Elizabeth Klarer and Akon of Meton

Elizabeth Klarer was born on 1 July 1910 and grew up in Natal. She became a meteorologist, a pilot and a musician. At about seven, feeding Sealyham puppies with her sister, she saw "a silver disc bathed in a pearly luster" swoop over them. In 1937, flying with her first husband, Captain W. Stafford Phillips, she saw a "huge pulsating sphere with a slightly raised dome" over the Drakensberg. It flashed white, blue and yellow, then "rolled away like a wheel."

27 December 1954. On Flying Saucer Hill, near the family farm at Rosetta, a craft hovered three metres above the ground. It gave only a soft hum as its hull spun and its central dome stayed still. At a porthole she saw a man, "The most handsome man I have ever seen," she said.

April 1956. Sources disagree on whether it was the 6th or the 7th, when the craft landed and Klarer learned that its pilot was named Akon. He was tall, with fair golden-hued skin, grey eyes and swept-back hair, silvery at the temples, and spoke perfect English. A short, stocky companion with olive skin travelled with him as Akon took her aboard his perfectly circular scout ship, about 60 feet in diameter, and then up to a garden-like mother ship in Earth orbit. She was shown images of his home world, given water, a red apple and a banana-like fruit, and returned to where she had been picked up.

17 July 1956, about 4:00 pm. Vivid light flashes turned into a dull grey craft in a shimmering heat haze. For an hour the disc darted silently over a rise near the farmhouse, making several weaving detours. Klarer raised a Brownie box camera and took seven photographs. Then the disc suddenly shot away.

The story grew. Klarer said Akon came from Meton, in the Alpha Centauri system, and that she was a reincarnated Venusian and his soulmate. She said she conceived his child on the plateau below Cathkin Peak, then travelled to Meton and gave birth to a son, Ayling. Four months passed on Earth while nine years passed on Meton. According to the account she published in Beyond the Light Barrier in 1980, the planet's vibrations affected her heart and prevented her return.

No government or military investigation has been found. In the first version, printed in Flying Saucer Review in 1956, Akon came from Venus. Meton and the pregnancy came later.

Edgar Sievers argued that "the frail Elizabeth would have found it difficult to throw a car hubcap and photograph it at the same time." Michael Hesemann noted a smooth flight path and clouds that barely changed between the final two frames. Yet the two disagreed on who was there. Hesemann wrote of two witnesses. Sievers said her family saw her leave alone.

Thomas Streicher called her claims "generally poorly substantiated." Her son David has no recollection of a pregnancy in 1959. Cynthia Hind asked researchers to stop "casting aside cases which, although sounding like hoaxes, are not obviously so."

In 1975 Klarer spoke at a congress in Wiesbaden at the invitation of Hermann Oberth, and received a standing ovation. In 1992 the crowd in Pietermaritzburg was so large that tea was cancelled. She died in February 1994.

In 2006, Rosetta residents built a runway for Akon's return. The 2023 documentary Beyond the Light Barrier, directed by Uga Carlini and narrated by John Kani, spent 13 years in production. Hers remains the best-known female contactee case.