The Rosmead Tennis Court Landing

Rosmead is a railway junction village about 12 km east of Middelburg, in the Karoo of the Eastern Cape. Its junior school had a tennis court, newly built in early 1971. Nearby stood a military camp with a large fuel depot. In 1972 South Africa was hearing other strange reports, among them two at Roosboom in KwaZulu-Natal that August.

Sunday, 12 November 1972. About 20:15. Four soldiers on guard at the camp saw a rotating set of red lights near their duty room. The lights went out before they could investigate. Two riflemen, P K Nel and S J Rosseau, later said the lights seemed to be about 1.5m above the ground. At the Rosmead junior school's tennis court.

At the same time, Sergeant John Goosen and Constable Koos Brazelle grabbed their binoculars. They were watching a bright light changing colours in the sky over Rosmead. A number of locals saw a bright light zig-zagging across the Karoo sky. It seemed to descend on the school tennis court. Then it disappeared. Some 10 minutes later, headmaster Harold Truter arrived at the school. He saw an unusual light hovering silently over a nearby ridge. It cast an oblique beam to the ground.

A retelling published by Listverse in 2018 gives a different version. Truter was driving when he noticed a strange green glow over the tennis courts. He walked over. There was no engine noise, only a thick silence, and a smell of burned oil that grew stronger as he came closer. Through the chain-link fence he saw burned, cracked asphalt and a pool of molten tar reflecting the moonlight. He called the police. They took his statement and told him several other UFO sightings had been reported by Rosmead residents that evening.

Truter found broken and molten tar and sets of symmetrically placed imprints. According to Cynthia Hind, there were two oval holes 3m in diameter at each end, each with a tail, a circular 2m hole in the centre of the court, and a small hole that appeared to have been made by a spike. The court was locked. The gate and fencing were secure and not at all buckled. Tar fragments lay 183 m away on a nearby ridge, and some accounts put tar and rock as far as 200m away. Eucalypt trees nearby were badly burnt and died soon after.

Tar samples went to the South African Police forensic laboratories in Pretoria. Their head, Col. Lothar Neethling, refuted any possible UFO landing theory. He said nothing unusual was found and suggested local vandals had taken to the court with pick-axes. Other local police sources were unconvinced. They believed no human could have done such damage. Another account says the CSIR analysed samples of the asphalt and the tree, and nothing was ever found.

Others have proposed Venus or ball lightning for the light, and an explosion for the damage. Neither Venus nor ball lightning explains the broken court. Supporters of the case answer Neethling with the locked, unbuckled fence and the debris scattered across the ridge.

Charles Bowen weighed the cause of the damage in Flying Saucer Review in early 1973. Hind came to Rosmead and interviewed residents, among them Hennie Coetzee, later a Middelburg historian. In 1988 she called the court a UFO landing site. John Spencer carried the case into his encyclopedias.

Today it lives on in travel writing, a geocache and Karoo tourism pages. Writers there enjoy the echo. Rosmead. Roswell.