Pietermaritzburg Orange Orb over Prestbury

Pietermaritzburg sits in the Msunduzi Municipality of KwaZulu-Natal. Prestbury is a residential suburb in the west of the city. In November 2015, the sky above it became the subject of a small run of reports. The common thread was a colour. Orange.

Two Prestbury residents were the witnesses. What they saw, in the wording that survives, was "an orange orb" in the sky over Pietermaritzburg. One object. A ball of orange light. Nothing about beings, contact or any effect on the pair was reported.

The details that would bring the moment fully into focus have not survived in the accounts still readable today. The exact night is not recorded, only that it came in November, on or before about the 26th. Their names, the time, the direction they were facing, how long the orb stayed and how it moved all sit in a single local newspaper article that has become difficult to reach.

The witnesses did not just watch. They took a photograph. By every account it was blurry. The image is said to show the orb itself, and it may have been printed alongside the original story. It has not resurfaced online, and no copy, credit or licence is known.

The story ran in The Witness, Pietermaritzburg's local newspaper, under the byline of journalist Chelsea Pieterse. Its headline put a question to readers: "Have you seen any mysterious orange orbs lately?" The article is dated 26 November 2015 in its web address and 27 November 2015 in later citations.

It did not carry the Prestbury report alone. On 22 November 2015, Ian Carbutt photographed what was described as "the last of 4 orange orbs travelling swiftly in single file over Roberts road, Clarendon, in the direction of Greytown". Clarendon lies a few kilometres away. Same month. Same colour. A separate sighting.

No official investigation has come to light. There is no known police, South African Air Force or Civil Aviation Authority record. The Astronomical Society of Southern Africa's sighting archive ends in February 2015, months before this case. No sceptical explanation for the Prestbury orb appears in print.

The orange orbs did return. On 8 May 2016, The Witness reported that Helen Reece saw four orange orbs while driving on Mayor's Walk in Pietermaritzburg. From where she was, she judged them "about the size of a pea". They disappeared after about ten minutes. A salesperson at a Johannesburg gadget shop suggested drones, which can carry lights underneath and fly high enough to be silent from the ground. That idea was offered for the 2016 sighting, not for the night over Prestbury.

Today the case survives as a single line in Wikipedia's list of UFO sightings in South Africa, beside the Clarendon report. Two witnesses. One orange orb. One blurry photograph. Whatever the pair saw, it belongs to a local run of orange orb reports over Pietermaritzburg that stretched into the following year, and its full story still waits in the pages of The Witness.