Middelburg and Witbank Orange Light Formations

Middelburg and Witbank, now called eMalahleni, sit about 25 kilometres apart in Mpumalanga, South Africa. Witbank is a mining town. In early 2009, the stretch of sky between them became the stage for two nights of strange lights. Both nights were Fridays.

27 February 2009. 21:51. Inspector Chris Gatzonis and Inspector Awie Labuschagne of the Middelburg police station were at work. "We were on active duty and driving across the bridge at Aerorand in Middelburg," Gatzonis said. Then they saw them. "First we saw five orange lights, moving in formation going in the direction towards Witbank."

A report submitted to UFOINFO, and posted by Brian Vike, described the same night. Round, orange-red objects under a cloudy sky. Five flying in what the reporter called "some sort of formation". Two more came towards them. Then all seven moved off together and disappeared behind the clouds. The reporter and a colleague filmed it. Friends phoned in to confirm they had seen it too, and recorded it themselves.

Gatzonis remembered the end differently. "Later only two were left." Then the cloud cover took them. "Then the clouds moved in front of them and we lost sight of them," he told Beeld.

6 March 2009. The lights returned, and this time there were more of them. The officers counted "a pattern in formation of 23 lights, coming back from Witbank." Wikipedia records them at 20:00, high in the sky and travelling in the opposite direction to the first group.

Scores of residents in nearby Middelburg saw them. One of them, Hetta Malan, told Beeld that "It was moving steadily towards the nearby mining town of Witbank". Her direction runs against the police account. She may have been describing another night, or another group.

Beeld reporter Aletta Otto wrote up the sightings, and the paper's website showed the police footage. It did not settle much. According to UFO Casebook, which passed on the report on 14 March 2009, "the images on their cellphones were poor". The Beeld video link has since died. No clips from the residents have surfaced.

No official investigation followed. The police officers were witnesses, not investigators. Neither the South African Air Force nor astronomers made any statement that has been found, and no one ever claimed a hoax.

No explanation was proposed at the time. In the years since, one possibility has been raised. Slow, steady orange lights travelling in groups, gaining and losing members and fading at altitude on weekend evenings match the profile of sky lanterns or balloon-borne flares, which have accounted for similar formations elsewhere. Nothing ties that explanation to Middelburg directly.

The case lives on in lists and reposts, on Wikipedia's page of South African sightings and on UFO sites that carried the Beeld story. In 2011, a similar report of about 20 orange lights came from Tierpoort. The Middelburg lights remain what two inspectors filmed from a bridge on a cloudy Friday night. Unidentified.