Case No 49 in UFO AFRINEWS No 7 (Jack Jones fireball, follow-up)

What was reported

Restated from UFO AFRINEWS No 7: Jack Jones, driving from Bloemfontein to Vanderbijlpark with a young apprentice, was accompanied by a ball of flames 8 to 12 metres across, roughly 20 to 25 metres up and 50 metres from the car. It stayed with them the whole way, vanishing when they entered larger towns and reappearing beyond them. Jones wanted to shoot at it but the terrified boy cried, so he put his gun away. Near his home it hovered over trees, then as he approached moved slowly off following the road's contours. Albert Budden calls it a natural UAP and proposes that town electromagnetic fields shifted its light out of the visible spectrum or repelled it upward. Hind retorts that Jones himself, not the editors, inferred intelligence, and asks how it singled out his car among heavy night traffic beyond Kroonstad.

What Hind made of it

Hind rejects Budden's electromagnetic explanation as insufficient, arguing a mindless phenomenon could not re-select Jones's car among heavy traffic, and sides with Jones on apparent intelligence.

Explanation offered
Albert Budden: natural UAP whose visibility was altered or which was repelled by electromagnetic fields from towns and the Vanderbijlpark substation

In their words

• It followed them all the way, disappearing when they entered some of the larger towns

• Jack Jones undeniably encountered a natural unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) but you say things like 'they must have understood'

• Come off it, Mr Budden!

Cross references

• UFO AFRINEWS No 7, Case No 49
• Albert Budden, The Electromagnetic Indictment

Source

Cynthia Hind, UFO Afrinews No 9 (February 1994), spread 20-21