Groendal Reserve: silver-suited men on the hill

What was reported

Alerted by a friend's call while working on the Rosmead case, Hind drove to Despatch with Peggy McLean. Four boys who had camped overnight in the Groendal Reserve, waiting to be fetched at midday on an overcast morning, noticed something glistening in the distance. Two men in silver suits crossed their view from right to left; the boys took them for poachers, then firemen. A third man with a square silver case joined them mid-hill. The figures stayed upright, moving as if their legs were fins, climbed a fence, and the last looked straight at the boys before all three reached the hilltop and vanished with the shining object. Fynbos there stood over two metres high, so the men must have been gliding above it. Where the object had been, the ground was trampled and geologists found nine symmetrical impressions with four small holes.

What Hind made of it

Hind recalls it as one of the clearest older cases with a great deal of corroborating evidence; the two university geologists were sceptical yet impressed and could not account for the marks.

Explanation offered
movements of mating turtles, rejected by all the Groendal trackers

In their words

• I thought their silver suits looked like aluminium foil.

• That depression was not formed by anything normal, the marks were too symmetrical.

• there were nine separate impressions arranged symmetrically.

Cross references

• Rosmead Tennis Court case (Hind was interviewing witnesses at Rosmead and Middelburg when the call came)
• National Inquirer award, 1979
• University of Port Elizabeth Geology Department

Connected

• Alien Descriptions: Hugo Ferreira's silver faceless figures, Groendal ReserveCase fileSame witness

  Hugo Ferreira is named in both. 06-09-4 is a boxed 'Alien Descriptions' quotation from him (entirely silver, no face, a glide rather than walking) lifted out of the same 1 October 1978 Groendal encounter that 22-04-1 narrates in full. Same witness, same event, two records.

• Groendal Reserve: four boys, three silver-suited men, nine impressionsCase fileNamed person

  Professor Rust, Russell Shone and Sgt Chris Powell appear in both. The nine symmetrical impressions, the four small holes, and Shone's calculation that a six-metre object would be needed for the boys to see it from where they stood are the same single finding told twice in different issues.

• Cigar-shaped object, paralysis and lost time at a caféCase fileNamed person

  Sgt Chris Powell is the hinge. He was in the Groendal search party in 1978 and the Uitenhage cafe owner was in his district in 1980; Powell sent that report to Hind. The two appear in adjacent spreads of Afrinews No 22, i.e. Hind published them together.

• Cigar-shaped object, paralysis and lost time at a caféCase fileSame place

  Both sit in the Uitenhage-Despatch belt, 6.0 km apart as geocoded. 22-04-1 records Hind driving to Despatch with Peggy McLean; 22-05-1 is a cafe in Uitenhage town. Note the geocoding is coarse: 22-05-1 sits exactly on the Uitenhage town-centre point, which is also the De Mist Commando coordinate.

• Groendal Reserve: four boys, three silver-suited men, nine impressionsCase fileSame window

  Both fix on 1 October 1978. 22-04-1 adds that Hind was interviewing witnesses at Rosmead and Middelburg on the Rosmead Tennis Court case when the call came, which dates her arrival and ties this cluster to a different cluster through the investigator's diary rather than through any phenomenon.

Source

Cynthia Hind, UFO Afrinews No 22 (July 2000), spread 04-05

In the archive

This case became a story on this site.

1978 · South Africa

Three men in silver on the hill at Groendal

Four boys waiting for a lift home watched three men in silver suits glide up a hill of tall fynbos and vanish. The ground they had come from was marked.

LIFTLift

Documented

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