Kommetjie in 1991 was still mostly a holiday village: a scatter of houses on the Atlantic side of the Cape Peninsula, lived in for two or three months of the year and shuttered for the rest, with plenty of open ground in between. Mrs P.L. and her husband lived there. Their house had an entrance hall, a lounge, and glass doors from the lounge onto a swimming pool enclosed on three sides under a roof. It also had a pool filter, and the filter was noisy.

One night in late November, at about two in the morning, the noise won. Mrs P.L. got up to switch the machine off. She said that when she stepped from the lounge into the covered pool area she saw a flame about thirty centimetres high, flickering and an intense blue, and took it for an electrical fault. Closer, it was not coming from the filter at all. It was burning in the sand around the base of the machine, several inches clear of it, in nothing but sand.

After about fifteen seconds, in Hind’s words, “the flame just vanished.”

She looked up to go back to bed and, she said, saw a second flame of the same kind in a window of the neighbouring house, the only other house near hers, off to the left and on the diagonal. Her first thought was a reflection, so she looked for a source: no traffic about, nothing that could have caused it. When she looked again the flame in the window was shrinking. Then, she said, she took fright: it was all too strange, and she ran back to bed and pulled the blankets over her head.

Her husband, Mr L., was up early and took his breakfast on the patio. He had filled the pool the evening before, and now the level was well down. He was a builder by trade, and he went over the pool as a builder would: no leak anywhere, the filter running perfectly if a little loudly, the single outlet dry, nothing spilled over the edge. He put the shortfall at about two thousand litres from a pool that held twenty thousand. The night had been still and cloudless, so lightning was out. The report has him quite adamant that, apart from the water, nothing about the pool was wrong at all.

Cynthia Hind met Mrs P.L. on a trip to Cape Town in December 1992, one of a batch of interviews that fed that issue of UFO Afrinews and the next. She gave the case two lines in January 1993, then wrote it up in full that September as Case No 73, under a heading on water and its significance. Her comment was careful. No UAP was seen, she wrote, and a small blue flame in the sand is not one. But her interest was in water that goes missing around events nobody can account for, and she had already noted that a visible object did not seem to be required.

Which leaves the neighbours. The report does not say whether anyone asked them about a blue light in their window that night, or whether they were home to be asked. In a village of holiday houses in late November, they may well not have been.