Dumfries five-officer police sighting, late 1979

1979 was a restless year for Scottish police. On 9 November, the Robert Taylor case at Dechmont Woods, near Livingston, began its rise to become one of the country's best known encounters. Dumfries had a history of its own. On 31 December 1978, numerous witnesses there reported an object that was officially put down to a meteorite, and they disputed it. Then, late in 1979, the town saw something else.

It began with the telephones. The officers were called in after a flood of calls from the public. Five uniformed police officers responded. Sergeant Bill McDavid, 39, drove to within a mile of the thing.

He described a shape similar to that of an airship. It was longer than an aircraft. By his estimate it hung at an altitude of only 500 feet. Five or six white lights shone from six different areas of the craft. Another account calls it a multicoloured flying object.

It did not move. For around 20 minutes the object stayed in one position above Dumfries. Then it vanished over the hill to the west of the town. How fast it left, nobody recorded. Several members of the public also reported seeing the UFO.

The story did not stay inside the station. McDavid and PC James Smith described what they had seen at a press conference. Its date and organiser are now lost. A forum account attributes a line to Smith: "I never believed in UFOs up to now." That quote has not been confirmed against an original source.

The first question was the weather. Checks with the Glasgow Weather Centre proved negative, as they could not explain the configuration of the lights as described by the witnesses. Beyond that, the trail goes cold. No photographs or film are known. No radar is mentioned. No physical traces were found. No Ministry of Defence file from late 1979 has surfaced, and no contemporary newspaper report has been located online.

No one has alleged a hoax. No specific explanation has been published. The witnesses themselves reached for the word airship, and a lit airship or advertising blimp is one untested possibility. A lit aircraft or helicopter is another, as are bright planets or stars low in the sky. None has been checked against flight records.

There is also a puzzle in the records. The PRUFOS Police Database lists a second Dumfries case, at 0135 hours on 30/08/80. A PC Smith and five other uniformed officers, plus several members of the public, observed a cigar shaped UFO with a series of lights over the town. The overlap is striking. It may be the same event, filed under a different date.

The Dumfries sighting survives through print. Nigel Blundell and Roger Boar told it in The World's Greatest UFO Mysteries. Detective Constable Gary Heseltine later catalogued it in the PRUFOS Police Database. Five officers watched one long shape over a Scottish town for twenty minutes, lit in six places. The rest is still waiting to be found.