22-06-2025
- Science
- The Herald Scotland
Scotland's UFO capital: What was happening in Bonnybridge?
And as 16 seasoned firefighters worked to douse the smouldering blaze, there came the niggling sensation that they were not alone.
Lights, darting and diving through the darkness, danced across the sky above them. One hovered, paused within feet, then zipped away with impossible speed.
Veteran crews might have expected some strange nocturnal sights from passing planes, satellites or shooting stars.
But this was like nothing they'd ever seen before ...
The 1980s incident in the Stirlingshire skies would not be the first, nor was it far from the last to leave onlookers in the area questioning what on earth – or, perhaps, not on earth – they had possibly seen.
Within a few years, a wave of even more vivid and unusual sightings of unidentified objects in the night sky would see the area around the Stirlingshire town of Bonnybridge gain international notoriety as Scotland's UFO capital.
Throughout the 1990s – and beyond – an area dubbed the Falkirk Triangle became the focus for vivid claims of extra-terrestrial activity, scoffed at by some and igniting the curiosity of others.
Now a newly published book suggests the skies above this part of the country were playing host to something unexplained long before the world was watching.
Co-authored by veteran UFO researchers Malcolm Robinson and Ron Halliday, Bonnybridge: The Definitive Guide to Scotland's UFO Hotspot is a meticulous compendium of eyewitness accounts, official responses, theories and the persistent mystery that has long hovered – sometimes literally – over the region.
UFO investigator Malcolm Robinson has spent years researching the unexplained
And crucially, says Halliday, it peels back the curtain on sightings that stretch far earlier than the widely reported explosion of activity in the 1990s.
'I was surprised myself,' he says about the sheer number of strange incidents stretching back years before the 1990s when the area came to be regarded as a UFO hotspot.
'I had been involved with the sightings in the 1990s, but I hadn't realised there were so many earlier accounts.
'It suggests there's been something happening in this area for much longer than we thought.'
Among the testimonies is the young woman who was stopped in her tracks by a glowing red light hovering above a house in Denny, not far from Gardrum Moss and just a few miles from Bonnybridge.
Squinting a little, she realised the light was emanating from an egg-shaped object, perched at an angle and with a glowing white band of light around its centre.
These days she might have reached for her phone to capture what she was seeing, to share across social media and watch her video go viral.
But this was October 1980, and all she could do was stare as it lifted straight up into the still dark sky and, in a sudden burst of speed, disappear.
A new book explores the mystery of Bonnybridge UFO sightings (Image: Getty)
Should she mention it to anyone? Would they even believe her?
Then there was Janet Middleton from the village of Laurieston on the fringes of Falkirk, who, in 1983, glanced up while walking her dog and saw what she later described as a 'huge starship', with six windows and a metallic enamel sheen, gently descending over the hills before fading away.
More sightings followed. From glowing orbs to dazzling lights to shimmering metallic craft, the phenomenon extended beyond one-off occurrences into a patchwork of strange and consistent events spanning several decades.
The new book now suggests patterns of sightings across the area long before the international spotlight turned on the town in the 1990s.
What makes many sightings stand out says Halliday, is they come from 'ordinary' men and women who had no reason to make anything up.
'A lot of witnesses have nothing to gain and everything to lose,' he points out.
'We have had a police officer, people in professional jobs… they don't want to be branded 'loonies'.
'Folk speak out knowing they are at risk of being ridiculed, yet they feel they have to talk about their experiences.'
The book comes in the wake of rising speculation over UFOs following a NASA panel set up in 2023 to explore unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) which confirmed some defied explanation.
US President Donald Trump has also indicated previously locked Pentagon files relating to UFO activity could be released.
The new book explores in detail dozens of sightings, among them a spate of early 1990s incidents which led to Bonnybridge becoming Scotland's UFO hotspot leading to film crews descending from as far as Japan, and a host of documentaries, articles and theories.
Read more by Sandra Dick:
Among the most intriguing was the incident on a March evening in 1992, when Isabelle Sloggett strolled on a quiet back road between Hallglen and Bonnybridge with her daughter Carole and son Steven.
Their eyes were drawn to a peculiar circle of blue light in the sky which swooped to the ground and landed first in a nearby field, and then moved on to the road around 60 feet behind them.
Bonnybridge Councillor Billy Buchanan led calls for UFO investigations (Image: Gordon Terris)
A fence began to rattle and shake, there was a strange whirring sound – likened to a door opening – and then, according to the book's account, a 'howl'.
As the family fled at a furious pace down the road, a blinding intense light shone out at them through a range of trees.
Within a few weeks, other locals came forward to tell of seeing bluish lights in the area, balls of light and odd objects.
They included pals Steven Wilson and David Gillespie, both in their early twenties at the time, who were driving on a quiet road close to their home in Maddiston – a few miles south of Bonnybridge.
It was the early hours of an August morning in 1992, and their eyes locked on a strange object in the sky.
'The object was oval in shape, red in colour, and was sharply defined,' says Robinson.
'They estimated that they observed this object for roughly one and a half minutes. No sound at all could be heard coming from the object.'
Witnesses ranged from pensioners living in Falkirk's high rise flats who, used to seeing passing planes, reported odd colours and lights in the sky, to 12-year-old schoolboy, Craig Morrison, who reported watching red lights form patterns above his home in Larbert, around three miles east of Bonnybridge.
'As he was walking down the street, he suddenly heard a tremendous 'whooshing' sound come from above him in the sky," says Robinson.
"Looking up, he observed three red lights in a rectangular pattern with a curved structure below them which appeared to be hovering above some nearby rooftops.
"Suddenly, the object flew off and was eventually lost to view.'
Paranormal and UFO investigator Ron Halliday, co-author of a new book exploring the Bonnybridge UFO sightings
But perhaps the most significant sighting involved a local businessman, James Walker, as he drove on a country road between Falkirk and Bonnybridge.
Just ahead of him, hovering above the road, was a glowing star shaped object.
Halting for a better look, he watched the lights form the shape of a triangle. This, he later told his friend, local councillor Billy Buchanan, he was sure wasn't due to an obvious source such as an aircraft.
The strange incidents would be among many: it's been suggested there have been as many as 300 sightings.
From being a quiet town with an industrial heritage of brickmaking, sawmills and foundries tied to its proximity to the Forth and Clyde Canal, cut through by the Antonine Wall and with the remnants of Rough Castle Fort on its fringes, Bonnybridge became a byword for odd activity.
But why Bonnybridge?
'We've always had hotspots that seem to flare up,' says Halliday. 'Bonnybridge in the nineties was like that – a sudden burst of reports, more than anywhere else in Scotland.
'But these older cases suggest there was always something simmering below the surface.'
The book pinpoints the role of the local councillor at the time, Billy Buchanan, who found himself inundated with UFO reports.
Read more by Sandra Dick:
Though sceptical, he became the town's most unexpected UFO advocate – not because he chased little green men, stresses the new book, but because, as he put it, he'd been elected to serve his constituents, and they were demanding answers.
Risking ridicule, he called for the Ministry of Defence to look into the sightings and penned letters to Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair.
He became known as the 'UFO Councillor' and while some locals cringed and scoffed, he'd later go on to receive a public apology from Nick Pope, a former civil servant who once investigated UFOs for the Ministry of Defence at the time, for dismissing claims of 'close encounters' around the village.
The book also captures the public's shift in attitude as more people came forward, igniting a growing willingness to share strange sightings that might otherwise never have been mentioned.
Emboldened, people who might have kept their sightings to themselves, spoke out.
'There's still stigma,' adds Robinson. 'For every five people who see something, only one might speak up.
'But in Bonnybridge, it reached a point where people couldn't stay quiet.'
Some sightings were particularly vivid.
There was the man driving with his sons near Denny when a black, doorless craft hovered beside their car, emitting a tingling, electric sensation through their bodies.
And another motorist near Castlecary Viaduct who watched two triangular craft, point-to-point, floating above the road before vanishing into the night.
'These weren't just lights in the distance,' Robinson adds. 'Some were structured objects, seen at low altitude, close to witnesses.
'Not planes, not helicopters – and not explainable by conventional means.'
Bonnybridge High Street (Image: Robert Murray, Geograph, Creative Commons)
And while there have been other Scottish UFO hotspots – Dumfriesshire in the '70s, East Kilbride, Aberdeen in the '50s - Bonnybridge stands out not just for the number of sightings, but their intensity, consistency, and proximity.
So, what was going on?
The authors stress up to 95 percent of sightings can be put down to misidentified aircraft, satellites or natural phenomena.
A small number, perhaps, are black-budget military tech.
But it's the remainder – the inexplicable 1% – that they argue continue to defy analysis.
UFO investigator Malcolm Robinson at Dechmont Law, near Livingston, scene of another UFO mystery (Image: Malcolm Robinson)
And in Bonnybridge, for a febrile spell in the 1990s, that one percent felt unusually concentrated.
'Why Bonnybridge?' Halliday muses. 'Is it a window area? Are we glimpsing into another dimension, another universe?'
It's a mystery within a mystery, he adds.
'There have been so many reports, photos and videos.
'People know a bit about the sky, they know what a plane looks like, they realise Mars is visible at certain times of the year, and Venus.
'There's something going on, and we can't just dismiss it.'
