THE REAL MACKAY: Sinister aspect to unexplained lights seen over Highland skies
The Real MacKay, by Dan MacKay
It was one of those dark November evenings and I was returning home over the Ord when a spectacular light display caught my eye. I’d never seen the likes of it before, nor had either of the two passengers with me.
It was as if a giant sparkler was exploding all across the night sky. Amazing, dazzling lights which, we assumed, must be some sort of atmospheric phenomena. A version of the northern lights…
It was quite a display and continued as we journeyed north. All this, I should point out, was almost exactly 30 years ago, back in 1994. The memory of it has not diminished, in any way.
But what we assumed was a natural wonder soon began to develop a rather sinister dimension.
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Those amazing lights were lining up over the Moray Firth, behind the Beatrice oil rig, and then, one by one, would shoot across the sea at incredible speeds, before darting about in very bizarre trajectories. Not smooth or curving sweeps but impossibly strange – mind-blowing – angular leaps!
It seemed unimaginable that any conventional aircraft or helicopters could manoeuvre in such a way.
We pulled in at the Castlehill petrol station – long since closed – and asked the owner to come out and confirm what we were seeing. Which he duly did. We all looked on, a bit bewildered, as the bamboozling night display passed off in utter silence.
Once home I phoned the air traffic control tower at Wick airport to ask what was happening. They knew nothing about it. Then a knock at the door. A police constable had come to take a statement of my sightings…
That week’s Groat reported a series of unexplained sightings from all over the county but no one seemed to take it seriously.
A few weeks later a letter, dated November 24, 1994, arrived from Mr R B Horsley, Secretariat (Air Staff) 2a, Room 8245 at the Ministry of Defence at Whitehall confirming they were “satisfied that no threat to the UK’s air defence had occurred”.
A new term, “unexplained aerial phenomena”, had replaced the more dramatic use associated with the phrase UFOs.
But we know what we saw! By Clyth, for example, we could see the flashing lights illuminating the fuselages of those unidentified flying objects.
Whilst across the world there have been too many legitimate sightings – from military and commercial pilots – that cannot be easily dismissed.
A latest NASA report says “more science and less stigma is needed” to understand what is going on. A US intelligence report notes 143 UFO sightings since 2004. A whistleblower, speaking under oath at Capitol Hill, claimed the US was concealing a “multi decade” crash of a UFO and its retrieval programme.
I’m still trying to make sense of what we saw that night. It remains beyond any rational explanation to me. It beggars the question: is there anybody out there?
