At four o’clock on the morning of Wednesday 28 August 1996 a sergeant on duty at the Adriaan Vlok police station in Erasmuskloof, on the southern edge of Pretoria, stepped outside and saw a light in the sky that was not behaving like a star. It pulsed. Inside it, or on it, there seemed to be a red triangle, and it threw out threads of bright green light that the station’s officers later described, to national television, as tentacles. Another sergeant fetched the station’s video camera and filmed it.

The radio did the rest. Over the next hour, by the newspaper count, some seven patrol vehicles headed east after it, along with, by the more excited accounts, the Flying Squad, a dog unit and most of the Pretoria night shift, and the figure of two hundred policemen went round the city by breakfast. At half past five a police Bo-105 helicopter took off with five officers aboard and picked the light up over Mamelodi, on the eastern side of town. The pilot, a superintendent with a good many hours, went after it at full speed. He could not close. The light stayed ahead and above them as they crossed the Cullinan diamond fields, and the helicopter was at ten thousand feet, near its ceiling and low on fuel, when it gave up somewhere near Bronkhorstspruit, seventy kilometres out. By then the sun was coming up and the thing, as Beeld put it, had simply become a white spot.

Beeld’s Sandra Coetzee had the story on the front page the next morning and on page three the day after, under a headline that translates as “UFO at Pretoria stays a riddle; helicopter chase costs R4000”. Captain Dave Harrington, the Pretoria police liaison officer, confirmed the hour’s flying had cost that much, that the patrol cars had driven some kilometres after it, and that the police would not be investigating further. The air force’s spokeswoman, Lieutenant Colonel Laverne Machiné, said the air force did keep a file on unidentified flying objects, but had not been called out, had not been asked to send a Mirage, and would look into such things only if there were something tangible to look into. The government, she said, had given no instruction.

Lights were reported over the same stretch of country in the early hours of 31 August and 1 September, and then the story went quiet, apart from the video, which has had a long afterlife on television and online.

The dry footnote is in the direction of travel. The light was to the east before dawn, and the chase went east, towards sunrise, until the light turned into a white spot in a brightening sky. In the last fortnight of August 1996 Venus stood at its greatest elongation as a morning star, rising in the east some three hours before the sun and outshining everything but the moon. Through a few thousand feet of turbulent winter air it flickers, changes colour, seems to pulse, and cannot be caught by a helicopter. Nobody in the Beeld reports says the word Venus. Nobody in the Beeld reports says it was not.