Just after midnight, a police van on the long straight road that runs east out of Pretoria towards Bronkhorstspruit. Two constables, John Lockem and Koos de Klerk, are on routine patrol with nothing much to look at. Then, the two men later told their superiors and the press, the headlights picked out something sitting squarely on the tar ahead of them.

They described a disc, copper-coloured, perhaps nine metres across, with a small dome on top. It was not moving. They had a few seconds to take it in.

Then it went. Lockem said the lift-off was faster than anything he had ever seen. Flame, they said, poured from two tubes or channels on the underside and shot about a metre into the air, and the object was simply gone into the dark, straight up. The flames stayed behind, burning on the road surface for a while after it had left.

When the spot was examined in daylight there was, according to the reports, a circular patch of gravel roughly two metres across where the tar had been separated from the roadbed and scorched, and the road surface had sunk, as though something heavy had been resting on it. Samples of the surface were said to have been sent to a scientific institute. If results came back, nobody published them.

The district commandant at Pretoria North, a Lieutenant Colonel Brits, told the newspapers that the matter was being treated as highly secret and that an inquiry was under way in top circles. That is the kind of sentence that keeps a story alive for sixty years. Lockem sat with a staff artist from Die Vaderland and produced a sketch of the disc, which the paper ran. Associated Press picked the story up from Johannesburg on 17 September and it travelled the world; the American research group NICAP included it in a 1969 report, which is how it entered the standard catalogues.

What is missing is any follow-up. No inquiry report has surfaced. The constables were not, as far as anyone has found, disciplined, promoted or contradicted. The Pretoria to Bronkhorstspruit road has since been rebuilt more than once, and the scorched patch is under somebody’s tarmac.

The story had a second life in 2026, when a Tshwane heritage group posted the old clippings and an aerial map marking where the road once ran, and half the city discovered it for the first time. Two policemen, one road, one very fast copper disc. The inquiry in top circles, presumably, is still sitting.