology at Cambridge and trained as a pilot, a serious, technically literate woman in a difficult field. She said her first sighting came as a child of seven on her family’s farm, decades before “UFO” was even a common term. It was only after she read George Adamski’s contactee books in the mid-1950s that she began to make sense of what she had seen. (Adamski was a Polish-American who claimed he was in contact with Venusians who took him on tours of the Solar System.)

By her own account, the contact escalated fast. In 1954, she says she encountered a fair-haired alien named Akon. In 1956, she claimed Akon took her aboard his spacecraft from the Drakensberg foothills. The relationship, in her telling, was not just diplomatic: Akon flew her to his home world, Meton, a planet she said orbited Alpha Centauri. There, she claimed, she conceived and gave birth to a hybrid son, Ayling, in under four months, before returning to Earth alone. Her son, she said, could never live on this planet and remained behind.

Klarer published the whole account in 1980 as Beyond the Light Barrier, and left an unfinished sequel, The Gravity File, at her death in 1994. South African audiences received her warmly for decades. International ufologists were far less kind: her only physical evidence was a single photograph, described by researchers who examined it as weak at best, and nothing she offered ever corroborated the story. She never recanted it.

The UFO That Landed at a Zimbabwean Primary School

On the morning of 16 September 1994, during a mid-morning break at Ariel School in Ruwa, roughly 22 kilometres southeast of Harare, dozens of children said they watched one or more silver, disc-shaped craft descend onto the scrubland next to their playground. Of the school’s pupils, aged six to twelve, 62 later gave accounts of what they saw. Some described beings dressed in black exiting the craft. Several said the beings communicated with them without speaking, delivering what the children understood as a warning about pollution and humanity’s reckless use of technology. The whole event, by most tellings, lasted about fifteen minutes. The teachers, in a staff meeting at the time, saw nothing.

Zimbabwean UFO researcher Cynthia Hind reached the school within days and found the children’s accounts strikingly consistent. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s Tim Leach, who had covered actual war zones, said afterwards that this story unsettled him more than anything he had reported on. Two months later, Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack travelled to Ruwa and interviewed the children himself, and it was Mack’s involvement, more than anyone else's, that turned Ruwa into one of the most cited mass sightings in UFO literature.

Sceptics have offered the usual counter-explanations: mass hysteria, a half-remembered puppet show, a dust devil, even contamination between the children’s accounts after repeated interviews. A rocket re-entry had also lit up regional skies days earlier. In 2023, a Netflix documentary featured a former pupil claiming the whole thing had been his prank, a claim that sits awkwardly against his own earlier statements and against dozens of other children who never changed their story.

The UFO the SAAF Supposedly Shot Out Of the Sky

In 1989, documents began circulating that claimed a South African Navy frigate had detected an unidentified craft over the Kalahari travelling at 10 000 kilometres per hour on 7 May at 13:45. Two South African Air Force (SAAF) Mirage F1 fighters were said to have intercepted it, before an experimental weapon named “Tor-2”, described as a laser cannon, brought it down. The crash was said to have gouged a 150-metre crater and left behind a silver disc containing two humanoid occupants, later supposedly flown out to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the US.

The story reached British UFO researchers through two men, Henry Azadehdel and James van Groenen, who supplied what they said were leaked SAAF documents stamped “top secret”. Van Groenen even offered to sit a lie detector test to prove his claims.

They did not survive scrutiny for long. The documents were written in ungrammatical English, mixed metric and imperial units, and misspelled the Kalahari itself, oddities investigators pointed out no genuine military file would carry. The named frigate, the Tafelberg, turned out to be a tanker, not a warship. A laser weapon capable of downing a UFO would, by the physics involved, have weighed well over 20 tonnes, far too large and heavy to mount on a fighter jet. The claimed intercept speeds and travel times were physically impossible even before accounting for the fact that Valhalla, the airbase named in the story, was a training facility rather than a combat base.

German researcher Michael Hesemann eventually tracked down Van Groenen, exposed him as several years younger than he claimed, and found he had forged the documents using seals lifted from a South African passport and a birth certificate. Van Groenen later admitted to Hesemann that his goal had been to embarrass the entire UFO research community. Azadehdel, his collaborator, had prior convictions for orchid smuggling and telecoms theft. The pair tried the same trick again in 1996, filing a near-identical hoax about a UFO crash in Lesotho.

An alleged interstellar romance, a schoolyard encounter, and a manufactured military secret give Southern Africa its own peculiar place in UFO folklore. And anyone looking for extraordinary tales of supposed alien visitors need not begin in the American desert. There are plenty closer to home.