Carp do not bite in a hurry, and carp fishermen are built accordingly. Two of them were settled on the bank of Mazowe Dam one winter night, about two hundred metres in from the main road and facing south-east across the water. The dam sits in a fold of the Iron Mask Hills some thirty-five kilometres north of Harare, built in 1920 to water the citrus estate below it. They had no fire. A gas lamp stood in front of them with a shield of card or tinfoil at its back, so that the glow fell on the rod tips, where a bite would show, and not into their eyes. It is a small, practical detail, and a useful one: their night vision was as good as two men sitting beside a lamp could make it.

George B. wrote the account down more than twenty years afterwards, from Morley in Western Australia, and Cynthia Hind printed it in the January 1992 UFO Afrinews. He was careful about what he did not know. The year was probably 1968. The month lay somewhere between April and August, which in Mashonaland means the dry cold of the highveld winter. The hour he put at about half past ten.

Over the hills on the far side of the dam a bright white light came into view. His first thought was a car, and at that distance it had the look of headlights. But he and his friend Keith R. talked it over and agreed there was no road on those hills for a car to be on, and from that moment the light had their whole attention. Its height was hard to judge, though since they had taken it for a car it could not have been much above the ridge. It came straight at them, he said, and never rose or dropped on the way.

Two things stayed clear in his mind. The first was that as the light drew nearer a hush fell on everything around them: in his words, “an eerie silence seemed to settle on the entire area and nothing could be heard.” The second was colour. The white warmed to orange and, by the time it was directly overhead, to something close to red. There, above the two fishermen, it changed direction, seemed to pick up speed, and vanished towards the dam wall. It had appeared to move slowly, and he guessed the whole passage at fifteen seconds or so.

The two men sat, in his word, dumbfounded. They had roughly another fifteen seconds to be so. Then a huge circle of light, perhaps three hundred metres across, appeared in the middle of the lake. It looked, he said, as though the water were being lit from underneath by a single source at its centre. Neither of them had an answer for any of it. They packed their gear, with some nervousness, and left.

He added a footnote on the light itself. It was one light, not two, and it kept the proportions of distant headlights throughout. It had no clear shape at all; the best he could offer was that it glowed strongly.

Hind ran the letter under the heading Travelling Light with Unusual After Effects and added no comment of her own. Nothing else has surfaced since: no second report from the Mazowe road that winter, no fisherman on the far bank. And the account never says what became of the circle on the water. George B. and Keith R. did not stay to watch it go out.