Ok I admit it

[Esquilax]

She is absolutely, 100% certain she clearly saw him for more than just a faint glance of an eye. She is as certain as possible, it wasn't just a vague thing she only faintly saw.

I know, that's what I'm saying: memories take on greater importance if the person wants to believe something about them, stories get wilder and more elaborate the more they get told.

I'm saying whatever she saw may have started out as a glance, that the original stimuli might have been tiny. But she lies awake at night, thinking about it: "Did I maybe see an angel? Holy crap, I saw an angel!" And suddenly, we have the makings of a story. She mulls it over for a few days, and the more distant the original stimuli becomes, the more hazy the actual memory of it is, and she really wants to believe it was an angel now. Was it just a thing in the corner of her eye? No! She saw it much more clearly than that!

Over time, she tells the story to someone else. And then to another, only this time she's got a new baseline for how significant the event was from the last time she told it, and so on, and so forth.

Our memories are crazy like that, I don't know what else to tell you. I have perfectly clear, real as all hell memories of myself floating at my old primary school, flying around as if under low gravity, even pushing myself off from a specific tree I could probably take you to see. But as real as those are to me, I know they aren't actually real. It was probably just a dream or something that was so vivid it stuck, and over time the memory of it being a dream faded, leaving only the crazy part intact.