Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth – A CONTACT NEAR CAPE TOWN
Bizarre encounters with unknown flying machines and their occupants continued to occur in the early 1950s, though few were reported: it was not until 1953 that stories by ‘contactees’ began to spread into the public domain. The following case, for example, did not come to light until 1977, when the Spanish journalist Juan Jose Benitez published his interview with a man who claimed to have established contact with extraterrestrials in South Africa in 1951.
The witness, identified only as ‘H.M.’ by Benitez, was a British engineer who, in 1977, had been working for twenty years as an engineer specializing in instrumentation, such as development and construction of automatic pilots for aircraft. At the time of the interview, H.M. was employed by one of Spain’s leading firms dealing with advanced technology. It was only after a great deal of effort that Benitez was able to persuade the witness to talk about his experience, and even then, on condition that his identity was not revealed.
At the time of the incident — in the early spring of 1951 — H.M. was working for Contactor, a subsidiary of the British Rheostat Company, and he was living with his wife in the small town of Paarl, some 32 kilometres outside Cape Town. One day, after their car had been out of use for some weeks, they found that the battery had run down, so H.M. decided to ‘jump-start’ the car down a slope near their house and charge the battery by taking a drive around the neighbourhood.
He got into the little car and set off in the direction of the Drakensteen mountain, about 10 to 12 kilometres away. ‘My idea was a simple one,’ said H.M. ‘It was just to go as far as a level area up near the top of this mountain and then come back. The run would be more than enough to top up the battery. And so, in fact, at about 11.15 p.m. I arrived on this mountain. The traffic along the road at that time of night was virtually nil. The area where I now was lay at an altitude of about 900 feet above sea-level, and forms a sort of small table-land running right up to the foot of one of the great cliff faces of the mountain.
‘There was a moon that night, and I remember how the vast shadow of the mountain fell across a large part of the table-land, so that this area was plunged into what, by contrast, seemed to be an accentuated darkness.’ Then began his encounter with the unknown: I was just about to start back for home when I saw a man waving his arm to me. He indicated that I should pull up . . . I pulled up and asked him what was the matter. He came up to my window and said: ‘Have you any water?’ I replied that I hadn’t, except for what was in the radiator.
The man looked upset when I said this, and went on: ‘You see, we need water!’ I could see how keen he was to get this water, so I suggested that I take him to a stream that crosses beneath the road a little further down the hill. Then the man asked: ‘Is it far to this stream?’ I replied that it wasn’t, that it was, maybe, half a kilometre or so, and that [it] was a mountain stream. I told him that it was very good water too, because it came straight from the mountain above us. At that the man seemed satisfied.
‘In what language did the man speak to you?’ asked Benitez. ‘In English,’ replied H.M. ‘But he had a rather strange accent . . . In South Africa, as you know, there are all sorts of people apart from the English-and Afrikaans-speaking folk; there are Americans, Germans, Dutch, Indians, French, Malays, Chinese, and so on.
And pretty well everybody speaks English, each of them with a different sort of accent according to his nationality. But this man’s accent was strange. Anyway, I invited him to get in the car. Which he did. And we set off for the stream . . . ‘I asked him if he had any sort of receptacle to hold the water. And he said he had not. “All right,” I said. “I’ve got an oil-can with me which maybe will do.”
My companion’s manner was brief. “That will be all right,” he said. So we arrived at the stream, and the two of us set about washing out the can and filling it with water. When the operation was completed, we returned to the car and set off back to the place where I had met him.’