Pasture Avenue runs down off Hospital Hill in Mutare towards Florida, and in 1988 a short cut crossed the field where the polo-cross horses were kept. Stuart, a primary school teacher in his mid twenties, took it home from the General Hospital one evening in late September or mid October, around seven. The horses, he noted later, were normally stabled by five. That night they were still out.

Before he reached the path into their field, he said, he looked up at what he could only call a thing. It hung about a hundred metres above him, bluish-grey, shaped like a rugby ball with spikes on its sides, turning very slowly anticlockwise. Green, blue and orangey-red lights flashed around it, not on and off but fading in steps, full, half, quarter, full again, in colours he described as faked and far away. “When I looked at it, I could not speak or move,” he wrote. The whole neighbourhood had gone silent.

A small girl was playing on a verandah on the road. He shouted at her to look up. She did not respond. When his legs came back and he ran, it was in slow motion, the strides absurdly long and smooth, with the object almost directly overhead. At the field he stopped again. The horses had not moved either: “they just stood there with their heads up.” The thing gave off a thin winding whine, like a generator a long way off, which seemed to come from inside him, not from the sky. He felt fixed to the ground. Then the silence came back, and for a while he felt outside himself.

When the whine started up again he could move. He ran across the field, the horses bolted in every direction, and the object climbed steeply, shot away west towards the Feruka oil refinery and was gone. He got home sweating and hammered on the door. His wife, children and twelve-year-old brother saw only lights flashing far off where he pointed. “They thought I was going mad.” By his reckoning he had been in the field for hours; at home it came to forty-five to fifty minutes. The Manica Post, phoned the next afternoon, took it for a hoax. He drew it on his classroom blackboard and in the dirt for friends, and kept off the field for six years.

He told Cynthia Hind all this in July 1997, in a letter written while his class sat an English test. Since 1988, he said, he had had a fungus in his ears that nothing shifted; the day before he wrote, a hard white matter like silicone had oozed from the left one, with a strange smell. His ears itched before bad news, of which there had been plenty. In 1995 an X-ray for a suspected heart problem showed a left rib cleanly cut off at the spine, no scar, the other ribs straight, which his doctor could not square with a birth defect. Older X-rays that would have settled it had gone from his cupboard. “The missing rib has me baffled,” he wrote. He had not told the doctor about the object.

Hind took it seriously. She wrote back with questions about the paralysis and the timing, got the address of the house with the verandah to ask whether the girl was hard of hearing, and persuaded an ear, nose and throat specialist in Harare to look for anything that should not be there. In October 1998 she went to see him. By then the ears had stopped running, and there was nothing for the specialist to examine.