Four Orange Orbs over Clarendon, Pietermaritzburg

Clarendon is a northern suburb of Pietermaritzburg, in the Msunduzi Municipality of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Roberts Road runs through it. Late in 2015 it became the setting for a small, sharp UFO story.

The main witness was Ian Carbutt. He lived in Clarendon and worked as chief photographer at The Witness, a post a later profile lists from 2001 to 2022. Taking pictures was his job.

Sunday, 22 November 2015. About 9.30 pm.

Carbutt was driving home along Roberts Road. In the night sky he saw three bright lights. They were travelling towards Greytown, about 65 km to the north-east.

Then a fourth orb appeared.

He described what he saw as "four orange orbs travelling swiftly in single file." One behind another, on a steady course. No hovering, turns or changes of speed were reported. Nor was any sound.

Carbutt took out his phone and photographed them. An early version of the record says the picture caught the last of the four orbs as they passed over Roberts Road, still heading in the direction of Greytown.

Carbutt was not alone. Early the previous week, at about 7.30 pm, a woman in the neighbouring suburb of Prestbury and her partner saw "a similar orange orb" in the sky over Pietermaritzburg. She asked not to be named. She managed a photograph. It was blurry. It resembled Carbutt's.

Chelsea Pieterse told the story in The Witness, and News24 carried it online under the headline "Have you seen any mysterious orange orbs lately?"

The paper asked Pietermaritzburg Airport. Its manager, Alvin Naidoo, said the airport's air traffic controllers had no explanation for the orbs. No radar data was mentioned. No formal investigation followed, and no military, aviation or police body is known to have looked into it.

Lasers were part of the local conversation. Laser waving had been reported as a problem in Clarendon and Prestbury. Both witnesses were firm. What they saw was "definitely not lasers."

A different idea surfaced the following year. In May 2016, Prestbury resident Helen Reece watched four orange orbs from Mayor's Walk. They disappeared after about 10 minutes. The Witness reported that they "could have been drones", a suggestion from a gadget-shop salesperson in Johannesburg. Same count. Same colour. Same corner of the city. But no one applied that explanation to the lights over Roberts Road, and no astronomical, satellite or aircraft explanation has been published for them.

The Clarendon orbs never became a famous case. There are no books, no documentaries. The story lives on in the original newspaper report and in the Wikipedia list of UFO sightings in South Africa, where Carbutt's words are quoted.

What gives it weight is the witness. A long-serving professional photographer, at the paper that broke the story, saw something he could not place and pointed his camera at it. No source has questioned his honesty or his photograph. Four orange orbs, in single file, heading for Greytown. Still unexplained.