Lesotho: Another UAP Hoax?

What was reported

American correspondent Albert Benajam sent Hind a cutting about a Lesotho farmer who saw something crash in the hills in September 1995; anonymous documents followed. They claim farmer Peter Lachasa heard a strange sound at 21:15 on 15 September and a dull explosion two minutes later, that neighbours watched a bright light sink to the ground and burst with blinding flashes, and that a humming craft turned dull grey amid burning grass and fierce heat. Lachasa reached Leribe police at 22:30; Sgt Thobo and Constable Nandi supposedly found a windowless grey disc 18 metres by 3. A fax to 1 SAI Intelligence in Bloemfontein at 00:15 brought two Alouette helicopters under a 'Commander George Human', a 'Capt. Manie Louw' reporting 400 square metres ablaze at 01:17, a 100-metre sterile zone, and a Foreign Technology Recovery Division from Valhalla at 05:55. Hind's intelligence contact found the officers fictitious and the overnight timing impossible.

What Hind made of it

Hind is sure the documents are another James van Greunen hoax: fictitious officers, impossible timings, reuse of the Botswana story, and his characteristic style and spelling; she warns him retribution is bound to follow.

Explanation offered
Hoax by James van Greunen, who earlier confessed to faking the Kalahari/Botswana crash documents

In their words

• The trouble with these hoaxters is that they either over-estimate their own intelligence or under-estimate the intelligence of the recipients...

• Watch it, James; you cannot get away with these hoaxes all the time. There's bound to be some retribution!

• I have never maintained that nothing occurred in Botswana; only that whatever it was, it never happened the way van Greunen reported it

Cross references

• Kalahari/Botswana crash hoax (14-06-2)
• Bentwaters 1980 (Col. Halt, Jenny Randles)
• In Conclusion, this issue

Source

Cynthia Hind, UFO Afrinews No 14 (July 1996), spread 04-06

In the archive

This case became a story on this site.

1996 · Lesotho

The Leribe documents

A brown envelope said a disc had come down on a Lesotho farm and been carted off by Pretoria before dawn. A week of phone calls found nobody in it.

Press report