At a quarter past two in the morning the road south of Harare, Salisbury as it then was, is empty, and the bush stands close on either side of the tar. There was still some moon on the first of June 1974 when a Peugeot 404 came through Mvuma with a young couple in it, Peter, twenty-three, and Frances, twenty-one, bound for Durban. The car was sound, on new retreads. On the verge stood a figure, and they took it for a policeman, which is what anyone takes a roadside figure for at that hour. As they passed, they said, it did not look like one. It looked shiny. Metallic.

Soon a light appeared in the sky, revolving, they said, like the lamp of a lighthouse. Then the car started to go wrong. The headlights faded, and the cabin lights with them. Peter lifted his foot off the accelerator and the Peugeot did not slow down. And it turned cold, cold enough that the two of them dug out jerseys and pullovers and put them on.

The light stayed with them the hundred kilometres to Masvingo, Fort Victoria then, and vanished, they said, as they reached the town. There they roused a garage attendant, who came out in shorts and a vest and could not understand why the pair in the Peugeot were dressed for frost.

The leg from Masvingo to the border was worse. There were two lights in the sky now instead of one. The country outside the windows was wrong: the scrub and bush had gone, and they seemed to be driving through swamp, on a road that in daylight crosses some of the driest ground in Zimbabwe. And Peter realised, looking down, that the speedometer stood at 190 kilometres an hour and that he was not driving the car in any sense that mattered.

They got to Beit Bridge. Later, under hypnosis, Peter came up with one more thing: the feeling that there had been someone in the back seat. When Peter asked what it was like, the reply, as Hind records it, was that he “could see whatever he wanted to see: he could see a duck, or a monster.”

Cynthia Hind reported the case in full in her book UFOs: African Encounters; a version ran in FATE magazine in January 1977. When she returned to it in UFO Afrinews in 1993 she gave it a page and a bracketed note that there was a lot more to tell. There is. The longer telling, as it circulates on the web, has a petrol gauge that scarcely moved between Masvingo and the Limpopo and a stretch of night the couple could not account for, and most people meet it as the Beit Bridge teleportation case. The newsletter version has none of that, and is stranger for the restraint.

Hind hung it on a reader’s letter. A woman wrote that in mid-1974, driving from Selukwe to Shabani at about eight at night, she had been followed by a big orange ball that hung over the trees at a fixed distance, took the corners with them, and went out at the lights of the town; she remembered reading of something similar outside Fort Victoria in about the same week. That, Hind noted, would be this.

The only outside witness to any of it is the man at the Masvingo pumps, in his shorts and vest, who thought the couple in the Peugeot were the odd thing on the road that night. Nobody seems to have asked him again.