A rare, previously unseen 1950s UFO report was discovered in a cardboard box full of junk at a flea market in southwest England.
A woman named Barbara Graves wrote the typed report to her friend Muriel Armfield in Chertsey, Surrey, from her residence in Durban, South Africa.
In the account, she explained how she saw a “round object” hovering high in the sky on March 8, 1953, while photographing the city’s Botanical Gardens.
“I hope you don’t think I’ve taken to the bottle when I tell you that on Sunday, Tom and I saw a Flying Saucer over Durban,” Graves wrote.
“We were taking photographs… and Tom asked me to look up to get the sun on my face when I spied a round object in the sky, very high and moving.
“We both agreed it definitely wasn’t an aeroplane – it was a perfectly cloudless, blue sky, otherwise we would never have seen it at the height it was.
“We watched it travel a good distance, and then it seemed to remain in the same spot for quite a long time – then went higher and higher until it was lost from our sight.”
The letter between friends coincides with a similar report by two Air Force pilots
It’s interesting to note that, according to The Independent, two South African Air Force pilots independently reported seeing something quite similar over the same location on the same day that Barbara Graves wrote to her friend about. A contemporary newsreel later reported on their UFO encounter.
“On Sunday 8 March 1953, two South African Air Force flying officers also reported seeing UFOs in the skies above Durban and a newsreel crew was dispatched to interview them about the sighting, including the nature of the objects and the circumstances, which were documented in the newsreel,” Sworders Auctioneers, where the letter will be put up for sale on August 18, wrote in the description of the letter. “The incident was part of a broader wave of UFO sightings reported in South Africa from late March to mid-April 1953. The witnesses are understood to have contacted the local press at the time, who printed the story.”
Mark Wilkinson, a spokesperson for Sworders Auctioneers, added, “No comparable private first-hand UFO eyewitness letter from this period is known to have notably appeared on the open auction market, making the survival of this document exceptionally rare.”