There is a hill on a farm outside Rosetta, in the Natal Midlands, that the family who owned it called Flying Saucer Hill. It was not a joke. Connington was a shorthorn farm on the Mooi River road, run by a veterinary surgeon who brought polo to the district, and his younger daughter Elizabeth grew up looking at the Drakensberg from its slopes and, by her own account, at other things too.

Elizabeth Klarer told her story for forty years and never changed it much. As a girl of seven, she said, she and her sister had seen a silver disc over the farm. She went on to St Anne’s, to Florence for art and music, to Cambridge for meteorology, and learnt to fly a Tiger Moth from her first husband. In the years after the war she read the American contactee George Adamski, and decided that the voice she had been hearing in her head since childhood belonged to a man from somewhere else. His name, she said, was Akon.

On 27 December 1954 she climbed the hill because the farm workers had been talking about the lightning bird again, and found instead a ship hanging a few metres above the grass, humming. On 7 April 1956 it came down properly. A door opened, a tall, fair man stepped out, and she went aboard. She described a scout craft eighteen metres across, a mother ship the shape of a cigar with a garden inside it, and a kiss. In July that year she went back up the hill with a Brownie box camera and took seven frames of a grey disc against the cloud. Those pictures went round the world.

The story grew. In April 1958, on a plateau below Cathkin Peak, she said, she and Akon became lovers, and a year later he took her to his planet, Meton, in the Alpha Centauri system, where she gave birth to a son called Ayling, whom she had to leave behind. Four months passed on Earth, she said, and nine years there. She wrote it all down in Beyond the Light Barrier, published in 1980, and in 1975 she gave an address to a congress of researchers in Wiesbaden and was given a standing ovation. When she spoke at the Pietermaritzburg Unidentified Flying Object Club in 1992 the venue could not hold the crowd.

Not everyone stood. A Johannesburg Mensa audience heckled her. The German researcher Edgar Sievers, who liked her, satisfied himself that her experiences were physical rather than psychic, and searched in vain for a hubcap that matched the disc in her photographs. Cynthia Hind, who investigated half of southern Africa’s sightings in her time, found Klarer’s conviction absolute and her evidence thin, and wondered gently about dreams. Her earthly son had no memory of his mother being away for four months in 1959. One of her early supporters, the ufologist Philipp Human, turned on her entirely, joking that she had merely been helped to photograph an ordinary motor car hubcap, and later wrote that he did not believe a word of the rest.

Klarer died in Durban in February 1994, aged 83, with a second book unfinished. The Witness ran a long piece on her in 2012 and found people in the Midlands who still spoke of her as a neighbour rather than a case. Every April until 1963, she said, Akon came back to the hill, and every April she went up to meet him. The hill is still there, above the river, with nothing on it.