The Tierpoort orange lights

Tierpoort is a smallholding area in the City of Tshwane, Gauteng. Beeld placed it south-east of Pretoria. In 2011 it was home to 1,167 people, spread across 32.14 square kilometres.

That autumn, something began to appear in the evening sky. Lights were reported on the evenings of 11 May, 20 May and 21 May 2011. They were described as "silent and orange with consistent luminosity". They travelled "faster than a commercial aeroplane".

Charlotte Grub was 25. She lived on a smallholding in Tierpoort. On a Friday night around midnight, she watched seven bright orange lights "come up" over the horizon. One after the other.

They appeared about 20 seconds apart. Each followed roughly the same path. Each climbed at a steady speed, then disappeared into the sky. They were much brighter than satellites, stars or aircraft lights. Their brightness held steady, without the flicker of a satellite or an aircraft. They moved faster than a commercial aircraft but slower than the International Space Station. They made no sound.

This time she photographed them. She said she had seen the same lights in May, but could only take cellphone photos then. One account adds that about 20 similar orange lights were seen in May, appearing just after 20:00 in the east. What were they? She said she had no idea.

On Monday 13 June 2011, Beeld reporter Fanie van Rooyen published her photograph under the headline "Wat is die oranje lig op dié foto". What is the orange light in this photo? Two days later a second article followed. "Nóg 'n vrou sien vreemde oranje ligte". Yet another woman sees strange orange lights. Across the province in Krugersdorp, Bernadette Opperman told Beeld that she saw a flying orange light in the sky on the 21st of May.

No statement from the South African Air Force, the civil aviation authority or the police has been found. The answer offered came from astronomy. Nicola Loaring, an outreach astronomer at the South African Astronomical Observatory, is quoted as saying such lights are meteors. "They are very common. They glow orange, sometimes green, can change colour, and usually end up white." She also suggested people may be more alert to such lights because of end-of-the-world predictions. 21 May 2011, one of the dates the lights were seen, was Harold Camping's widely publicised "Rapture" date.

Not everyone accepted the meteor answer. Listverse later wrote that some of the reported movements were "not at all in line" with meteors. And Grub's account was of lights rising, not falling. Seven of them. One after another, along the same track.

The Tierpoort lights belong to a run of South African reports from 2011, alongside the silent fireballs photographed over Harrismith that October. In 2018 Listverse placed Grub and Opperman among its ten mind-bending UFO encounters from South Africa. Grub's photograph remains the heart of the case. Nobody has accused the witnesses of fabrication, and no one has settled what rose over Tierpoort that night.