The coast south-west of Majunga in January is a wet, green, half-drowned place. The Mahavavy comes down brown out of the interior and spreads itself into mangrove and mudflat before it finds the Mozambique Channel, the lakes behind the dunes fill and spill, and the cyclone season sits over everything like a lid. By half past seven the sun has been down for an hour and the sky, when the cloud allows it, is very black. This is the district of Mitsinjo, a fishing town some seventy kilometres from Majunga, and in the first weeks of 1955 the chef de district, the colonial officer in charge of it, was a Mr Quesnot.

On 21 January 1955 the Malagasy daily Fandrosoam-Baovao ran a short piece under a headline asking, more or less, whether a flying saucer was visiting Madagascar. It was, the paper said, the third time such a thing had been talked of on the island. The first had been seen over Fort-Dauphin, at the far south-eastern tip, at about four in the morning in September 1954. The second was over Tananarive, which has its own entry in this archive. The third was over Majunga, and it arrived at the newspaper as a communiqué.

One evening a few days earlier, between half past seven and a quarter to eight, a round luminous object had been seen above the coast of the districts of Majunga and Mitsinjo, and Mr Quesnot, the communiqué said, was one of those who saw it. It was flat: a very bright disc, blue-green in colour, about the size of the Moon. It appeared first over Majunga, having come from the north-east, and shot off at what the paper called a dizzying speed, so that in very little time it could no longer be seen there. Moments later it was over Mitsinjo, and so bright that all the country it passed over was lit up beneath it. It turned west, towards the sea, and was gone. Mr Quesnot said he had followed its course for close to eight seconds.

That is the whole of the report. No sound is mentioned, no height, no trail, no second look. Nobody, so far as the paper knew, went down to the shore to see where it had gone.

Patrick Gross, the French researcher who transcribed the article, put a note of his own beneath it: the third case, he wrote, strongly suggests a meteor. It is hard to argue with him. A large fireball does everything the communiqué describes. It arrives from one direction, crosses the sky in seconds, burns blue-green when its metals flare, throws enough light to make the ground jump out of the dark, and is seen from towns seventy kilometres apart with a small lag between them, or none. It ends out over the sea because most of the world is sea, and it is never seen again because it has stopped existing. Fort-Dauphin at four in the morning got a sentence and no description at all, and nobody, so far as we can find, has since worked out what was seen there.

What the communiqué does not describe is a streak. It describes a flat disc the size of the Moon. Perhaps that is what a bolide looks like coming more or less at you, or perhaps that is what a man on a dark verandah in Mitsinjo makes of eight seconds of blue-green light going out over the Channel. Nobody, so far as we know, asked him.