Southern Africa Unexplained

Case No 122 · UFO Afrinews No 15, January 1997

'Alien' with a Satchel

1996 ยท Pote Street, Chipadze Township, 10 km outside Bindura, Bindura, 90 km NNE of Harare, Zimbabwe

What was reported

Studying alone at 01:00, Lloyd Karambakuwa heard a persistent clicking approaching along the road past the Women's Training Centre. After a pause it resumed 20 to 30 metres away and he hid in the hedge. Two metres off he saw a short, completely white, fast-moving figure about 1.5 m tall with an egg-shaped head and a satchel on its back carrying an aerial and a small flashing red light; he saw only its back. The clicking recurred until a car revved. At dawn he found five paired sets of round footprints, shoe-sized with dot-like pads, in soft sand. Independently the Centre's guard, Kambudzai Gweshe, heard twenty minutes of clicking like a lift alarm and saw a small white-covered figure with an aerial moving slowly east, then turning south quickly, its body bathed in rainbow colours and its head animal-like; she quit night duty.

What Hind made of it

Hind has no doubt both saw the same 'apparition'; no craft was seen, so it fits the general idea of an alien but could just as easily be a ghost; Lloyd's ready acceptance of the 'UAP' label shows how little he knew of UAPs.

Explanation offered
cordless phone (rejected, no phones in area); ghost; friends suggested UAP; Hind presumes Lloyd's image of tall small-headed aliens came from the Voronezh reports, Zimbabwe having been a Marxist country

In their words

  • I nearly died of shock! I had never seen such a thing!

    Lloyd Karambakuwa, spread 11

  • Oh, that is the guard who saw the ghost.

    Constance Savanhu, spread 13

  • if ghosts do exist, it could just as easily have been a ghost.

    Cynthia Hind, spread 13

Cross references

  • Voronezh incident, Russia
  • Jean Senac, France, July 1964 (15-13-1)
  • Hermann Gmeiner Secondary School
  • Chemasec (Pvt) Ltd security company, Bindura
  • Cotton Company, Bindura
  • letter received May 1996; investigated Monday 17 June 1996

Source

Cynthia Hind, UFO Afrinews No 15 (January 1997), spread 11-13

In the archive

This case became a story on this site.

1996 · Zimbabwe

The satchel on Pote Street

A short white figure with an egg-shaped head and a satchel clicked past a Chipadze hedge at one in the morning. The guard opposite said she saw it too.

Documented

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