A farm worker walks into the yard at Braeside on a winter morning and tells his employer there is an ugly thing down by the reservoir. Bennie Smit, who farms outside Fort Beaufort and also owns the hotel in town, goes to look. What he later said he found in the thorn scrub was a ball of fire, roughly a metre across, hanging a little above the bushes and changing colour as he watched: green, then yellow, then a dull gunmetal grey.

Smit did two things in quick succession. He telephoned the police, and he fetched his .303.

The Fort Beaufort station sent a sergeant, and later the station commander, a warrant officer. The sergeant’s own account, written up years afterwards and still circulating online, has the object hiding among the trees about a hundred and fifty metres off, sliding behind cover whenever anyone got a clear look. He fired three rounds at it and said he hit it with each one. Smit fired too. The thing flickered bright white, moved off through the vegetation, and was not seen again.

The next morning they walked the ground where it had been. In the hard clay were nine round impressions, evenly spaced, each about ten centimetres wide and two or three centimetres deep, as though something had screwed short legs into the earth. Soil samples were taken and, the sergeant said, sent up to the CSIR in Pretoria, where they apparently never arrived.

That might have been the end of it. Except that a fortnight later, according to a Fort Beaufort man who was a boy at the time, the concrete farm dam at Braeside burst apart without warning and threw slabs twenty-five metres across the veld. A contingent from the army base at Grahamstown, so the same memoir goes, cordoned the farm for two days. No record of that deployment has ever been produced.

The story went out on the international wires and Fort Beaufort enjoyed a brief trade in visitors. The local museum ran a long article on it in 1990. The Afrikaans daily Beeld revisited it in 1997, on what it took to be the twenty-fifth anniversary. That is the awkward detail: the Wikipedia list gives the date as June 1971, the newspapers and the sergeant say June 1972, and nobody has yet settled which.

The farmer, the sergeant and the warrant officer were all sober, respectable men with reputations to lose, and they kept to their account. The holes filled in. The dam was rebuilt. What was in the trees at Braeside is still, officially, an unknown object that changed colour and got shot at.