Late May is the best time of year for the sky over Windhoek. The rains are done, the dust has settled, the nights are cold and completely clear, and a man who owns a bar can step out into the car park for a breath of air and see more stars than he has customers.

On the night of 22 May 2009 that is what one Windhoek bar owner did, and he reported what followed to NUFORC, the American reporting centre that takes sightings from anywhere in the world, the same night, which is how it comes to be here.

He said he looked up and saw something as bright as a fireball, but not one. It was the colour of flame, he wrote, without any of the movement of flame: a steady, hard, orange light. Riding above it was a smaller red light, and the two seemed to be joined, as if they belonged to the same object. It came in from the east, travelling west, and then it stopped and hung over the bar.

He went inside and fetched everybody. By his count about eighteen people came out into the car park and stood looking up. He noted the time it first appeared and the time it went. Using a star as a fixed point, he watched the thing describe a slow circle in the sky, then climb, and then fade out as it gained height, until there was nothing where it had been. Twenty minutes, all told.

He rang Hosea Kutako airport and asked whether anything had been flying. There was, he was told, no recorded aircraft movement at that hour.

He signed off with two remarks. One was that there had been a run of sightings in Namibia in the preceding weeks, which is true: the newspapers on the coast had been printing accounts of a fast ball of light with a tail seen over Usakos and heading for Swakopmund a year before, and the reports kept trickling in. The other was that he had, until that evening, considered himself a sceptic.

There are things this account does not tell us. It does not say what direction the object was in when it hovered, or how high, or whether anyone took a photograph, in an era when most of those eighteen people would have had a camera phone. It gives an implausible time of 12:50, which the report itself contradicts by describing a night sky, so we assume he meant ten to one in the morning and typed in a hurry.

A helicopter with its landing light on, seen from below and side on, can hang in the air with a red beacon above a white glare, and can seem silent at a distance over a noisy bar. Windhoek does have helicopters. Whether any of them were up that night is something the airport apparently could not say.

Eighteen people in a car park, one steady orange light, one small red one, twenty minutes, and a sceptic who went back inside a believer. The bar, presumably, was quieter than usual for the rest of the night.