Scotland: Aliens' Official Favorite Destination

scubacuda writes: "This Reuters article says that Scotland has the highest concentration of UFO sightings--300 per year, the most per square kilometer and per head of population of anywhere in the world. That means 0.004 UFOs for every square kilometer of Scotland -- a rate four times as high as in France or Italy, earth's other UFO hotspots. (In comparison, only 2,000 UFOs are spotted every year in the United States represent, making just 0.0002 sightings per square kilometer. Bonnybridge--30 miles west of Edinburgh--seems to be the Scotland equivalent of Roswell, New Mexico). UFO nuts explain it in terms of aliens being attracted to remote areas. But can anyone say *autosuggestion*?"

Comments

Scotland and the uncanny

[Creosote]

Remember, Scotland invented the word "uncanny", and in older Scots it meant not only weird but dangerous. UFO just stands for Uncanny Ferlies, Och!

All I know is that I had a UFO experience during my one and only visit to Scotland. I was in Glasgow for a meeting, and rented a car for the one free day I had, to drive as far into the western Highlands as I could go. I was driving through Glen Coe, which is about as wild and romantic a place as it gets (on both aesthetic and historic grounds), when WHOOSH something flew past me at incredible speed, and not too high up; it seemed to be three pitch-black fighter planes. But I couldn't be sure I hadn't just imagined it. What would jet fighters be doing swooping through idyllic Glen Coe as if it were part of a Star Wars set?

As it happened, I shared a compartment on the train back to London with a guy in the RAF, and he told me that sure enough, the glens up there were used a lot for low-level military flight training. (Of course, he could have been an Alien plant trying to convince me that everything was Just Fine.)

But it doesn't take desert flats or Highland glens to produce odd sightings. The most uncanny experience I've ever had was riding a city bus in New Haven late in the afternoon, and casually noticing the sun going down out the window to the east, and then as it penetrated my consciousness what that meant experiencing a couple of seconds of disorientation and pure panic until the reason-seeking part of my brain figured out that I was simply seeing a reflection of the sunset to the west. But if I'd only had that split-second perception of the world reversed, I might for the rest of my days had sworn that I had slipped through a crack into an alternate universe for a moment.