The Kalahari UFO Crash Hoax

Two men brought the story out of Africa. James van Greunen presented himself as a Captain and special investigations intelligence officer in the South African Air Force. Dr Henry Azadehdel took it to Tony Dodd's Yorkshire group and offered to take a lie-detector test. Dodd, a former police officer, and Graham W. Birdsall of Quest International received the papers. Even the date the story surfaced is disputed. Summer 1989, autumn 1989 and July 1990 are all given.

The papers tell it minute by minute. 13:45 GMT. The SA Tafelberg radios naval headquarters in Cape Town. An unknown object is on its radar, "flying in a northwesterly direction towards the African continent with an estimated speed of 5746 nautical miles per hour."

13:52. It enters South African airspace. Two Mirages scramble from Valhalla Airbase. 13:59. Squadron Commander Gozen sees it, visually and on radar. He is ordered to fire an experimental laser, the "Thor 2." The object "emitted several blinding flashes." 14:02. It is "losing altitude rapidly at 3,000 feet per minute" and comes down at a 25° angle, 80 km north of the border. In Dodd's telling it seemed to be "attempting to land as opposed to falling from the sky out of control."

The papers describe a crater 150 m wide and 12 m deep. Sand and rock had fused in the heat. Magnetic and radioactive readings were strong enough to knock out military electronics. The craft was "polished, smooth silver," with unevenly spaced portholes and its landing gear extended. Two living beings in grey suits came out through a lower hatch. Dodd's version made them 4ft tall, with grey skin, over-large heads and huge slanting eyes. It added a third being that stayed in South Africa. The occupants were said to have been transferred to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on 23 June 1989.

Cynthia Hind, MUFON's Africa coordinator and editor of UFO Afrinews, counted "14 spelling mistakes in what claimed to be an official document." In Germany, Michael Hesemann tracked van Greunen down. He was younger than he claimed. He had made the seals from a South African passport and a birth certificate. His goal, he said, was to "finish off the ufo community."

Then came the confrontation. A back room at a UFO conference in Germany, with Dodd present. Van Greunen "admitted he had faked some details but still insisted it was a true story about a downed object on the border repeated to him in confidence by a friend." He later named an SAAF pilot, "Hendrik Greef." No one has ever traced him.

The flaws piled up. The SA Tafelberg was a fleet replenishment tanker, not a warship. Navy headquarters was in Simon's Town. The stamps did not match SAAF practice. A. Zlobin of the Central Institute of Aviation Motors found that Mirages could not have caught the object, and that a 1989 laser weapon would have weighed about 20 tonnes. The South African government denied van Greunen held any rank. Colonel Rolt, speaking for the defence ministry, dismissed the story with a remark about "flying ducks." Yet UFO Insight still calls the case unresolved. It argues the papers were fakes but the story was real, rebuilt from memory.

It is still called South Africa's Roswell. Tony Dodd gave it a chapter, "The Kalahari Conspiracy," in Alien Investigator. In 1995, anonymous documents described a similar crash in Lesotho. Hesemann debunked those too. Azadehdel, for his part, had been arrested at Heathrow in 1986 over orchid smuggling.