Over the last few months, I’ve been working with Falkirk Libraries, and with Bonnybridge Library in particular. Bonnybridge was the centre of a 1990s/2000s UFO wave that was widely publicised in the media. On 17 October, I had the pleasure of delivering an evening talk on this topic to an audience at Bonnybridge Library. Rather than get into the question of what really was seen in the skies above Bonnybridge, I focussed on a more down-to-earth topic: attempts at the time to make Bonnybridge a centre for UFO tourism.
There was definitely some pay off to local community from these efforts, including organized trips and UFO conferences in the local area. But there was also a lot of speculative activity centred on proposed new developments in or near the town. The modest version of this plan imagined a Bonnybridge Encounter Centre with an observatory, archive and public information desk — on the scale perhaps of the UFO museum in Roswell, New Mexico. The grander vision was a UFO theme park bringing together a whole range of leisure activities (indoor golf, casinos, amusement complexes) hosted within flying saucer shaped buildings.
The local visionaries behind this scheme were clearly inspired by models of tourist regeneration in other de-industrialised locales, with the most famous example being the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which has been widely credited with the economic regeneration of this Basque city.
The plans for Bonnybridge, of course, never came to fruition, and in my talk I explored some of the difficulties with paranormal UFO tourism, as evidenced by a 1995 story from The Courier of a couple visiting Bonnybridge who enter the Tourist Information Centre to ask, ‘When is the best night to see the UFOs over Bonnybridge? Can we see them next Wednesday?’. Not only are UFOs a notoriously unreliable paranormal experience, there was also a competing, and ultimately successful vision of local tourism based on leisure activities around canals, which materialised in the highly successful and accessible visitor attraction of the Kelpies at Helix Park, just off the M9.
More recently, we’ve put up display stands at Falkirk and Bonnybridge Libraries promoting this work on the ‘Bonnybridge Triangle’, and asking for local views via an online survey (with paper version for those who prefer it). We’ll soon begin work on updating and expanding the library’s large collection of press clippings from the height of the Triangle period — which we’ll later deposit in the library itself.
