The Karoo does one thing better than anywhere else in the country: sky. Between Cradock and Graaff-Reinet the land flattens into scrub and koppies, the towns are an hour apart, and on a clear night the Milky Way throws shadows. It is the kind of place where a farmer on a stoep has time to notice that one of the stars is doing something it should not.

Two days after Christmas 1998, a Graaff-Reinet family noticed exactly that, and had the presence of mind to fetch the camcorder.

What they filmed, according to the case file logged with a South African investigation group and later carried in the Wikipedia list of sightings, was a cluster of objects passing very high over the town, at something like twenty-five thousand feet. They were rounded, or roughly triangular, and they changed colour as they went. Now and then two of them would circle one another, like moths around a lamp nobody could see. The family watched and filmed for some time. Then, the account goes, a much larger object arrived, shiny and gold-coloured, and overtook the group. At that point all of them, large and small, moved off together towards a bank of cloud on the horizon and did not come back.

That is the whole record. No time is given, no duration, and the tape itself has not surfaced online. It is a thin file, and this archive lists it as a witness account rather than a documented case for that reason. But it sits inside a much longer local tradition, which is why it belongs on the map.

Karoo people have been reporting lights for as long as there have been Karoo people. The travel writer Chris Marais, who has spent decades collecting the region’s stories, notes that farmers and policemen on night call-outs have a habit of describing orange lights that dance about the sky in a playful, whimsical way, as though enjoying themselves. In 1975 a Loxton farmer said he had met four small beings beside a funny sort of caravan. In the 1970s a Rosmead schoolmaster found a tennis court scorched and holed after a night of moving red lights, a story with its own page in this archive. Between Rouxville and Smithfield, some years ago, a party of elderly tourists watched something descend and found burn marks in the veld the next morning; the CSIR took samples and that was the last anyone heard.

The mundane explanations are all available. High-altitude aircraft in a holding pattern, a flight of birds catching town light, a satellite pass, the planet Venus doing its usual impression of a spacecraft. A camcorder pointed at the night sky will also make a single bright star wobble, split and change colour on its own, which is worth saying plainly.

Still. A family in Graaff-Reinet stood in the street two nights after Christmas and filmed something that led a formation of lights away over the Camdeboo. If the tape is in a drawer somewhere, this archive would like to see it.