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A pulsing white light dropped into the Delta and sat over the trees. The hippos went quiet, and the witness went to bed without fetching the camera.
A green glow hung in the cloud over the city one Saturday night. The observatory blamed a stadium light test; the stadium said it had run none.
A large white disc with a star at its centre hung over Maseru, jumped north, and shrank away towards Butha-Buthe as people watched.
Two dam projects stopped because crews said the water people drove them off. The minister told the Senate he did not believe in mermaids; the village did.
A warrior goes up the mountain for a leopard skin and does not come down. The girl who waited is still weeping, and the river is her tears.
Villagers heard bangs in the sky, then a farmer found a six kilogram metal sphere in the bush beside a crater. Nobody has ever claimed it.
Two golden shapes turned up in a morning photo from Tofo beach. Nobody saw them at the time. Every other frame that day was clean.
A bar owner stepped out for air and saw a flame-coloured thing with a red light riding above it. He fetched the whole bar out to watch.
Two colleagues went looking for a satellite before dinner and found a triangle of red, green and yellow lights instead. Twice.
A silent light came in off the Atlantic over Swakopmund and crossed into the Namib, faster than a plane, slower than a falling star.
A screaming noise, clouds turned orange, and something with a tail plunged into the bushveld at 04:33 on New Year's Day. Police never found it.
A Phoenix woman woke her husband to film a pulsing ball of light that changed from round to oval and stayed three hours, until the sun came up.
A ring of standing stones on the edge of the escarpment, called a 75,000-year-old calendar by one man and a cattle kraal by the archaeologists.
A family filmed a knot of colour-changing lights circling high over Graaff-Reinet until a larger gold one arrived and led them off.
Nine bodies came out of one river in one wet season with their faces gone. The villagers named the thing that did it. The police named the crabs.
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.
A pulsing light over Pretoria at four in the morning drew out seven patrol cars and a helicopter. At sunrise it became a white spot. The bill was R4000.
A 350 bed hospital shut in a day in 1996 with the equipment and files still inside, and the town spent thirty years filling the empty wards with ghosts.
A disc in a field off the old Bulawayo Road, two men in shiny black overalls, and a passing bean trader shouting that they were tsotsis.
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.
Two silent yellow lights crossed the citrus valley and sent up smoke behind the mountain. Police searched for an hour and called it a meteorite.
A horse-headed serpent said to live in the plunge pool of a 95 metre waterfall, with one photograph, one reward, and one children's dinosaur book.
Sixty-two children at break time said something silver came down beside the playground, and drew the same thing for weeks.
Two nights before Ariel School, a fireball with a tail crossed the whole country. In Kariba, people said it stopped and hovered.
A white light over False Bay put a thin beam on the water, then rushed the beach. Walking back, Sandra found a barefoot man thigh-deep in the vlei, facing it.
Four missionaries on a night hike saw a glowing orange sphere sit over the grassland and light the whole valley white, twice, in silence.
A blue flame danced in the sand beside a Kommetjie pool filter at 2 a.m. By breakfast the pool was two thousand litres down and nothing had leaked.
A Mirage, a secret laser cannon, a silver disc in a crater and two grey occupants. Every word came from one 24-year-old with a passport stamp.
Beira tower had watched it for three hours. Then a LAM captain took off, climbed towards it with a full 737, and flashed his landing lights at it.
A teacher on a short cut past the polo-cross field could not move or speak, and the horses stood with heads up. Nine years on, he wrote to Hind about a rib.
A storm serpent in a gorge, a week of wind, a foreign teacher blamed for taking its young, and roadworks in the next valley that would not go forward.
A shining thing with a cone on top sat over Bulawayo at sunset. Two Hawks went up after it. The air force said it climbed to seventy thousand feet in a minute.
A blue-white ball of light drifted over the sand ahead of a bakkie, hugging the ground for ten minutes. The farmers had a name for it and were not surprised.
A starry ball over a Namibian farmhouse at midnight, a fifteen-metre dam dry by morning, and a farmhand who said a red ball had drunk it.
A silent silver bullet over a Zambian farm road, then years later outside Lusaka a face in the dark, paralysis, and a lump that vanished overnight.
A ball of fire rolled across the lawns and up the tower of the Courtaulds' old house. Then three men in shiny overalls turned round, and the foreman went down.
Zimbabwe's highest mountain has a habit of not giving people back. The chiefs say it has rules. The parks board now sends a ranger up with you.
A café owner went out at 2 a.m. with a torch to check on his car and found a dark cigar hanging over his roof. He came back inside at three.
A nurse and her son followed the dachshund up the road near midnight and found an egg on spider legs straddling Tindall Road, with men climbing out of it.
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.
Two RLI sticks sat down for the midday break in the lowveld and stood up at four. One man saw a flash, and nobody said a word, then or ever.
He went over hoping the uranium men would give him coffee. At five metres four small figures looked up, something clicked, and a beam of light hit him.
Two men sped up to catch a bus at dusk outside Shabani. Domed, lit white inside, one figure standing. Round the bend there was no bus, no dust, no diesel.
A metallic policeman, a lighthouse light overhead, a car that would not slow, and a cabin so cold they wore jerseys while the garage man wore shorts.
Red lights zigzagged over a Karoo railway village. By morning the school tennis court was cracked, molten and pitted, and the gum trees were dying.
A farmer and a police sergeant fired rifles at a colour-changing object in the thorn trees. Later, nine neat holes appeared in the clay.
Thirty people at a desert braai watched a wall of fire eight storeys high switch on between two hills, and off again. At dawn the sand was not even scorched.
A mirrored frame round a gold barrel came down Table Mountain through a bush fire, put out the flames beneath it, and a voice told a schoolboy not to hit it.
A young woman in dark clothes asks for a lift on the Willowmore road at Easter. A few kilometres on, the seat beside you is empty.
Rounding Ponta Vermelha on a blue December afternoon, a diplomat saw two plates pressed rim to rim, the size of a ship, hanging over the island in the bay.
A white light crossed the hills toward two carp fishermen, went red overhead and left for the dam wall. Then the lake lit up from underneath.
Two policemen said their headlights found a copper disc sitting on the tar. It left in a burst of flame and took part of the road with it.
Five men in an Alouette on the Congo border, ten seconds of silver-chrome overhead, and one creased photograph from a twenty-pound Agfa camera.
Four hills in the sand with four thousand paintings, where the spirits keep rules. One writer broke them, wrote an apology and buried it.
An engineer said an object hung over a Kitwe mast for nine hours, on Ndola's radar. Days later a German colleague was found dazed beside a burned imprint.
The Tonga said the river god would not stand for a wall across his gorge. Then the worst flood on record came, and the year after, a worse one.
A Rosetta farmer's daughter said a ship came down on a hill above the Mooi River, and that its pilot took her to the stars and gave her a son.
A silvery object hung north of Ndola and faded. Five weeks later a flickering light toured four mining towns while men were called out of the bars.
A blue-green disc the size of the Moon crossed the Majunga coast, lit the ground beneath it and went out to sea. The district chief gave it eight seconds.
A bomber pilot and his student turned a Tiger Moth towards a silver sausage. It tipped over and left, then came back over the lake as two saucers and hovered.
A green light dropped behind the Queen's Palace at dusk, then came back along the main avenue a hundred metres up, silent, and the streetlights went out.
Near midnight on the pass a stranger asked an engineer for water. He filled an oil can at a spring and, he said, was led into a craft with four men inside.
Two sisters walking the dog after the cinema heard a thud and saw a saucer with a golden ball hanging over the Langham Hotel, and two tall men watching them.
A square-rigged ship under full sail with no wind, seen by a beach full of people, then not seen. The Cape has been telling this one since 1790.
South Africa's only natural lake, made by a landslide or by a curse, kept by a python, guarded by a white crocodile, and not a place for boats.
A serpent as long as a bus in a bottomless cave full of diamonds, and a treasure hunter who went in and never came out.
In the first month of the Great War, half of South Africa saw a German aeroplane's headlights at night. Germany had three aeroplanes, all in the wrong place.
A retired pirate, a stranger in black, a pipe-smoking contest that ran for days, and the cloud that has been pouring off the mountain ever since.
Guests in Room 10 wake to find their clothes folded and the taps running. The hotel says that is Charlotte, and she means well.
A turret card room where the cards still shuffle, a nurse who fades, a woman in a negligee on the stairs. The Karoo's most haunted hotel, it says.
A tightrope walker crosses the Kalahari in 1885 and comes home with a poem about a ruined city. Thirty expeditions go looking. One finds it, sort of.
A trickster in the shape of a praying mantis, who threw his shoe into the dark and told it to be the moon. It is cold because it is only leather.
The Vazimba were the first people of the highlands, buried in water rather than earth. Their springs and rocks still get offerings, and never salt.
Where the lightning strikes, a bird has landed. Big as a man, black and white, and, the tradition says, very thirsty.
A beast so long the eye could not take it in swallows every living thing. One child, born with divining bones round his neck, cuts the world back out of it.
Short, hairy, fond of rivers and mischief, and the reason a great many beds in southern Africa stand on bricks.
A father bets his son he cannot ride a horse up the stoep and round the dinner table. He can. It is the way down that kills him, every New Year's Eve since.
A governor who died on the day he was cursed, a walled-up bell that rings itself, and a tall man who walks the battlements every few decades.
A giant made of the headland itself rises out of the night to curse the Portuguese, and every wreck on that coast since has been his doing.
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