The Firth of Tay Roadside Creature on the A85 near Perth

In 1965 the road from Perth to Dundee was numbered A85. East of Perth it ran along the east bank of the River Tay, just before the river widens into the Firth of Tay. It was an ordinary stretch of Scottish road. Later investigators found nothing optically unusual about it.

Thursday, 30 September 1965. About 11:30 pm. Maureen Ford, the wife of amateur flyweight boxer David Ford, was driving towards Perth with friends. A few yards from the River Tay, she saw something beside the road. She described it plainly: "a long grey shape. It had no legs but I'm sure I saw long pointed ears."

Roughly 90 minutes later, at about 1:00 am on Friday 1 October, Robert Swankie came along the same road in the opposite direction. He was heading from Perth towards Dundee. His headlights picked out the creature. It was now on the other side of the road. In the dark between the two sightings, it seemed to have crossed.

Swankie gave the fuller account. "The head was more than two feet long. It seemed to have pointed ears." Then the body. "The body, which was about 20 feet long, was humped like a giant caterpillar." It was moving very slowly. It made a noise like someone dragging a heavy weight through the grass. Swankie slowed and wound down his window. A car was close behind him, so he drove on. Later, he reported what he had seen to the police.

The story appeared in the Scottish Daily Express on 5 October 1965. A police spokesman told the paper that car headlights can play tricks when they strike walls and trees in the dark. It is the only official response on record. Both witnesses also gave their testimony on tape, recorded by Miss Russell-Fergusson of Clarach Recordings, Oban. Where those recordings are now is unknown.

F. W. "Ted" Holiday, a member of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau since 1963, brought the case to the attention of cryptozoologists. He was not convinced by the police. An illusion, he argued, would not explain why Swankie saw nothing similar anywhere else on his journey. Nor would it explain the dragging sound.

Karl Shuker took up the story decades later. He wrote that the "trick of the light" idea had since been discounted by cryptozoological investigators. His own reading was bolder. A reclusive sea creature, he suggested, had come up the Firth of Tay and the River Tay and briefly crossed land. He set it beside sea serpents, lake monsters and the horse-eels of Ireland, and floated a surviving zeuglodont, an extinct early whale, with a more flexible spine. No allegation of a hoax has been found.

The case lives on mainly through Shuker, in his 1995 book In Search of Prehistoric Survivors and on his ShukerNature blog. The Paranormal Database lists it as a "Road Crossing Serpent", seen by two independent motorists, a creature that "propelled itself along like a giant caterpillar." It files the sighting under Oban, an apparent indexing error. The newspaper report, the police record and the tapes remain out of reach. Two drivers. Ninety minutes apart. One slow grey shape beside the Tay.