The Harrismith Silent Fireballs

Late October 2011. The eastern Free State, South Africa. Riaan van Greuning lived in Eloff, near Delmas, in Mpumalanga. According to the report carried by Sapa from Volksblad, the sighting happened while van Greuning was travelling in the Harrismith area. Later accounts on the Urban Astronomer blog place the lights to the north of the witness's home. Where exactly the camera stood remains an open question.

Sunday, 30 October 2011. The sky was cloudy. Then the first fireball appeared. Five came in all, between 22h00 and 22h22, one after another rather than together.

"Greuning said the fireballs moved from north to south, made no noise and were relatively slow moving," The Witness reported. Wikipedia's summary of the Nuus24 report speaks of "silent fireballs observed traveling southwards in low cloud." The blog account has them drifting through the sky and heading south into the clouds, though one passage describes them travelling fast. The accounts do not agree on the speed.

Van Greuning took photographs and filmed the fireballs as they passed overhead. One thing was certain. "All I know is that it was not a helicopter's searchlight." The witness did not believe in aliens. But the event was strange, and several websites offered no answer.

On 2 November 2011, News24 ran the headline "Free State UFOs leave skygazers puzzled". The next day Karen Ebersohn's report "Vreemde vlieënde vuurballe bo Harrismith gesien" appeared on Nuus24, and The Witness and the Mail & Guardian carried the story. Beeld readers on Facebook added something more. Several Bloemfontein residents said they had seen similar strange lights over the previous few nights.

Van Greuning also emailed the Urban Astronomer blog, run by Allen Versfeld. At first Versfeld wrote that the sighting "couldn't be explained with any of my usual answers." In a follow-up on 18 November, Versfeld turned to a second, brighter light in the same sky. It disappeared behind trees and came back dimmer, with red and green running lights showing. Versfeld identified it as an aircraft on a standard approach path, noting that the area was "surrounded by 2 major civilian airports, and one military airbase".

Claire Flanagan of the Johannesburg Planetarium was the first to answer the blog's query. Chinese lanterns, simple model hot air balloons. Phillippa Lowe, who once lived in the Middle East, told the press the "silent fireballs" were most likely Chinese lanterns too.

Prof. Matie Hoffman of the University of the Free State physics department and Boyden Observatory was careful. "My ideas are only as good as any other member of the public." Hoffman compared the lights to emergency flares. "They can stay in the air for quite a long time." No official investigation followed, and what Versfeld finally made of the five fireballs themselves is not clear from the accounts available.

The Harrismith fireballs live on in a handful of South African press reports, two blog posts and a single line on Wikipedia's list of UFO sightings in South Africa. They share that list with the silent orange lights reported over Tierpoort in May and June 2011. Five silent lights. A cloudy sky. And a witness sure of only one thing.