What happened
Robert Taylor, a forester for the Livingston Development Corporation, parked his pickup near the M8 on the morning of 9 November 1979 and walked up a forest track on Dechmont Law with his red setter. Rounding a corner into a clearing, he said, he found a large dome-shaped object, roughly 20 feet across, hovering just above the ground. It looked dark, metallic and rough like sandpaper, with a rim set with small propellers. Two smaller spheres, like old sea mines, dropped out and rolled toward him, grabbed his legs and began dragging him toward the craft. He smelled something acrid, like burning brakes, and blacked out. When he came to, the objects were gone and he could barely walk or speak. Unable to start his truck, he made his way home on foot, muddy, his trousers torn and his chin and thighs grazed. His wife called a doctor and the police, who treated the episode as an assault and found strange marks in the clearing.
The official explanation
Skeptic Steuart Campbell, who visited the site with police, noted that a water authority had laid a cable duct nearby and suggested stacked pipes or equipment could have made the ground marks. Physician Patricia Hannaford, advising him, proposed that Taylor suffered a temporal-lobe epileptic episode, consistent with his history of meningitis, the strong smell no one else detected, headache, leg weakness and unconsciousness; physicist Steve Donnelly agreed. Campbell suggested the seizure might have been triggered by a mirage of Venus, and a 2013 local report suggested a mini-stroke and a saucer-shaped water tower nearby.
The anomalous case
Taylor's story is unusual because police, not ufologists, were first on the scene and logged it as a crime. Officers accompanied him back to the clearing and found two parallel 'ladder-shaped' tracks where he said the dome had been, and a series of small holes where he said the spheres had rolled; West Lothian Council's information sheet says forensic examination of his torn trousers was consistent with a sharp upward pull, and that no other tracks led into or out of the clearing. His injuries were real and treated by a doctor the same day. Those who knew him described an honest, unassuming man, and he never sought money or fame, sticking to his account until his death in 2007. Ufologist Malcolm Robinson has called it possibly one of the few genuine close encounters.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Dechmont Law UFO information sheet report, westlothian.gov.uk
Sources
- Robert Taylor incident Wikipedia
- The Livingston Incident Undiscovered Scotland
- Dechmont Law UFO (Case File Number 1013) West Lothian Council
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.