A Tiger Moth is not built for chasing things. It is a biplane of spruce and doped fabric with two open cockpits, one behind the other, a speaking tube between them, and a cruising speed a family car on the Bulawayo road could better. On 26 July 1954 one was droning over the highveld south-west of Salisbury, as Harare then was, at 137 kilometres an hour and around 2100 metres, in the bright dry cold of a Rhodesian winter. In it were a student pilot named Bob Woodward and his instructor, Squadron Leader A J Roberts, formerly of RAF Bomber Command, who presumably thought he had seen most of what a sky could hold.

Not far off lay Lake McIlwaine, the reservoir on the Hunyani that had existed for only two years, and which is Lake Chivero now.

Some 760 metres above the biplane, in a clear patch of blue sky, they picked out a silver object. Roberts described it, and Cynthia Hind recorded it, as an elliptical sausage: sharp in the middle, hazy at both ends. He took the controls from Woodward and turned the Tiger Moth towards it, which is what a bomber pilot does with something unidentified, and the object did what a Tiger Moth cannot. As they closed, they said, it tipped onto its side and departed at great speed. The whole thing took thirty seconds.

They flew on to the lake. Over the water it came back, towards them this time, and then, Roberts said, it stopped dead and hung there about four kilometres off. From that range the sausage had become two saucers, one above the other, either separate or joined by something the colour of the sky. It was silver or grey. It did not reflect the sun, which a metal thing in a clear winter sky ought to. They put its length at about twelve metres. It hovered a short while, tipped onto its side again, and left at what Hind’s account calls incredible speed. The second look was a little shorter than the first.

“The most amazing thing about the object was the way it changed direction,” Roberts said, and the sentence trails off in Hind’s account as if he had run out of comparisons.

Both men reported to Flying Control at Belvedere Airport, the old Salisbury aerodrome, as soon as they landed. Flying Control could do nothing with it. The radar was not working that day, so there was nothing on a screen to set beside the two men’s account, and the sighting rests on their word and on the minute or so they had, between them, to study the thing.

Hind put the case in her first book, UFOs: African Encounters, in 1982, and returned to it in the January 2000 issue of UFO Afrinews, in an article asking whether pilots really were the extraordinary witnesses the newspapers took them for. Her answer was a qualified no: pilots are closer to whatever is up there than the rest of us, and have a witness in the next seat, but a stable character matters more than a logbook. Roberts, with Bomber Command behind him and a student to keep calm, appears to have had both.

The case has drifted a little in the retelling. When The Herald in Harare ran through the country’s old sightings in 2026 the student had become R. Howarth, and the object had climbed to two kilometres above the biplane. Nobody seems to have asked Belvedere why the radar was off.