In the narrow waters of the Strait of Hormuz, where a third of the world's seaborne oil passes and where perception can move markets as surely as fact, Iran announced on September 6th that it had struck an uncrewed American military vessel — a claim the U.S. Pentagon rejected as flatly false. The exchange belongs to a long tradition of competing narratives in contested waters, where assertion and denial serve as instruments of power in their own right. What neither side offered was evidence, and in that silence, the ambiguity itself became the event — unsettling shipping lanes, energy markets,