Selection makes a big difference to our cultural memory of Scottish UFOs. The Dechmont Woods incident has been told and retold in many different contexts, and has been physically memorialised at the original site.
But hardly anyone recalls a big splash from 10 November 1957, when the Sunday Mail‘s front page boomed: ‘Screaming women chased by “THING” from sky”. This was a time of great Cold War anxiety, little more than a month after the successful Sputnik lunch by the Soviet Union.
A group of tattie-howkers (potato-pickers) were returning from Musselburgh to Edinburgh on Friday 8 November when they were pursued by a glowing, humming ‘FLYING SAUCER’ which seemed to be tailing their lorry at a distance of less than 60 feet. One woman even tried to leap off the back of lorry, where the tattie-howkers were sitting, before being pulled back by another of the occupants.
An explanation was quickly proposed for the ‘THING’ that had terrified the tattie-howkers. A weather balloon had been launched from RAF Leuchars that day, and meteorologists estimated it would have been above Edinburgh at around 5.30pm. The explanation doesn’t seem to have been accepted by some of the eyewitnesses. But it made this sighting much more explicable, which likely explains why it has been so poorly remembered in practitioner histories of Scottish UFOs. These histories present a selective tradition that prefers mysteries. They can overlook a story like this one, which had clearly had enormous national coverage at the time, and which shows something of the Cold War mood of the period — whatever the tattie howkers saw in the sky, they knew to be terrified of it.