The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 26

The Guardian Tuesday October 31 1995 2 Something weird is going on in Bonnybridge: 2,000 UFO sightings in three years, from sinister cigar shapes and strange dunces' caps to classic flying saucers. Many are mistakes, but some 250 remain unexplained. John Mullin asks, is there anything up there? Flying saucer photographed over Scotland last year by Ian MacPherson Keep watching the skies Big dark, clear night, a feature common to the sightings. "I was driving under the viaduct, and I saw the lights to the right. It was an eliptical shape, with bright lights around the edge.

We have a big sun roof we drive a SpaceCruiser and we opened it up. We went under the viaduct, and there was an identical craft on the other side. They were absolutely silent. From underneath, they were triangular. "I had never given UFOs any thought at all.

We get planes from Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cumbernauld airports over here sometimes. I know what helicopters are like. I've seen meteors and satellites and this was nothing like that. I'm not a liar or imagining things. We are level-headed, educated, and we don't jump to conclusions.

We can only say what we saw." Come in Bill and Mabel Bestall. They have three times watched a Catherine Wheel-like craft above Bonnybridge. Mr Bestall, 73, says: "I couldn't even watch ET before. I was never interested in outer space. But it was amazing.

It moved at some speed. We spend a lot of time looking out for it now." More astounding is the tale of friends Gary Wood and Colin Wright. It is like something out of The X-Files, and is to be featured on a BBC documentary next month. They were driving in the countryside to deliver a satellite dish late at night. As they turned a corner, there in front of them was a black flying saucer of the classic shape.

wide, and black. Wood, 32, says: "I put the loot down on the throttle. as we were going underneath it, a shimmering curtain fell and wo went into total blackness. I couldn't see anything, then there was like a shunt on the back of the car. and then I'm on the road again.

I put the foot down on the gas. I must have been doing about 80, 90 miles an hour up the road." But what should have been a journey of 30 minutes took them two hours longer than that. To discover what happened in the missing period, they have undergone regressive hypnosis. Helen Walters, die hypnotherapist, believes they may indeed have been abducted. Wood, when under, says the aliens he met when they were taken into the craft were like skeletons, with long bodies and long arms.

Each had a large head, with two black eyes. They were grey and their ribs seemed bruised. They looked as if they had had a hard time. His friends call him Starman now. THERE is more to the Bonnybridge phenomenon: tales of folk quitting their houses because of ghostly presences.

Jackie Hamilton, 21, did a bunk with her young son after she saw a white coffin in the child's bedroom, the culminataion of months of unusual apparitions. "I thought I could stay, but it just gets worse. I'm petrified." Perhaps strangest of all, the incidence of twins in the area has, according to one siu-vey, doubled, and is twice the national average. Spooky. It is, then, hardly suprising talk of the paranormal dominates in Bonnybridge, where even the boundless electricity pylons begin to look like martians marching across rolling hills.

One bloke has even written a song about it all. At the bus-stop, a mother struggling with four kids is waiting for a number (52 to take her four miles into Falkirk, equidistant from Glasgow and Edinburgh. She observes: "There's more chance of seeing a spaceship here than there is of that bloody bus." Buchanan has organised three public meetings. More than 900 turned up at the latest, earlier this month. Hundreds more were unable IT ALL BEGAN, as strange stories sometimes do, on a dreich winter's night three years ago.

Billy Buchanan, who took his footballing skills around the globe in his younger days, was sitting watching the telly, no doubt still feeling pretty chuffed. As an independent, he had taken on the Labour candidate, and knocked him out of sight in the district council elections. There came a late night knock at the door of his old lock-keeper's cottage on the Forth and Clyde Canal. He found on his doorstep the distraught figure of George Wilson, a lifelong friend. His story amazed Buchanan.

But that was back before he had heard hundreds more similar tales from people he grew up with in Stirlingshire, and in the long lost days when tiny Bonnybridge was unremarkable rather than, as some proclaim it, UFO capital of the world. Buchanan, 47, says: "I asked George in and we had a cup of tea. He seemed flustered. He is a self-employed carpenter, and he told me he had been working late in Falkirk, and had come back using the back-roads. He said he had seen something, a UFO, hovering above the road, and had watched it for 10 minutes, and then it had just shot off.

1 didn't know what to think, but, to make him feel better, I suggested putting a note in the local paper, to sec if anyone else had seen anything unusual." The floodgates opened. Buchanan says up to 2,000 townspeople have reported sightings of the unidentified to him after that newspaper advertisement: in a community of just 5,500. With every claimed sighting, Malcolm Robinson, 38, a one-time UFO sceptic: but now a fastidious investigator, rings around the Ministry of Defence, the airports, and the meteorological office. Ho discovers rational explanations for maybe 90 per cent of' sightings, but believes the number of weird sights in the so-called Bonnybridge Triangle which cannot otherwise be rationalised stands at 250 in three years. The UFOs come in a variety of shapes: there is the dunce's cap, spotted by Ray and Cathy Procek; the Toblerone bar, seen by Alan Swan; the cigar, watched in awe by Mark Wilson; and, inevitably, the flying saucer, seen by just about everyone.

They all talk of lights: sometimes with red, orange or green variations; but always white dominated. And, without exception, blindingly bright. Take the case of Wilson, 26, who runs a car valeting business. He was driving home with his girlfriend and two friends from a Christmas Day party when he became aware of something hovering above his Escort. It stuck to the car as he accelerated up to 90mph in an effort to shake it off.

It switched from side to side, then shot off. In his panic he took a wrong turning olf the motorway, and found the craft hovering ahead, above the road. He turned around and sped away. There it was, the cigar shape in front of them again. Then it shot up into the sky.

"It was as if they were trying to tell how many people were inside. It was early in the morning, and there was nothing else on the road. I was stone cold sober. My mate in the back was drunk. He kept giving it the Angers.

"We go out looking for them now. We were stopped by the police once, when there were eight of us in a van. One of them asked us what we were doing, so I said: 'Looking for UFOs'. It didn't go down well." Then there are Ray and Cathay Procek, nipping through to Cumbernauld to visit friends two years back. Mrs Procek, -11, a school dinner lady, is unshakeable.

It was a Star gazer Malcolm Robinson, once a sceptic, now an investigator of strange sights photograph: murdo macleod.