Uitenhage in December is warm at night, a motor town on the Swartkops River behind Port Elizabeth, and by two in the morning most of it is asleep. Yusuf A. was not. He kept a café, in the South African sense of the word, the corner shop that sells bread, cigarettes and cool drinks, and one night that month he was inside it at two o’clock with his stamp collection spread out in front of him. Hind does not say why; presumably he lived on the premises, and philately is a quiet hobby for a man who cannot sleep.

What broke the quiet was a buzzing. His car was parked outside, and his first thought was the ordinary one, that somebody was at it. He took a torch and went out. Nobody was there. He swung the beam up over the roof of his own building, and there, he said, at an elevation of about seventy degrees, hung a large, dark, cigar-shaped thing.

He put it at perhaps two hundred feet up, well under the scattered cloud, which he judged to be at about two thousand. The comparison he reached for was the barrel of a petrol tanker. One end glowed orange, but he did not think it was a light, because a light throws a beam and this threw none. It was not moving. Then he noticed that he was cold, on a warm night, and a moment later, with some alarm, that he could not move at all: not his arms, not his legs. Around him was an absolute silence.

Then a whine started and grew, and the tanker went up, very fast, shrinking until the night sky closed over it. He found he could move. The dogs, silent through all of this, began to bark and howl as though terrified.

He reckoned the sighting had lasted about three minutes. When he went back into the café, the clock said three.

The report reached Cynthia Hind through Sergeant Chris Powell of the South African Police, who for years sent her cases from Uitenhage and its districts. Powell sent this one in 1980, eight years before UFO Afrinews existed, and Hind printed it in July 2000, admitting that new reports had gone thin on the ground. She and Powell never pinned down the exact night. What they did pin down was the arithmetic. Fifteen minutes, generously, to search around a car with a torch. Three minutes for the sighting and the paralysis. That left thirty to forty minutes Yusuf could not account for. “Both Chris and your Editor felt that there was some significance in the time factor,” Hind wrote, which is as far as she would go.

There were complications, and she listed them. Yusuf had recently had rheumatic fever. He believed the episode had affected him only for two days afterwards; his wife reported that he had complained of pains in his body for several days before. Hind noted the resemblance to Stuart, the Mutare teacher of 1988, who also stood rooted in complete silence under something overhead, and left it there. Nobody put Yusuf under hypnosis, and after the report the trail went cold. Twenty years on, she wrote, a new investigator in Uitenhage would try to trace him, and a further report would appear in No 23.

There was no No 23. Issue 22 was the last UFO Afrinews; Cynthia Hind died that August. Whether the new investigator ever found the café, or the man, or what he said about the missing thirty or forty minutes, went unprinted, and stays that way.