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"I know it sounds crazy, but we have more than 40 people who swear they saw a herd of elephants sucked into the belly of a spacecraft shaped like an upside-down bowl," said bewildered wildlife officer Augustus Buso.
"They all say the same thing - that a powerful beam of light drew the elephants into the UFO, which then zoomed away to the west and disappeared into a clear blue sky.
"I've never much believed in aliens from space and all that, but park officials confirm that 11 full-grown elephants are missing, so now I really don't know what to believe."
The spine-chilling spectacle unfolded in broad daylight before a busload of tourists at a popular game preserve northeast of here.
"Our bus had stopped to let us watch a herd of elephants at a watering hole when suddenly this gigantic 'thing' with flashing blue and orange lights appeared in the sky," recalled flabbergasted German businessman Gerhardt Braun.
"Everybody figured it was some kind of show being staged by park employees until a beam of orange light shot down and began sucking those elephants right up into the spaceship. We didn't know whether to run or scream or what - because we realized that anything powerful enough to pull a bunch of four-ton elephants into the sky wasn't from this world, that's for sure."
But as bizarre as it was, the electrifying episode was far from unique. A similar dome-shaped spacecraft reportedly plucked 26 hapless pachyderms from a game park in Spain in 1988, and UFO investigators say aliens have abducted more than 300 exotic animals from zoos and preserves over the past 10 years.
"There are intergalactic poachers at work in Africa, America, Australia and everywhere in between," said baffled British researcher Samuel Doukirk-Smith.
"And frankly, we don't know what these uninvited visitors are doing with our animals - whether they're eating them or dissecting them for study or what. All we know is that once they're sucked into the sky, they're never seen again."
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