Bertrand Russel wrote: “Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.”

In January 2022, my family spent a week together just north of Hoedspruit at a game farm called Ntsiri. Sam and all our kids were together again for the first time in more than a decade; Kashka out from Hong Kong, Ky breaking from his work, Gabriel and Emma as chilled as students should be.

We settled quickly into an adventure that was as good as it can get. Light moods were wrapped in peaceful nature. Game drives, grumpy elephants, lions and long lunches helped us bond, love, laugh and reconnect.

One windless night, under a cloudless, star-filled sky, while searching for animal eyes with powerful torches from the back of an open Land Cruiser, we discovered something that none of us could explain. All six of us saw it. We had time to study it. We had time to discuss it. When the string of lights finally disappeared, we all agreed that we had seen a UFO.

Your mind can play tricks with your vision. I first saw the headlights of another car on a road in the distance. Sam’s insistence made me refocus, so that I saw the lights in the sky. Then I was convinced they were a drone display. It must have been an event of some kind, not far away. They moved like drones, maybe 30… or 100 of them? Then they moved too far and fast for drones. The lights moved like spaceships, in a perfectly straight line. They dimmed as they crossed the sky and finally disappeared near the horizon.

Sam saw them as windows in one big vessel. Like a train. A train in the sky. She could even see the shape of the shell surrounding them. Like a space train. Emma agreed… it was a space train.

Gabriel, for split seconds, saw a meteor shower, with trails behind the lights, but then it became a string of lights, like a space train, moving too fast, too far…

Ky saw missiles or a weapon of sorts. Surely not above the Kruger National Park… can’t be.

With only minute illusional variation, we all saw the same thing, and what we saw was beautiful, otherworldly and very exciting.

Ky, possibly braver than the rest of us, was the first to say the words. He could not contain his joy; at last, the aliens had arrived! No one argued with this theory. The variety of emotions we experienced was broad but subtle. The surge of shared energy, the prospect of our lives taking an unknown and irreversible turn, the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again… was exhilarating, electrifying and intoxicating. Life was truly wonderful.

Your mind can play tricks with time too. Time slows down when faced with trauma. Does it speed up when you’re having a thrilling time? We cannot agree on how long our UFO was in the sky. It may have only been 20 or 40 seconds. But then, how did we see, talk and feel so much?

I’m good in times of crisis. I trust my gut and make quick decisions. I knew what we had to do; get on the radio and find the other night drivers. Somebody else (many people) for hundreds of kilometres must have seen what we saw. Kashka, probably wiser and definitely more cautious, shot me down. DO NOT TELL ANYONE WHAT WE SAW UNTIL WE KNOW FOR SURE! Consensus was reached. I was no longer in charge. This was our secret, our time. Google will have the answers. It had been about 10 minutes, it would take another 10 to reach the Highpoint so we could connect to the rest of the world and find out what others knew. I’d have to wait before claiming first contact.

We had 10 more minutes to savour our discovery. We had 10 more minutes to enjoy being the heroes in the greatest story of all time.

It took Emma only five seconds at the Highpoint to disappoint us. Elon Musk had pranked us. We had not seen a UFO. What definitely was, definitely wasn’t. We saw a train of recently launched Starlink satellites. So, our story took another turn, back to a normal, logical and confirmed narrative.

The Starlink satellites are beautiful. Seeing 30 to 40 dining-room-table-sized satellites travelling 550km above the Earth in a perfect line at 500km per minute, spread out over more than 100km and reflecting the sun in unison, brought the future to life. Our skies are changed forever. Nothing will ever be the same again.

I’m proud of my family’s mettle. When faced with the unknown, cynicism and fear was overridden by faith and hope. It may have been different if our UFO was accompanied by deadly laser beams, if multiheaded giant lizards had appeared and started eating us or if screams of death and destruction drowned out the real ethereal night-time chorus of crickets, frogs and nightjars. Luckily for us, our UFO was benign.

And seeing it was one of the most exciting times of our lives. DM

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