The day after our first experience I remember telling the tale to the science teacher at school.I could tell that he was not quite ready for such a story as he said I must have at the time been looking though the bottom of a whisky bottle! Quite shaken and with no one to turn to except my sister I decided to tell no other adults of my experience.Instead I would study the phenomena and draw my own conclusions. I felt very alone.
My sister and I were surprised that the next evening (14th December 1971) a similar red light appeared on the horizon and slowly moved over Cairnhill and then subsequently hovered over nearby Greenheads farm. From there it passed over the church and ended up over the Whinwood plantation where it stayed for hours on end.
In fact this pattern or similar ones went on for years.Every night of the week during the winter months, the same thing. From farmhouse to ordinary house they would do their rounds, hovering at a low altitude above the rooftops. Pausing for maybe fifteen minutes or more at a time over each house. When an aircraft flashed by on its way to Dyce airport, the lights would duck gracefully behind Cairnhill only to re-appear after the aircraft was out of site!
Sometimes they would come in pairs or in three or fours.Sometimes they would come from all points of the compass.Some would then go away and others would stay and hover as before.Sometimes they would be white and still - when an aircraft came over. In this state they appeared like a star! When the aircraft had gone the colour changed back to red and flashed.
Three years later my sister left to go to Aberdeen University and stayed in Aberdeen most of the time. I pursued their observation (or was it the other way around?) on my own. I was ocassionally quite nervous. A few times they came quite close, in fact one time one of them silently took off from the field behind our house. That gave me a shock thinking that they might have been watching us too. I do not remember these lights ever appearing directly over our house.
They were quite literally always there. When I went outside, within five minutes I could see them, sometimes more than one. On a few occasions I would try to walk towards them only for them to maneuver gracefully away from me.
In (1975) I left Scotland to study in England. I remember telling my student friends of my experiences. Some were skeptical, others were understanding. Why did you not take pictures they would say? Well I did not have a camera of any sort was the reply. I soon bought one however and during the Christmas vacation tried to capture on film the lights. This was a great failure. I had a cheap camera and knew little of photography.I found out later that you needed to be a bit of a photographic expert to satisy the requirment of night photography. A similar phenomena in Norway had thousands of pounds worth of equipment to study it including tele-photo lenses etc (see project Hessdalen in links page - a Norwegian University studies this one)
When on holiday (back in Muchalls) I used to see these machines of the night regularly up to as late as the early 1990s. A colleague at work (I now live near Glasgow,Scotland) suggested I use a video camera to film the phenomena. This I did and have over half an hours film. When I showed the film it to my sister she thought it was not the same lights as we had seen in the early seventies. I have to agree. However, they are still a little strange.On one occasion in the early 1990s they all seemed to gather when I started to film. I was spoilt for choice and did not know which one to film. they seemed to arrive from all points of the compass like the early days.
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