The Mindalore Landing: Meagan and Andre Quezet

Mindalore is a suburb of Krugersdorp, now Mogale City, about 30 km west of central Johannesburg. In January 1979 the Quezet family lived at No. 14 Saul Jacobs Street. A new, unlit link road had just been built nearby. Nearly everything known about that night comes from Cynthia Hind's write-up for the MUFON UFO Journal.

Wednesday, 3 January 1979, about 23:50. Meagan Quezet was about to make a cup of tea to help her son Andre, 12, get to sleep. Outside, their dog Cheeky was barking excitedly. She opened the door and the dog ran off up the road. Worried about the neighbours, mother and son followed.

A glowing pink light hung over the link road. As they got closer, they saw it surrounded a grey metallic craft that was coming down. The craft was shaped like an egg, but its underside was flat, as if the bottom had been sliced off. It was smooth and lead-grey, with no fins. Hind's summary puts it at about 3.66 m tall and 4.88 m wide. Four spider-like legs with sucker-like pads at the ends stretched out and touched the ground. There was a light on each side of an opening and one on top.

Five or six crew members came out. They looked at the tarmac and the sand. They were very slender and about 1.58 m tall, reaching Meagan's chin. They wore one-piece suits, white or tinted pink. Two of them walked over. One had thick, dark, curly hair and a beard. His eyes seemed translucent, as if she could look through them. He bowed and said something that seemed to be a greeting. The language was high-pitched and sing-song. Meagan said it sounded most like Chinese.

At first she felt no fear. She even felt drawn to him. Then came a sudden feeling of dread. She told Andre: "go and get Daddy. And run, please run!"

She started to back away. The crew were back inside in what seemed like less than a second, and the door closed. A buzzing like "bees in a hive" filled the night. The legs telescoped out, then pulled back into the craft. It hovered for several seconds, tilted slightly to the left and shot straight up into the low cloud. Within 30 seconds it was gone. Its pink glow could still be seen in the clouds. The whole encounter lasted about 10 minutes.

Meagan reported it the next day. Hind found no marks on the tarmac. There is no record of any official inquiry. Andre refused to be hypnotised. Meagan was hypnotised, but the accounts of what she remembered disagree. One says she recalled being drawn into the craft. Robert E. Bartholomew's UFO Lore says she was invited aboard and refused.

Hind also recorded a second report. At the same time, an anonymous husband and wife were driving in fog near a mine. They saw a grey cone-shaped craft with four legs that had landed. They lost 20 minutes of time but remembered humanoids near the craft. NICAP lists their report as a separate missing time incident.

There are no photographs and no physical traces. No hoax claim and no ordinary explanation has ever been published. The retellings do differ, though, on the sizes, the leg length and the shape of the couple's craft. Still, the bearded figure bowing on a dark road remains a striking close encounter in Hind's files. It stands beside the Ariel School incident, which she later investigated in Zimbabwe.