The Wasp Factory - UFOs to the Less Logical and Less Imaginative

I remembered once, in the middle of summer two years ago, when I was coming down the path in the late dusk after a day’s walking in the hills beyond the town, I saw in the gathering night strange lights, shifting in the air over and far beyond the island. They wavered and moved uncannily, glinting and shifting and burning in a heavy, solid way no thing should in the air. I stooped and watched them for a while, training my binoculars on them and seeming, now and again in the shifting images of light, to discern structures around them. A chill passed through me then and my mind raced to reason out what I was seeing. I glanced quickly about in the gloom, and then back to those distant, utterly silent towers of flickering flame. They hung there in the sky like faces of fire looking down on the island, like something waiting.
  Then it came to me, and I knew.
  A mirage, a reflection of layers on air out to sea. I was watching the gas-flares of oil-rigs maybe hundreds of kilometers away, out in the North Sea. Looking again at those dim shapes around the flame, they did appear to be rigs, vaguely made out in their own gassy glare. I went on my way happy after that – indeed, happier that I had been before I had seen the strange apparitions – and it occurred to me that somebody both less logical and less imaginative would have jumped to the conclusion that what they had seen were UFOs. –p.86