1914 South African "Phantom Monoplane" Wave and the Greytown, Natal Landing Report

Britain declared war on 4 August 1914. Within days, South Africans were watching the night sky for German machines. That raised a problem. The Union of South Africa had no flyable aircraft and no airfield. German South-West Africa had only a few machines, and the places where the plane was seen lay far beyond the range of any aircraft of the day.

It began on 11 August 1914. Until 9 September, "thousands of South Africans in various parts of the country observed what they believed to be a nighttime monoplane, or believed to observe its headlights, while in some cases the aerial vehicle performed sophisticated maneuvers."

The headlines followed it across the map. Reports came from Cape Town and the Peninsula, Vryburg, Table Mountain, Porterville, Ashton, Hoetjes Bay, East London, Sea Point, Skinner's Court in Pretoria, and Natal again and again. Near Cape Town, one report described two objects "like large pieces of wood." The Johannesburg Star asked: "Aeroplane or planet?" Back in January, Pretoria had already reported "a powerful searchlight attached to an aeroplane," with "a swishing sound as it circled overhead."

The strangest account came decades later. Sometime after 1955, an old farmer from Greytown, Natal, told his story to the ufologist Edgar Sievers. Gordon Creighton put it in print in Flying Saucer Review in 1962.

One September evening, probably in 1914, the farmer was walking home across the veld. He came across one of the "German aircraft" he had been reading about. Jerome Clark and Lucius Farish later told it this way: "The object rested on the grasslands not far from him. Nearby he saw two 'German spies' with a pail taking water from a stream." He watched, then went on home.

Officials had no machine to point to. On 29 August the Cape Times carried the Defence Department's position: "No union machines." On 21 September it reported that German South-West Africa had "Only one efficient" aeroplane, while the aviator John Weston gave his views on the "air visitors" and a Pietermaritzburg optician offered a solution of his own. The spy and bomber theories were discounted. Nobody ever found where the plane was going, where it landed or refuelled, or who flew it.

Real German aircraft did fly over Union troops later, near Lüderitzbucht in November and December 1914. That was a separate story, far from Natal and the Transvaal.

Some readers in 1914 already suspected a planet. In 1989, Robert E. Bartholomew used the wave to test Smelser's theory of hysterical beliefs. Later, Evans and Bartholomew included it in Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior. Brett Holman reads scareship waves as expressions of national anxiety, where "belief matters more than reality." Patrick Gross classes the Greytown story as a "probable airplane" with "medium" certainty. Yet no aircraft could reach Natal that September. And the farmer's account is a single, second-hand memory told roughly 40 years later.

South Africa 1914 belongs to a wider family that includes Britain's scareship waves of 1909 to 1913, New Zealand and Australia in 1909, and Norway, Canada and the United States in the war years. On Holman's list of mystery aircraft, it stands out as a major wave. The phantom monoplane was never found. Neither was its pilot.