Flying Saucers over the Belgian Congo Uranium Mines (Elisabethville, 1952)

In 1952 the Belgian Congo held some of the most strategic ground on earth. The Katanga uranium workings, including the Shinkolobwe mine, had supplied the Manhattan Project. Elisabethville, now Lubumbashi, had a small airfield. On March 29, 1952, the Vienna daily Die Presse ran a story from there under the byline Fritz Sitte. It gave no date for what it described. Only one word. "Recently."

Two fiery disks appeared over the uranium mines in the Elisabethville district. Onlookers on the ground watched them glide in elegant curves. They changed position many times. From below they sometimes looked like plates, then ovals, then simple lines. A penetrating hissing and buzzing sound carried down to the witnesses.

Then both disks stopped. They hovered in one spot. And they took off in what the article called "a unique zigzag flight to the northeast." The whole performance lasted from 10 to 12 minutes.

Commander Pierre of the small Elisabethville airfield went after them in a fighter plane. The article called him "a dependable officer and a zealous flyer." On his first approach he came within about 120 meters of one disk. He put their diameter at 12 to 15 meters. The inner core stayed absolutely still. A knob came out from the center, and several small openings could plainly be seen. The outer rim was veiled in fire and must have been spinning at enormous speed. The metal looked like aluminum.

The disks moved precisely, vertically and horizontally. They changed height by 800 to 1,000 meters in a few seconds and often shot down to within 20 meters of the tree tops. Pierre estimated their speed at about 1,500 kilometers per hour. After 15 minutes he had to give up. Both disks left with a loud whistling sound he could hear over the noise of his own plane. They disappeared in a straight line toward Lake Tanganyika.

Pierre did not think they could be manned. The irregular speed and the heat, he reasoned, would make it impossible for anyone to stay inside the stable core. He gave a detailed report to his superiors.

The CIA translated the article and filed it as Report No. 00-W-23602, catalogued as foreign press material. The file also carries the newspaper's own cutaway drawing: an explosive core, installations for radar steerage, a rim driven by jets and spinning at perhaps 22,000 revolutions per minute. Its captions admit they were "in part, purely conjecture." The CIA added no analysis of its own. No Belgian inquiry and no Project Blue Book entry for the case has been found.

Everything rests on one newspaper story, printed in Vienna, thousands of kilometers from Katanga. The pilot's full name never appears. The geography is awkward too. The article places the mines east of the Luapula River, but the land east of the Luapula was Northern Rhodesia, while Elisabethville lies to the west. The drawing echoes the early 1950s idea that saucers were secret weapons. Yet no one has published a debunking, and no conventional explanation has been offered.

The CIA released the file in 1978. In 1982 Antonio Huneeus, writing as "A. Hovni," covered the case and called Pierre a "competent witness." On January 21, 2016, the CIA placed the document fifth in its "Top 5 CIA Documents Mulder Would Love To Get His Hands On," and press coverage followed. Some later retellings mistake the newspaper's date for the day of the sighting. The real date remains unknown.