Star Sirius

By Samson Mawulolo Ahlijah

The question of UFOs in Africa, for a long time a ghostly and taboo subject, is now starting to stir things up. Since the Roswell crash in the 1940s, the Western world has begun to observe the skies from a new perspective. It was no longer a question of whether or not the weather was going to change, or whether or not it was going to rain, but rather of identifying strange objects that had probably been flying over our skies since the dawn of time. This sudden interest in the sky has not affected Africa, a continent plunged into precariousness and underdevelopment where the difficulties of daily life are already numerous enough.

And yet Africa, the cradle of humanity, may well be the cradle of UFO sightings and probably the place where the Being from elsewhere first encountered the Being living here. Several accounts seem to point in this direction. The Dogon people have extensive knowledge of the distant star Sirius and the founding myths of many African peoples mention beings descending from the sky.

Today, we’re going to tell you three little-known stories about contact between humanity and intelligences from elsewhere on the African continent.

The first story that interests us is that of the Pendés, a people who live mainly in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, but who are thought to have originated in what is now Angola. In the 1800s, this Congolese people received a rather unusual visit. According to oral tradition, beings from the sky in a flying machine landed in the royal city of Popokabaka. The missionaries who heard this story trivialised it and turned it into a banal primitive tale. For them, it was a story forged from scratch by the Pendé chiefs to mark a certain difference from other peoples. But according to the Pendés or Bapendés, this encounter with beings from elsewhere is at the origin of the eccentric masks and outfits worn to this day throughout the Kwango sub-region during ancestral ceremonies. It is assumed that these outfits and masks reflect the appearance of these extraterrestrials. What message did they deliver to the Bapendés? Did they leave any artefacts behind? If so, which ones? These are just some of the questions that need to be investigated in greater depth.

Abdijan, Ivory Coast

Several years later, it was West Africa, more specifically the Republic of Eburnia, also known as the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, that was the scene of equally original UFO sightings. In a report made for the Canal + channel by journalist Joseph Andjou in 1997, Jeannot Guethaye Tadoa, a resident of a village in the south of Côte d’Ivoire, saw two openings projecting bright white beams of light onto his skin and had the impression that gold dust was being thrown onto his body. This sincere young man assures us that the technology he saw was not of human origin and that when he came into contact with this light, he was plunged into a state of joy and elation mixed with anxiety, because he knew in his conscience that sooner or later this light was going to recede.

In the same report by Joseph Andjou, an unnamed middle-aged man living in Côte d’Ivoire at the time recounts how, aboard an extraterrestrial vessel, he visited the planets of a multi-planetary extraterrestrial civilisation. They first took him to a planet called Anti, which was inhabited exclusively by white people, and then took him to the planet Buyar, which is inhabited by grey men. According to the witness, it took him 5 to 10 minutes to acquire the ability to write and speak the language of these beings from elsewhere in a laboratory. In the video footage, the man writes on a sheet of paper, using a strange alphabet, a sentence that he pronounces in an equally unknown language, which he translates as: I am an extraterrestrial.

Truth or fantasy, it’s up to each and every one of us to judge the value of these stories and testimonies. We don’t personally believe that the men and women who claim to have witnessed these sightings are making it all up. One thing is certain: in the depths of the continent’s forests, beyond the rivers and mountains, buried in the tales and legends, lie hidden the fabulous history of mankind and other humanities.

Samson Mawulolo Ahlijah