Half past four on the first morning of 2007, on a farm in the bushveld east of Lephalale, the town the maps used to call Ellisras. New Year’s Eve has been and gone. A woman is lying in bed reading the midnight messages on her phone, not asleep, not quite awake, when a noise starts.

She was the town’s administrative manager, a person whose job was to be believed about things, and she described it to the press that week with some precision. It began like an airliner spooling up its engines. There was no thunder, no lightning, nothing to suggest weather. The noise grew and grew until, she said, it sounded like a million turbines screaming at once. She got up and went to the window.

Outside, the clouds had turned a bright orange-red. And then something came through them: a bright object that plunged from the cloud to the ground at a terrible speed and hit with an almighty bang. She described it as looking like Halley’s comet, round at the front with an orange-red tail streaming behind. Then silence, and the ordinary dark.

Her neighbour saw it too. That was the whole witness list.

By the Wednesday the Lephalale police station was fielding calls from everyone in the district, and the station commander, a superintendent, said the sensible thing: the area was vast, the object could have come down anywhere, and the Botswana border was only forty-five kilometres off, so it might not even be in the country. He had many queries, he told the paper, and no answers. There was, as far as anyone could tell, nowhere to start looking.

Nobody did. Ten days after the event a Lephalale resident, exasperated, copied the News24 story into the American reporting centre NUFORC for the record, noting that television had ignored it entirely and that no newspaper had run a follow-up. Nobody has since.

The explanation most people reached for at the time is a bolide, a very large meteor that gets low enough into the atmosphere to be heard. That is a real thing and it does exactly this. The sound is the giveaway: a big fireball produces a roar or a rumbling shriek as it passes, sometimes minutes after the flash, and it lights the underside of cloud in orange and red. It ends in a bang because it explodes. It is not usually found, because what hits the ground is a few kilograms of black rock in ten thousand hectares of thorn. A bit of space junk coming down, a satellite fragment or a spent rocket stage, does the same, with more noise and less bang.

Against that: the witness said the noise came first and built for some time before anything appeared, which is the wrong way round for a meteor, where the light arrives long before the sound. Screaming turbines that grow louder over a minute sound, to be honest, like a machine.

So the Waterberg keeps a small mystery. Something came down on New Year’s morning, loud enough to get a municipal manager out of bed and bright enough to colour the clouds, and the police, quite reasonably, never went to look. If it is out there it is under a thorn tree, and the thorn trees are not talking.