The old Bulawayo Road runs west out of Harare through farming country, with a newer road running parallel to it. A little past Filippa’s dog and cat kennels a side road turns off towards a scatter of farms and Lilfordia School. On the evening of Sunday 20 October 1996, a little before eight, a man Cynthia Hind called Paul turned onto it. He was disabled, drove his own car, and was heading home to the farm where he boarded with his aunt.

Then, he said, a bright light came down from high in the sky. As it drew nearer it had a shape, a disc, and Paul thought the obvious thing: flying saucer. On his left was a large open field. He pulled over and watched it settle in the middle of it.

A door on its side slid upwards and two men in shiny black overalls climbed out of a dome on top. They were too far off for faces. He heard nothing, and the leaves of a small copse beside the landing site did not stir. A second vehicle stopped across the road and an African man got out and watched with him.

The figures, Paul thought, noticed they had an audience. Folding steps dropped, the pair went quickly back inside, and the door slid shut. The machine, or whatever it was, as Hind put it, was flat underneath with a dome on top, two lights on either side, and a reddish-pink colour beneath that grew brighter toward the top. It was as big as the tree it stood beside, four or five metres high. He could not say whether it rested on the ground or hovered just above it.

The other man ran across and signalled for the window to come down. Paul knew him: a farmer who bought beans around the district to sell on to street vendors in town. “Get out of here, get out quickly. Those are tsotsis over there!” he shouted, tsotsis being thugs, and ran back to his vehicle. Both drove off fast. As it lifted away to the north-east, Paul said, he heard a faint hum. His aunt said he came in shaken.

Hind heard all this on the telephone from a relative of the family, a woman she considered reliable, and two days later the woman would not talk. Her husband, Hind wrote, held that the whole business was demonic and wanted his wife nowhere near it. A promise of anonymity did not help. Hind never spoke to Paul at all.

She went after the farmer instead: an appeal in UFO Afrinews, adverts in the personal column, a friend on ZBC radio, word around the district. Nothing. She and her team drove out twice. The field was fenced with barbed wire, the grass knee-high, and near the centre lay a large black burned log, close to where the craft was supposed to have come down. Gunter Hofer, the team’s technician, swept it and found no unusual radiation and no metal. Hind, who confessed she was “no slim, model-type”, got through the wire with help from the men. They took samples of the log. She was almost certain lightning had done it: Zimbabwe has plenty, and it had been a lone tree.

She ruled out a helicopter: no noise, no rotors, no wind in the trees. Then she asked the question the case turns on. Did the farmer shout tsotsis, or did he shout tokoloshes? Nobody who could answer was answering. She would comment, she wrote, when confirmation came to hand. Either witness would do.