The Muchalls Lights and the Glowing Gowned Figure

Muchalls is a small former fishing village on the North Sea coast of Kincardineshire, now Aberdeenshire. It sits south of Newtonhill and north of Stonehaven, among cliffs, sea stacks and headlands. Muchalls Castle stands a short way inland.

In 1971 one of its boys was Tom Moir. He would grow up to be an electronics engineer with a PhD, at Massey University and then as a professor at Auckland University of Technology. But first, there were the lights.

One evening in 1971, Moir was walking home from the bus stop after his weekly violin lesson. He noticed a red, pulsating light. Another identical one appeared on his left. Then a third.

One of the lights came down until it was just above the ground. Then, in the words of the account, "a brightly glowing creature dressed in a long gown suddenly appeared." He walked towards it. The figure vanished.

Moir went back to the spot with his sister. A red light appeared. "It came towards them and then hovered over their heads. The only detail they could make out was a small ring of lights." Then it moved off over the nearby hills.

It did not end there. The lights "appeared at the same time every night of the week from then on." Moir put it simply: "They'd be there every night of the week, almost like clockwork in the same area." The sightings recurred for many years, until at least 1991, when some aspects were filmed.

In 1988 came a closer look. Another red, pulsating light. Behind it, an object that was "flat-topped, drum-shaped, and had diamond-shaped facets on its circumference." A white-coloured halo appeared, flashed, then disappeared.

The experience changed him. Moir spent about three decades videotaping the lights. "It was me doing the gathering this time instead of someone gathering the information on me." In 2005, aged 44 and living in Auckland, he told the Press and Journal he was "plagued by UFOs" that he believed were monitoring his movements. In New Zealand, he reported no sightings. He later investigated another mystery there, the Auckland Hum.

Ron Halliday told the story in UFO Scotland in 1998, with Moir under the pseudonym "Tom McClintock." Malcolm Robinson called Muchalls a UFO hotspot in 2011, but said reports had died down. Aberdeen Live revisited the encounters in 2022, and Charles Lear gathered the threads in 2023. Years earlier, researcher Ian Taylor had noted that "Lights and objects were regularly seen near Muchalls, Portlethen, Deeside and the area north of Aberdeen."

No official investigation is on record. No hoax has been alleged, and no explanation has been offered. The short Wikipedia entry speaks of "two school children" and "silent craft," but its only source is Moir's own webpage, now offline. A local history page complained that the Muchalls stories were "widely being reported as 'fact', particularly by UFO enthusiasts." The tapes have never surfaced online. Set beside Bonnybridge, Muchalls is the quieter puzzle. A boy, a gowned figure, and lights that kept their appointment.