I get very irritated by the misuse of 'may' and 'might', referring to the past. They mean different things, but are constantly confused, even by the 'Times'. Today, in a piece about a French sailor whose boat was struck by ice, but who was unhurt, a journalist wrote: 'Yesterday, the ice may have proved fatal.' This means, grammatically, that it is possible he was killed, but we're not sure. 'Yesterday, the ice might have proved fatal' would have indicated, correctly, that it could have proved fatal, but it wasn't, luckily.
If you email a friend, 'I was in a car crash; I may have been killed', it would sound spooky.
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