Somewhere in the Skies - Scotland's Most Famous UFO Encounter (w/ Zelia Edgar)

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

In November of 1979, forestry worker Bob Taylor went with his dog to an area known as Dechmont Law. What ensued became Scotland's most famous - or infamous - UFO sighting, a sighting which would ultimately be investigated by the police. Subscribe to Zelia's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JustAnotherTinFoilHat Please take a moment to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple. Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://www.cameo.com/ryansprague51?utm_campaign=profile_share Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Substack: https://ryansprague.substack.com/ All Socials and Books: https://linktr.ee/somewhereskiespod Email: [e-mail] SpectreVision Radio: https://www.spectrevision.com/podcasts Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Closing Song by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2026 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. #Scotland #Scottish #Storytelling #UFOs #UFO #UAP #CloseEncounter #Paranormal #Unexplained #TrueCrime Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You live your whole life and then in one second you learn what it's like for primal terror to swallow you. Mind and body. He was standing in the hallway, lit only on his left side by the bulb. Just as he appeared in the photograph I'd found, he was very small, much shorter than his brother, my father, Eric. The family had said he'd always been boy-faced and a bit skinny, now standing there. He looked old and sick as well, but he looked angry too. Not for a moment that I think he was alive, and some terrible mistake had been made. I knew instinctively that he was not really there,

that I was looking at Herman in the depleted physical state he had died in. He was wrong, he said again, his whole body trembling slightly. He jabbed his finger toward me almost in tears. I could have been a chemist. I had the grades. I think I tried to speak then, but it was stable. Uncle Herman kept his finger pointed in a threatening way, as if it were up to me to change the past.

He turned with creaky slowness and took a couple of steps deeper into the hallway, toward the kitchen, leaving all light behind him, becoming a silhouette. He turned back just before he reached the third. threshold of the other room. His face was a black blur, but his voice was still clear. There's a fourth body, you know. He said voice hoarse. Shovel's still in the shed. Knife Point Horror. Tales of supernatural suspense written, produced and narrated by Sorin Narnia. Now transmitting

from Spectrevision Radio, anywhere you hear podcast. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank. The man stumbled into his home, disheveled and clothing torn. He mumbled something about being attacked, and his wife rushed to call the police, but he stopped her. He said he had not been attacked by people, but by, quote, some spaceship thing. Welcome to just another tinfoil hat with your host, Zilia Edgar. Join Zilia as she walks us through some of the most bizarre UFO cases and incidents of high strangeness.

Well, good evening to my fellow tinfoil hats. I am just another tinfoil hat. Welcome to my show. Today, we will be discussing the fascinating case of the Declan Law incident, perhaps better known as Scotland's most infamous UFO encounter. Now, I'm really excited today for one thing. I don't believe I've ever done a Scottish case on this channel, which is bonkers to me. and two, I actually have Scottish ancestry, so I'm very doubly excited about this one. I'm wearing my McLean tartan. Yeah, so let's get to it. November 9, 1979, at around 1030 in the morning, former war hero and forestry worker, 61-year-old Bob Taylor parked his truck at the bottom of Dechmont Law,

a tall hill near Livingston, West Lodian, Scotland. It was a damp morning, and he and his red setter, Laura, were on their way to walk a path that wound through some new planted trees, checking for stray livestock, when suddenly their idyllic walk would come to an abrupt stop. About a quarter of a mile away from his truck, Taylor saw what he described as a, quote, spinning top object. He said that it was a very dark gray, flying dome about 20 feet in diameter and 30 feet high, hovering in the air above a clearing. He said that it appeared to be made out of a dark metallic substance with a sand papery texture. He said it had an exterior rim or collar with protruding arms in each of the air.

his arms had a propeller. Perhaps strangest of all, he claimed that as he watched the object, it would appear solid and then suddenly transparent to the point that he said he could actually see the trees beyond it. Now Bob claimed that he was transfixed or mesmerized by the object in front of him. So he approached it, and as he approached the weird object, two three foot in diameter spheres dropped out of the object. He said that they looked like old sea mines with protruding spikes and had two longer spikes

that they used to kind of walk. Now, he referred to them as creatures or robots and said that when they walked over the damp ground, their, I guess you could say, feet actually made kind of suction-type noises. Now, as Laura the setter was just going absolutely berserk, barking madly, the two things kind of roll walked towards Bob and attached themselves to the sides of his pant legs. He said that he felt himself being grabbed by the side of his legs

and dragged forwards towards the large object. Suddenly, he claimed that there was an acrid burning, smell like burning car brakes, and he passed out. When Bob finally came to, it was about 20 minutes later, and he had a terrible headache, a sore throat, and a bad taste in his mouth. But thankfully, the object was gone, and also thankfully, his faithful dog Laura was by his side, probably barking hysterically. He tried talking to her, but found that he had lost his voice. So he tried to then stand up to walk over to his truck, however, his legs had no strength. So he then crawled back to his truck, tried to use the radio, and he couldn't. Again, no voice. So he just started up the vehicle

and promptly ran it off the road into a ditch, so he decided just to kind of walk or stumble home. Now, when he arrived home, his wife, Mary, thought that he had been attacked. In addition to his just absolutely disheveled and disoriented state, his heavy work pants had been torn. So she went to call the police, but Bob told her instead, no, don't call the cops. Call my boss, Mr. Drummond, head of the forestry department because, yeah, he had been attacked, he said, but not by your average human criminals, but by, quote, a spaceship. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work.

Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus. Let's go. Get ready for a new case. We're going to crack this case and prove our decoranist partners of all time.

New friends. You are Gary Destinic. And your last name? The Snake. Dream team. Hit new habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home.

You're clearly. We're going to add. Zootopia 2. Now available on Disney Plus rated PG. So Mr. Drummond came to the Taylor Home and said that at first, he was skeptical of Bob's claims. I mean, if we're being completely honest here, if any of your coworkers or employees called you up and said, hey, you know, kind of near one of our job sites, I was attacked by a spaceship thing. I think a lot of people would probably, probably at first think it was some sort of joke. So he at first was very skeptical of Bob's claims, but Bob was so insistent that they go to the area

that Drummond finally assented. So the two men went to Dechmont Law, where they found two parallel ladder marks. Drummond is quoted as saying, it looked as though a bulldozer had been set down on the spot with no tracks leading to or from and then taken back. Then there were also these triangular hoof marks, these smaller, strange, cone-shaped holes in the ground. Now, here is the very intriguing part of this case, and what has skyrocketed into the position as Scotland's most infamous UFO case. Eventually, Taylor did go to the police, and because it appeared that he'd been attacked, they had to investigate the case as an assault. Detective Constable Ian Warwick was the main investigator and interviewed Bob Taylor three times. He came away from

each of these interviews, stating that Mr. Taylor certainly believed in what he claimed. He was no hoaxter or crackpot looking for attention. Although he did think that a sudden epileptic seizure may explain the appearance of an alien spaceship and strange robotic beings, he fell into the same problem that faces many investigators trying to pin an anomalous experience into the purely subjective category, and that is the trace evidence. After the pants were analyzed, it was the forensic team's opinion that they had been damaged by some. something hooking onto them and lifting them up with Mr. Taylor inside of them. In addition to this, the ground impressions, remember it was a wet, soggy day out, did not have

any other footprints or traces around them. To reiterate what Mr. Drummond said, Detective Constable Warwick said it was as though a heavy machine was just set down and picked up again. Now, this case is truly a standout, and again, I have to say, I love Scotland. It's very high my list of destinations, especially given the folklore of that region. It's just a great interest to me. And this case occurred in what has now been called the Falkirk Triangle, an area of Scotland known for an increased number of UFO sightings. What really stands out to me about this case is how much it is like so many other narratives that we've seen of humanoids grabbing or abducting people. It's just that in this case it wasn't little like, you know, furry gnome-like beings

or the floating mitten-fisted pascagula entities. It was these two metallic things. that looked like sea mines. It's very relevant to me that the same patterns seem to be presented over and over again, regardless of appearance of the anomaly, whether organic or robotic, humanoid or not, these presences, perhaps as they can best be framed, perform the same maneuvers over and over again. Now, in this case in particular, I really have to wonder if the appearance of the sea mines had something to do with Taylor's prior military service, kind of an image picked out of the subconscious to clothe the anomaly. Now, interestingly enough, we have two very strong features of a typical fairy encounter in this case, both a hill and a clearing. The clearing

being a very classic setting for meetings between humans and denizens of the other world, and hills being very well associated with the fairy faith. Indeed, the concept of fairies living inside of hills, or perhaps fairyland existing inside of hills, is a strong aspect of the Scottish fairy law in particular. Now, perhaps even more interesting than that is that the many slopes of the area known as Dechmont Law, with the actual Dechmont Law or hill being one of the most prevalent hills in the area, show signs of ancient earthworks from both the bronze and iron ages, lending some credibility to the notion that an ancient fort was once located there. Now, sites of archaeological importance seem to be well associated with paranormal phenomena,

and especially earthworks. Here in the U.S. Midwest, we have an abundance of effigy mounds, which multiple researchers, John Keel and Linda Godfrey included, have tied to sightings of UFO's hauntings or strange beasts. Of course, the fairy faith makes the tie between the settlements of the good folk in ancient sites such as forts or barrows, a conflation as well of the fairies with the dead, placing fairyland and the land of the dead in the same other world. What intrigues me the most is that this embodies the very human-centric concept of anomalous phenomena.

Our oldest places seem to be the places where such entities are, perhaps showing that us and the other are connected at a deeper level than such strange appearances would suggest. Well, if you enjoyed this episode on the Declunt Law UFO, please like, and if you're new to this field of crop circles, go ahead and subscribe to see what weirdness the future may have in store. Till then, you can keep up with me on my free blog at patreon.com slash just another tinfoil hat. And be sure to check out somewhere in the skies, not only for the very best in anomalous listening, but also that is the home every other Friday of the audio versions of Just Another Tinfoil hat. For today, I am Zelia Edgar, signing on. This has been just another tinfoil hat with Zilia Edgar. Be sure to rate and review wherever you get your podcasts.

For full video versions of these episodes, be sure to subscribe to Just Another Tinfoil Hat on YouTube. Thank you for listening. I think ideas come from everywhere. On one hand, I believe our subjective experiences present ideas to us through circumstance and everyday happenstance. Sometimes answers are provided to questions that we didn't even know to ask.

I think ideas come from our heart, that they are born out of our feelings. I also think ideas float above us in the ether and that in extreme moments or instances of heightened sensitivity, we are capable of accessing them from some sort of vast, shared cosmic consciousness stream. Sometimes I suspect ideas are passed down from unseen higher intelligences, downloaded like Philip K. Dick's gleaming pink light. But I also think some of the most fascinating and transformative ideas come from what Dick called the trash stratum, from lowbrow pop culture like comic books, paperbacks, monster movies, and the like.

I think the universe is itself an idea. one that we shape.