The Loxton Landing: Danie van Graan's Humanoid Encounter

Loxton is a small village in the Karoo, in today's Northern Cape. It was founded in 1899 on the farm Phezantefontein. In July 1975 it was late winter. Danie van Graan owned land just outside the village. Some retellings call him a farm owner, others a smallholder checking on his sheep.

Thursday, 31 July 1975. 07:50. A chilly, misty morning. Van Graan was walking over the ten-foot-high earth bank that protects the village from flood water. In the field below he saw what looked like the aluminium roof of a caravan.

It was an oval object, made of a curious silvery, metallic substance, with rounded windows. It gave off a pulsating humming sound. Inside were four figures in cream-coloured overalls. One account describes beings 5 ft tall, with very long faces, high foreheads and fair hair. Another calls them small, thin and pale, with slanting eyes, moving about as if in slow motion. One held an instrument. Another stood near a panel of little triangular lights.

He was about fifteen feet away when they suddenly looked up at him. A flap opened at the side of the object. A bright beam of light hit him in the face. His nose began to bleed, and he was immediately disoriented. After 10 minutes the humming grew louder. The craft took off very fast and very smoothly. Within about twenty seconds it was gone.

Jan van der Westhuizen heard a humming noise around 07:30 and assumed it was a helicopter. A boy of about eight or nine saw the object and alerted his mother, Meitjie Devenish, and a young man nearby. All three are said to have seen the craft. One account says they then left toward East London out of fear.

The field kept a record. There were four equidistant landing marks and one central mark. In the central mark van Graan found a green putty-like substance, reportedly analysed by the South African Geological Survey Department. No result has ever surfaced. The soil was hard-baked and barren. "Ever since that machine landed here nothing will grow in this spot," he said. Unusual footprints lay near a dried-up duckpond, unlike those of his workers. Van Graan himself was left with blurred and double vision. Before that morning, he had had no trouble with his eyes.

Cynthia Hind, the Zimbabwe-based researcher who later became MUFON's coordinator for Africa, investigated in person. She interviewed the witnesses and found the additional ones. The case entered the HUMCAT humanoid catalogue as entry 1975-24, credited to Joe Brill and Cynthia Hind. No government, military or police report has been found. No hoax finding or sceptical analysis has been published either. Questions remain. The versions differ on the beam and the timing. Recent retellings add corroboration by police, a claim absent from the older summaries.

Hind opened her 1982 book UFOs: African Encounters with the chapter "Landing at Loxton". John Spencer's UFOs: The Definitive Casebook and Nigel Blundell's Fact or Fiction: UFOs retold it. The Eleusis TV documentary UFO: Not Alone features the first police officer on site and a deathbed confession van Graan reportedly made to his best friend and next-door neighbour. Hind also investigated Rosmead in 1972, another Karoo landing.