The Pretoria-Bronkhorstspruit Highway Landing

September 1965. The Transvaal, in what is now Gauteng, South Africa. Two officers of the South African Police were patrolling the highway that leads out of Pretoria toward Bronkhorstspruit, near Silverton. Their names come down to us as John Locken and Koos de Klerk. Some accounts spell the first surname Lockem.

The exact night is slightly blurred. NICAP places the encounter just after midnight on September 16. Donald Johnson's chronology files it on September 15, just before midnight.

The two men were driving in their police van when the headlights picked out an object resting on the road surface. It was a disc. Copper-coloured, with a small dome on top. A newspaper in Wales would later describe it as "like a giant spinning top." It was put at about 30 feet in diameter.

They drove closer. Then it moved. Flames came from what appeared to be two tubes on its underside, and it began to lift itself from the road. The flames shot three feet into the air as it left the surface.

"Its lift-off was quicker than anything I have ever seen," the constable said. Then it was gone. According to a 2026 retelling, the flames kept burning the tar after the object vanished. No beings were reported, and no account describes any sound.

The road itself carried the evidence. NICAP describes a severely burned area about 6 feet across, where gravel had separated from the tar. Briefly News later put the scorched circle at about 3 metres. The surface had caved in, as if from a heavy weight. Johnson's chronology speaks of a large hole in the bitumen.

The road was closed for examination. On September 17 the South Wales Echo, drawing on the Associated Press wire from Johannesburg, reported that police and scientists had been investigating the day before. Samples of the road surface were taken by one of the leading scientific agencies. Lt. Col. J.B. Brits, District Commandant of Pretoria North, told a newspaper the matter was regarded "as being of a highly secret nature and an inquiry is being conducted in top circles."

The results of that analysis were never made public. No official conclusion is on record, and the case was never officially solved.

No hoax claim and no specific conventional explanation appear in the record, but the story has loose threads. The 1965 Echo report names no officers and says nothing about road damage. The burn mark ranges from about 6 feet in one source to 3 metres in another. The constable's surname shifts between Locken and Lockem. And without the sample report, the physical evidence cannot be checked.

NICAP rated it a Category 2 Close Encounter and featured it, with a drawing, in its 1969 book UFOs: A New Look. Charles Bowen included it in The Humanoids, and Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia is cited as listing it as case 702. In 2010 Richard Jurgens reworked it into fiction on LitNet. In July 2026 the Friends of Tshwane Heritage Research Centre revived the story, linking it to the Flying Saucer Roadhouse, a saucer-roofed restaurant between Pretoria and Johannesburg that operated from about 1965 to about 1975. Its site lies in today's Delta Park complex, where Piering Avenue still recalls it.