She was found floating in the sea and the young fisherman who rescued her had never seen anything like it in his life — a naked, fair-skinned girl with round green eyes and an expression of ambiguous rapture on her face.
The inhabitants of the remote village of Kalupapi in Indonesia’s Central Sulawesi province concluded that she was an angel who had fallen from Heaven, and carefully looked after her.
“Excitement!” said the headline on one early news report. “Angel in Sulawesi found fallen from the sky, naked and weeping.”
It took the less innocent eyes of local police to ascertain the truth: that the celestial visitor was actually an inflatable plastic sex doll.
She was recovered three weeks ago by 21-year-old Pardin, three days after a solar eclipse that had inflamed the superstitious expectations of local people.
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Mr Pardin’s mother dressed the “angel” in a blouse and trousers and covered her head in a hijab. She changed her clothes every day as the doll gradually deflated.
A photograph of the angel seated in a chair was widely shared on social media. Such was the excitement generated by its appearance that it caught the attention of local police.
"So it was checked by one of our team,” Heru Pramukarno, the police chief, told local journalists. “It was a sex toy.”
The police concluded that rather than having fallen from the sky, she was the property of a lonely sailor and had fallen off a passing ship.
After the truth was discovered, the doll was taken to the local police station “for safe keeping”. Superintendent Heru said: “This doll has been secured in order to avoid problems.”