Is intelligent life out there?

Jeanne van der Merwe investigates

It’s a Saturday afternoon and a group of people is gathered in the foyer of Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre. They look like members of a neighbourhood watch.

But the game is given away when I stroll past and catch snippets of their conversation.

“Why don’t they just land in front of the White House? Why are they only ever seen in deserts?” asks one middle-aged man.

His buddy shrugs, and offers: “Some of them prefer not to interfere. Some species have non-interference policies.”

Hmmm. What have we here?

It’s the monthly meeting of the South African UFO Forum – they call themselves Saufor – taking place under the saucer-shaped lampshades of the theatre.

I walked past them twice without realising I had found them – so ordinary did these hunters of alien life seem.

Alien watchers are rather like some of the extraterrestrials Hollywood action men Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith watch over in Men In Black – completely indiscernible from the rest of us.

Present at this get-together are, among others, a grey-haired granddad, a Muslim father of two who has brought his wife and kids along, a shy, skinny man with tattoos and a motorcycle helmet, and a Japanese visitor in a weatherbeaten T-shirt.

Saufor is bravely gearing up to find out everything there is to know about UFOs in South Africa. It’s led by soft-spoken Cristo Louw, a 28-year-old who looks like a fitness trainer and who gave up a career as a technical support operator to hunt down information on beings “out there”.

“I’ve never had any experiences myself, but I’ve been interested in them since I was a child, and I’m really looking forward to meeting some myself,” he says.

What started as a hobby, however, has proven a boon for other South African believers, who have long ago given up talking to friends and loved ones about the things they see in the night skies, and the strange memory lapses and dreams of little people with big eyes they’ve had.

Believers such as Fareed Hoosen, who mans the forum’s “call centre” (his personal cellphone) and who has had strange experiences with unearthly beings since he was seven years old.

“It’s just great to be able to get together and talk about these things,” he says.

The only thing the odd assortment of UFO-watchers have in common is Louw’s website – started while he was working for Vodacom about five years ago – which recounts UFO sightings and strange encounters in South Africa.

As far as the forum can tell, the earliest reported UFO sighting happened in 1838, when a Cape Town newspaper reported that glowing fireballs were crisscrossing the Cape skies.

At their meetings, they also ponder other famous UFO sightings, such as the Rosmead incident in the Eastern Cape in 1972, where a primary school principal saw a strange flying thing that left molten holes in a locked tennis court and scorched surrounding trees.

And another sighting in Fort Beaufort in the same year when a farmer had his reservoir shattered by what some believe was a UFO.

Or the time in 1974 at Beit Bridge when a car inexplicably left the road and hovered above the earth while the occupants lost all sense of time.

In Groendal near Uitenhage in 1978 a group of teens on a camping trip apparently saw beings in silver suits gliding up a hillside.

An overseas guest makes an appearance at the Saufor meeting – Masahiro Kahata, a Japanese researcher investigating, among other things, the effect crop circles have on people’s brain waves and how one can control a craft telepathically.

However, his enthusiastic explanations in a nigh-incomprehensible Japanese accent make way for a more practical question, and one that no doubt consumes believers everywhere – how to get people to take them seriously.

Louw himself admits that “we cannot make people believe who don’t want to believe”.

In hope, they turn to the memories of people like Elizabeth Klarer, a South African woman who claimed she was impregnated by a man from the constellation of Alpha Centauri named Akon and go t a book published about it.

Louw is keen to use the Promotion of Access to Information Act to get information on some of the stranger UFO incidents, such as an alleged sighting in 1996 when a military helicopter chased after a UFO.

“We could get hold of the video of that,” he tells his audience hopefully.

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