Muizenberg beach at eleven on a foul April night is nobody’s idea of a walk. The wind was howling, it had been raining, and the sand was empty from the bathing boxes to the water. Sandra was there because one of her dogs was, in the newsletter’s phrase, rather vicious, which meant walking it when nobody else was about, and never alone, so Mark, a friend of the family, had come too. They walked towards the place where the vlei runs into the sea, and across the bay, towards the Hangklip mountains, there was a white light.

She had watched it a while before asking Mark what it was. So still and so bright, they took it for a lamp on some aerial. Then, she said, it went straight up, very fast, stopped, dropped, and rushed off to the left and then the right. They stood where the water got deep and could not think what it was.

Next a beam came out of it: very narrow, from the centre, with what she called a translucent sheen, gentler than the light itself, lighting only the patch of water where it landed. She judged the thing about fifty metres away, hovering very low at the foot of the mountains, no colour to it at all, simply blinding white.

It went still again for a long time, then came straight at them at what she described as an incredible speed. Sandra turned and bolted for the bathing boxes, Mark shouting behind her not to run, to stay and see what it was. “The light just came at us with an almost devastating rage,” she told Pam Puxley. With her eyes shut she could still see it inside her eyelids. She did not remember the dogs at all.

Mark, who had been in the Air Force, held his ground and watched it fall back as fast as it had come, tuck in under the mountain, then speed away low, overland, towards the airport, a heading Sandra knew from watching planes take it. A search helicopter, he thought, and then not: the rising, falling and sideways darting were too erratic and too fast for one.

When Sandra walked back to where Mark still stood, she looked to her left and there was a man in the water. He stood thigh-deep in the fast outflow of the vlei, in a jacket and trousers, no waders, no shoes, no rod, no equipment of any kind, facing exactly the way the light had been. He was perhaps ten metres off. She got a fright and said so. He looked at her with no expression, as though he were not there at all, then turned, walked out of the water and, in her word, disappeared. He did not stagger or seem drunk. She and Mark decided afterwards that he might have been trying to kill himself and they had interrupted him. They wondered too whether the two things were connected.

Puxley’s follow-up questions, reported in Cynthia Hind’s newsletter, added that the weather that night was foul, and that Sandra had seen the light several times before, looking, she said, like a Frisbee almost side-on. Mark was overseas and would back the story when he got home.

There is a small difficulty with the geography. Sandra put the light fifty metres off and also at the base of the Hangklip mountains, which rise across a bay more than thirty kilometres wide. Both cannot be right, and the newsletter does not say which. The man in the vlei, certainly no more than ten metres away, was never seen again.