The Scottish UFO Casebook

By Steve Hammond

The Scottish UFO Casebook is a compilation of over 800 sightings, from the first century AD to the present day. Well-known events are covered alongside sightings teased out of archives and contemporary newspaper accounts. Each entry has been written with an unsensational eye for the facts, fully referenced and with links to original sources.

Where possible, actual case numbers are given, as used by UFO groups of the time. Sightings are of course covered, as are Close Encounters, Alien Abductions, and yet stranger occurrences. Many cases are being presented here for the first time.

You will see that throughout history Scotland is no stranger to to flying saucer mystery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781471060663

Book preview

Introduction

The Casebook

I can trace the origin of this book all the way back to 1980. Then, aged 11, my Dad gave me a birthday present of Ronald D. Story's The Encyclopedia of UFOs. Already interested in the subject, and in the aftermath of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I saw some things in the sky for myself. In retrospect, they were easily identified. More interesting sightings happened elsewhere in the world, it seemed. But what about Scotland?

The encyclopedia had nothing to say, save for a table of UFO physical trace landings, containing a tantalising but frustrating entry on the 36th line: Scotland 3.

And that was it. No other details. No internet to chase it up. None of the books in the library dealt with Scotland.

So I started collecting sightings from my local newspaper — The Dundee Courier and Advertiser — and saved them in a manila folder. There weren't many.

More ambitiously I plotted all the UFO landings on a map of Dundee, of which the newspapers had even less. And for the next few decades I'd only managed to scribble in a single one. This ended as a small collection indeed, and really only a record of Dundonian (i.e. from Dundee) sightings, haphazardly collected and not analysed.

Of the three landing traces noted in the encyclopedia, the sum of my available information¹ had never increased.

My interest remained rumbling along in the background, sometimes greater as in during Project UFO and the height of The X-Files, usually less.

Then, post-2000, I found myself involved in ASUFORA — the Anglo-Scottish UFO Research Association. ASUFORA was comparatively small and short-lived. Members were connected through the internet and rarely met each other in person. Indeed, I still can't put faces to many names. I was persuaded into responsibility for the website until ASUFORA went the way of most UFO groups, and at roughly the same time as elements in the media declared the UFO phenomenon to be dead anyway.

However, during this time we acquired a number of cases, some of which were investigated, some solved, most not. Much of the data was on the forums, and when it became obvious our days were numbered, I spent hour after hour printing them out. In that way they wouldn't be lost. Just in case.

Later I had an idea of making them into a book, but it would have proved a slim volume indeed. Similarly, the idea for a tourist guide to UFO landing sites. The idea went to the back of the queue.

And then in recent times something new happened: the availability of thousands of scanned UFO newsletters in online archives dating all the way back to the 1950s. As the pandemic and lockdown hit, the National Archives waived the download fee of the Ministry of Defence's previously classified UFO files. Couple this with a fresh membership of the National Library of Scotland, and something more ambitious became possible; write up all the cases!

And so, The Scottish UFO Casebook.

Now I just had some reading to do.

The Sightings

Although this book calls itself a casebook, it unfortunately can't hope to be comprehensive. It's a truism amongst UFO researchers that 95% of all sightings have a conventional explanation. It's also true that most sightings never get investigated.

Not all sightings are reported, of course, and of those reported to investigation groups, not all will be published. Similarly, not every sighting will be reported to the MoD or the police or the newspapers.

Many we'll simply never hear about. I think a future study could be revealing, of what kind of sightings get reported to whom. There's a distinct flavour, for example, in the MoD reports, of the public saying in essence I think it's important that you should know about this, a sentiment which is absent from newspaper accounts. Equally, the MoD cases range from simple stationary lights to what can charitably be called flights of fancy. Newspapers lie somewhere in the middle.

These in particular tend to focus on the details of the witness (what they were doing at the time) and not what they have seen. So a half-page account of a sighting might not even include basic details such as direction, speed, or even what it looked like. But this is entirely in line with their purpose, which is human-interest stories.

The problem is worse for the MoD files, where calls to their answerphone service often resulted in the dreaded n/a for most of the report's fields. Some even described the UFO as a UFO which, though it can't be faulted for technical accuracy, isn't exactly satisfying.

Cases from investigation groups have gone through some level of quality control making them comparatively worthwhile. At minimum, someone is likely to have thought on it. At best the witness had been interviewed, and authorities queried. Newspaper accounts will not generally have had any investigation, and the MoD cases will specifically have not had any except in exceptional circumstances. The sighting is simply noted and filed.

At its most basic a case involves a witness who saw something, and along with a date but not necessarily a location, that's all we are ever likely to know. Page after page of this stuff would hardly be worthwhile as good evidence of the unknown. Similarly, many old sightings listed in UFO journals appear only as a single line with minimal data. Good for statistics, maybe, which isn't to disparage those efforts. The 1970s, judging by those old newsletters, seemed to be a high-point for statistical analysis.

Which leads to the tricky issue of what to include in a casebook.

Many (even most) of the MoD files are what Northern UFO News terms low definition meaning a lack of information, rather than how strange the case is. Tabloids, as revealed by the UFO Newsclipping Service, by contrast enjoy more sensational and spectacular events. But spectacle shouldn't be a criterion for inclusion.

Inevitably there's some judgement about what to exclude. I've not included low definition cases, where all we have is a light in the sky not doing much of anything. I've tended not to include self-reported cases from the web, where no-one has so much as commented on them (though it's not an absolute rule). On the other hand anything not immediately explicable is a good candidate. Anything with more than a single source even better. Anything noteworthy for other reasons, likewise, whether through being well-known or well-discussed. The best cases are picked apart and analysed by multiple investigators and periodicals.

Strange objects are seen in the sky, often at close range, by an observer and which seem to defy rational explanation. And because the UFO phenomenon gets a little fuzzy at the edges, there are related phenomenon to consider. Alien abductions? Entities? Men in Black? Mysterious craters? Glowing mists?

Yes. All of those. As with art, you know it when you see it. The UFO Phenomenon is anything called the UFO Phenomenon. Art shades into engineering, and the material shades into the paranormal.

But you might have noticed one criterion conspicuously not mentioned: whether or not the case is true. Which is another way of asking if UFOs and their attendant halo of sub-phenomena are real. This might appear an odd question. A substantial part of UFOology takes as its starting point the belief that aliens from Zeta Reticuli are routinely experimenting on humans. But the Scottish experience is not the American experience. There's such a thing in American alien research as the Standard Abduction Scenario. One of the surprises I had in compiling this book was how vanishingly rare it was in Scotland. Even when creatures do appear, they are atypical.

What might be real are radar tapes, photos, recordings. But usually we have to add a silent alleged in front of them, because the originals are not in our possession and never will be. Photos have, alas, always been contentious. From the classic double exposure to modern-day phone apps specifically designed to fake sightings, no photo is truly conclusive. One book I read in the 90s specifically declined to contain photos reasoning, remarkably, that it could only detract from the credibility.

I think on some level, this point is more fundamentally important than they knew. And so this is where we get to the heart of the matter: all that we can reliably study are not UFOs but UFO stories. What people say they've experienced is the bulk of what we can work with. It's a rich field.

We may not have the hard evidence we'd like.

But we unquestionably have lore.

Explanations

What do the 95% explained sightings look like and why should we care? What might you see if you look up? Here's where it becomes plain that no single explanation can accommodate everything seen in the sky. What is a UFO anyway? Taking the Fortean view, there's not a single explanation there's a dozen. Perhaps if we carve away those sightings, whatever is left might be amenable to a single explanation. Maybe that'll prove to be aliens?

Some mundane explanations have a characteristic signature. A star-like object seen for hours at a stretch, perhaps drifting extremely slowly, is likely to be planet. If you're not familiar with the sky, it can seem unusual. Especially since with clouds and time of day, it can seem to appear sporadically. Venus has attained the status of a cliché for a good reason.

Similarly, orange spheres, silent and drifting, are likely to be Chinese lanterns. And that's even more likely if they're seen in groups of many, and especially if seen in the first decade of the 21st Century when such things were on sale. A ring of white lights, perhaps rectangular, expanding and contracting, is almost certainly a laser lightshow.

Long-lasting bright fireballs are most plausibly explained as meteors or re-entering space debris. The signature for these is being seen from a great many places, by multiple witnesses. They occur so high in the atmosphere that they can be seen over a wide area, and sometimes from high-flying aircraft.

Others will be misidentifications of natural phenomenon. Perhaps ball-lightning, mirages, or even undiscovered atmospheric features. This isn't as unlikely as it may seem; sprites – electrical discharges related to lightning – weren't positively identified until 1994.

Even aircraft, seen under unusual conditions, can can appear mysterious. To say nothing of secret military craft intended to be hidden from view – might we have a sub-category and call them cryptodynes? – and other prototypes. The rise in the number of drones has already caused new kinds of UFO report, with their own characteristics.

Some cases will undoubtedly be hoaxes, for the purposes of fooling us, or simply for the satisfaction of having done so. Without an outright confession, how would we prove it? Other than an accumulation of discrepancies over time, or some discordant detail, or other suspicion, the story will remain intact.

Yet all of the above also appear in this book.

So why take note of them?

Because an explained case is still enlightening, serving to distinguish them from other cases around the same time. If you saw something and look it up, you'll find an answer, even if it's one you might not have expected. It's good to know the rules – such as they are – so that the sightings which break them stand out even more. If it resists such easy answers, well maybe you're onto something.

A metallic saucer orbits a car at a distance of 60ft². A saucer rises out of the water in view of a family. A radar contact can't be attributed to any known aircraft. An object hovers, before shooting off at rapid speed, and this is so common a feature it even gets parodied in The Simpsons. These surely can’t have a mundane explanation, or at least a currently known one.

This, then, is the biggest question: are some sightings alien spacecraft? Are they piloted by extraterrestrial beings?

Insufficient data.

I suppose I should qualify that. In The UFO Encyclopedia, there's an entry for the ETH, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. In other words, the idea that all unexplained sightings are alien craft. It's compelling, of course, the idea that there's other life visiting us, the nuts and bolts explanation.

But it's not the only such theory. When objects first appeared in the summer of 1947 over Mount Ranier, American opinion was divided as to whether they were from Mars, the Soviet Union, or – and this was an admittedly minor view – Britain. (Yes, some people thought saucers to be British secret weapons.) Then the phenomenon updated. Occupants appeared.

So maybe they're Ultraterrestrials – from another dimension – and that explains why they vanish in the way they seem to. Or Space Critters, which holds that they're animals made from a different kind of energy. Could they be humans from the future? The beauty of the ETH, and also it's main failing, is that it can be arbitrarily patched up to an unlimited extent: yet higher technology and alien whim.

As time progressed, different theories came and went in popularity.

One such is the Federal Hypothesis, which holds that UFOs are secret military aircraft. What's more, that intelligence agencies have seeded belief in aliens to further disguise their projects such as the U2 spy plane. If you've seen a stealth drone, you're much more likely to think of it as an alien spacecraft, helpfully deflecting from the truth.

But what seems clear is that no single hypothesis covers everything. And secondly, that the phenomenon evolves.

In the UFOlogy of the USA, the ETH is essentially taken as fact where the following decades have cemented it. Not so in Europe. A different kind of UFOlogy is favoured; the Psychosocial Hypothesis in which something mysterious is still going on, but heavily shaded by culture. Here the experiences take in the paranormal and psychic. Some real but unknown force presents itself to humans, who interpret it with the culture of the time. If a glowing figure by the side of the road wears a space helmet, we have no qualms about putting them in the UFO category. If a glowing figure, also by the side of the road and in the same decade, instead dresses as an 18th Century piper, should we do the same? If not, then why not? Why should one go in the UFO Phenomenon bucket and not the other?

I have a lot of sympathy for that perspective.

It naturally explains why it changes as culture changes over time, and why it's different in different parts of the world. It explains why Classic Adamski style flying saucers, primitive and almost agricultural in shape, belonged to the early days of the 1950s. Indeed, early reports of the interiors of these craft had them being controlled by large levers. And why the original 1947 saucers over Mount Ranier weren't saucers at all but crescents. The saucer description was a miscommunication by reporter Bill Bequette, and became part of culture.

The phenomenon evolves alongside us.

Within UFOlogy this is known as cultural tracking, the phenomenon always being just a single step ahead of us³. When we look back we see the era of powered flight being accompanied by mystery aeroplanes. Before that mystery airships, longer-ranged and faster than the real thing. By the time we get to the 1960s, after the launch of Sputnik, there were even reports of mystery satellites. As I write this we're now getting reports of mystery drones.

As to the aliens themselves, worldwide in the 1950s, every entity seemed to looked different, if encountered by accident. Aliens were from comparatively nearby, Venus or Mars, and looked entirely human to the Contactees who were sought out by them. Scientific knowledge of space increased and they came from farther afield, when Mars and the Moon proved to be dead worlds. From the 1980s aliens looked like the archetypal Grey. In Brazil they saw hairy dwarves, in Europe nordic types who could pass for – ethereal and glowing – human. That is, until the American Grey swept all else away, with perhaps a footnote for Reptoids.

But having said that, they appear rare in Scotland. I wonder if this is because Scotland already has a rich mythology of creatures, in the form of the Good Folk, Selkies, Brownies, Kelpies… with which to fill the need for lore.

Even if there's an objectively factual mystery behind it all, the culture in which the stories are told appears to matter. And that is why I've kept in – and marked as such – known hoaxes. Even if not real, they nevertheless feed into the zeitgeist as if they were real. Which brings us back to the main subject matter: UFO stories. Created by the interaction between Humans and Mystery, an iterative, generative process, with no single author.

Where does that leave the ETH?

Nothing precludes the existence of extraterrestrials, of course. We only have to weigh up the likelihood that they're here, now, and behaving in the way that they seem to be. Perhaps Greys from Zeta Reticuli really are taking an unhealthy interest in humans, disguising themselves as they go. Perhaps stray electromagnetic fields from the modern world affect our temporal lobes, bringing on an experience akin to, but not really, a hallucination.

Or perhaps something altogether stranger is happening.

Something no-one's thought of yet.

The Entries

The size of an entry, then, is not necessarily a reflection of its importance, but of roughly the quantity and quality of available information. The more substantial the information or significance of the sighting, the more space it will get. If anything is of additional note, this will be mentioned in the text.

Dates are of the sighting itself, not the date of the report. Sightings have been collated from various sources, being mindful of including a reference back to the original and giving the main investigator's name if known, and if there was one.

Personally identifying information of witnesses is only provided if it was present in the original, for example if they went to a newspaper. And even this may not refer to the percipients real identities. The newsletter Magonia, for example, used pseudonyms by default.

Many sightings have a case number, sometimes several, assigned to them by different investigation groups. These are included

extra information like so

where they're known, along with the main group, in the hope that this might prove useful to researchers.

I don't believe I've seen this in a book before.

Obviously The Scottish UFO Casebook builds on the work of a great many others, who've reported, investigated, and written in journals over the years. So a thanks to all those researchers and witnesses, without whom this book wouldn't have been possible.

If there are any errors, or mistakes here then they're mine. If I've omitted proper credit for anyone, or got anything wrong, I'll be happy to correct it⁴ along with updates.

Notables

The most famous and best-documented of Scottish UFO cases has to be The Livingston Incident 5.10.29 in which Bob Taylor was attacked by a landed craft. This gained worldwide attention, also being immortalised by/ Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World/. It's also the most significant, with physical evidence, an impeccable witness, and extensive investigation. This is undoubtedly one of the trace cases only hinted at in the Encyclopedia of UFOs.

Another large case, The Fife Incident 7.7.13, is perhaps the counter. Spectacular, with multiple alien entities, but ultimately divisive amongst investigators. The witnesses remain anonymous, with some considering it to have been a hoax which got out of hand.

An aerial explosion and a subsequent ditching of an unknown object, in contrast, unquestionably happened. The Lewis Crash 7.7.14, seen by multiple witnesses and widely reported on, resulted in a large air-sea search effort. A military exercise in the area, mere days afterwards, coincident with no aircraft having been declared missing, provided conspiratorial fodder.

Alien Abductions also play a part in the wider Scottish UFOology, the best-known being The A70 Abduction 7.3.9. Such was the impression made on one of the abductees, that he became a UFO investigator himself. This regularly crops up in newspaper articles about Scottish UFOs.

By contrast a wave of sightings in a single area on a single night, involving multiple objects and multiple witnesses, is seemingly unknown in the press. The Tranent Flap 5.8.17 provides an example of multiple witnesses with multiple sightings, all apparently part of the same event.

But even if many cases can be subjectively interpreted, there does seem to have been a genuine solid unknown object in the skies. The Calvine Photo 7.1.18 was taken near Pitlochry. Even if we don't have the original photograph, there's official documents showing that the RAF analysed it and couldn't explain it.

And I have to mention a landing at Loch Ness 5.2.6. Before I started researching this book, I knew it only from Usborne's 1977 World of the Unknown: UFOs which had scared kids (including me!) all across the country. Unknown to me, investigator Steuart Campbell had already looked into it, and turned up strong evidence against.

---

I now think that one of them might have been at New Elgin (see 5.8.18) and another certainly at Livingston (see 5.10.29). The third may be by the River Earn (see 5.5.4) but these are only my suppositions.↩︎

Apologies for not using metric. Most UK sightings seem to be recorded this way, especially in the 20th Century. If you wish, mentally substitute 1 yard as 1 metre, and 1ft as 30cm. Given the accuracy of estimations, you can't really go wrong.↩︎

Putting on my Sci Fi hat for a moment, I predict that in the near future we will start getting reports of mystery AIs on the internet, appearing just smarter and more intelligent than the current state of the art. The new other.↩︎

With references, of course!↩︎

Before 1947

The start of the modern UFO era in 1947 prompted both recollections of old cases from witnesses, and reviews of newspaper archives and older documents. Here could be found reports of phantom airships, underwater wheels and other phenomenon, now interpreted through a flying saucer lens. It's interesting to note how such sightings were not so much UFO encounters but proto-UFO encounters; the phenomenon not having yet coalesced around modern cultural imagery. We can even see evolution of the phenomenon within cases only from Scotland, a microcosm of the worldwide picture. Discs appear for a few decades, but slowly became less common, almost supplanted by black triangles in the 1980s. The earliest encounters of all are reported in terms of the supernatural, not in the cultural appearance of science.

80AD | Caledonia¹

One fast aerial ship. Air seemed to burn.

91AD | Scotland²

From Scotland to Humberside. One aerial ship.

1685

³

John Nisbet and his son James Nisbet plus others witnessed a sight, which sounds remarkably like a modern UFO. Nisbet was a Scottish Covanenter (a religious and political movement) who was later executed for his participation in the rebellion at Bothwell Bridge in 1679⁴.

His son wrote of an experience in 1685:

The Sabbath night before he was taken, as he and four more were travelling, it being exceeding dark, no wind, but a thick, small rain, no moon, for that was not her season, behold, suddenly the clouds clave asunder towards the east and west, above our heads, and there sprang out a light beyond that of the sun, which lasted above the space of two minutes. They heard a noise, and were much amazed. They said one to another, What may that mean? But he spake none, only uttered three deep and heavy groans.

Comment: While it may of course have likely been a meteor, or bolide, the long duration is notable.

10 Mar 1756 07:00 | Edinburgh

⁵

A number of people watched a …pencil of light… high in the sky, which was in view for an hour, after which it vanished. At the same time a similar object was reportedly seen in Köln, Germany.

26 Nov 1758 21:00 | Edinburgh

⁶

A cone-shaped object quickly flew over Edinburgh, shedding sparks and …casting such a strong light that even the most minute objects could be seen in the streets. Shortly afterwards a …fiery globe the size of the Moon… was seen over Glasgow, where it split into three parts. Those parts then rose upwards.