Every Fisherman In The Harbour Saw It And Every One Of Them Lied To The Reporter

You have to understand the economics. If the harbour gets a reputation for men who see things, the insurance gets interesting, and the buyers get funny, and a reporter with a slow week can cost a fleet a season.

So here is what eleven of us saw on 4 February, and here is what we told the paper.

What we saw: a light that came UP out of the water about a mile and a half out. Not down into it. Up. It broke the surface without a splash — and I know how that sounds, but there was no plume, no spray, nothing — and it climbed, slow at first, then not slow, and it went into the cloud and the cloud lit up from the inside like a lampshade for about four seconds.

The sea was flat. The birds went up. All of them, at once, from the whole harbour, which is a thing I have seen exactly twice in my life and the other time was an earthquake.

Ten seconds later there was a swell that lifted the boats. One low, fat wave from open water, on a flat night.

What we told the paper: nothing. What Dougie told the paper, because he is Dougie: "flare".

We had a meeting in the boat shed. Nobody called it a meeting. It was eleven men, tea, and about six sentences, of which the important one was Alec's: "It came up. We say nothing."

And we have said nothing for six years.

I am writing this because Alec died in November and because the youngest of us, who was nineteen at the time, has started drinking in a way I recognise, and he told me last month that he thinks he imagined it, and that we all let him think that.

We did not imagine it. It came up out of the water and the birds went up and there was a swell on a flat night.

I still cannot tell you what it was. I can only tell you what it was not, and it was not a flare.