The Kincardine Mother-and-Daughter Sighting

In 1992, reports of strange lights clustered around Bonnybridge and the surrounding district. The area earned a nickname. The Falkirk Triangle.

That November, Central 103.1 FM, the local radio station, began broadcasting reports of recent possible UFO sightings in the Falkirk area. The Falkirk Herald was covering the same ground. In the middle of it all, one short report appeared.

A mother and her daughter were travelling to Kincardine. They had a sighting.

That is the whole of the surviving account. The destination was almost certainly Kincardine-on-Forth, on the north shore of the Forth, across the Kincardine Bridge from the Falkirk district. Where they set out from, which road they took, and the hour of the day are not recorded in any source that can be read today. Nor is what they saw, its shape, its lights, its movement or how long it stayed. All of it is missing.

The story was reported in the Falkirk Herald on 12 November 1992, on page 11. Again on 19 November, on page 21. And once more on 10 December. Three mentions in about a month. Yet those pages are not freely available online, and no later book, website or programme found so far has repeated the story or named the witnesses.

No police report, Ministry of Defence file or Civil Aviation Authority record mentions the case in any source reached. No photographs, film, radar data or physical traces are known.

It would be easy to blur this story into another. In March 1992, Isabella Sloggett and her daughter Carol were walking between Hallglen and Bonnybridge. They reported a blue light over the road, then a landing and an opening door. A different month, and on foot, not travelling to Kincardine. Unless the Herald pages show otherwise, the two cases stand apart.

The Kincardine name carries its own echo. On 12 November 1991, Phil Trevis and Paul Penman were photographing the BP plant from Polmont Reservoir. They saw "two small, dimly flashing lights" by the Kincardine Bridge pylons. A year earlier, with different witnesses, but tied to the same bridge.

No explanation has been offered for this report. For the wider wave, sceptics have pointed to flaring at the Grangemouth refinery and petrochemical complex, to aircraft, and to the publicity spiral itself. One review calls the often quoted figure of 300 sightings a year overstated. Whether any of that applies here cannot be judged without knowing what the mother and daughter described.

Malcolm Robinson's group, Strange Phenomena Investigations, checked Falkirk-area reports from the period with police, airports, met stations and the MoD. His UFO Case Files of Scotland records the wave and the radio coverage that fuelled it. The Kincardine sighting itself remains a single line. The answers are most likely sitting in three pages of the Falkirk Herald, still waiting to be read.