Robert Taylor incident

Robert Taylor incident

Type	Case (close encounter with physical effects)
Also known as	Livingston incident; Dechmont Woods encounter
Date	About 10–10:30 a.m., 9 November 1979
Place	Clearing in Dechmont Woods, below Dechmont Law, Livingston, West Lothian, Scotland (grid ref. NT 035 703)
Witness	Robert "Bob" Taylor (died 2007), forestry foreman, Livingston Development Corporation
Reported objects	A dome about 20 feet (6 m) across; two spiked spheres "like sea mines"
Evidence	Grazes; torn trousers; ladder-shaped tracks and about 40 small holes in the clearing
Police	Recorded as an assault by persons unknown

The Robert Taylor incident, also called the Livingston incident or the Dechmont Woods encounter, is the name given to a reported encounter on 9 November 1979. The forestry worker Robert "Bob" Taylor said that, in a clearing on Dechmont Law near Livingston in West Lothian, Scotland, two small spiked spheres seized him and tried to drag him towards a large hovering dome. He came home dishevelled, with torn trousers and grazes to his chin and thighs, so the police recorded the matter as an assault. The case is popularly described as the only example of a UFO sighting becoming the subject of a criminal investigation.^[1][4]

Everyone who knew Taylor regarded him as honest and level-headed, and he never changed his story before his death in 2007. Many believers consider it among the strongest UFO sightings on record. Skeptics have suggested that the marks were left by stacked pipes, and that Taylor suffered an epileptic attack or a stroke with hallucinations.^[1][2][3][4]

Taylor's account

Taylor, aged 61 by one account, was married with five children and had worked as a forester for 15 years. His employer, the Livingston Development Corporation, was then building Livingston New Town. He lived at 4 Broomyknowe Drive in Livingston Station, now Deans, near Livingston United F.C. On the morning of 9 November 1979 he parked his pickup truck beside a road near the M8 motorway, at a plantation at the foot of Dechmont Law. Part of his job was to check the area for stray cows and sheep. With his red setter, Lara, he walked along a forest path through a newly planted area a little north of the hill.^[1][2][4]

At about 10 a.m., or 10:30 by another account, he rounded a corner into a clearing about 530 yards (480 m) from his truck. There he saw a large round object resting on the ground or hovering just above it. Wikipedia gives its size as about 7 yards (6.4 m) across, and other accounts give 20 feet across and about 12 feet high. He called it a "flying dome" made of "a dark metallic material with a rough texture like sandpaper". Parts of it at times turned semi-transparent, so the trees could be seen through it. Just below halfway down ran a narrow rim like the brim of a hat, set with rotating arms or small propellers. There were dark patches like portholes, and the object made no noise. Taylor and his dog both froze and stared.^[1][2][4]

The spheres

Two smaller spheres, about two feet across, dropped from the bottom of the object, making sucking noises as they hit the wet ground. Taylor likened them to Second World War sea mines, though their spikes were longer, making them about three feet across including the spikes. The spheres rolled and bounced towards him, one to each side, while his dog barked. Taylor said their spikes caught his trousers, "ripping right through to my skin", and they dragged him towards the dome, tearing the cloth up to the pockets. He heard a hissing sound and smelled an acrid, choking odour "like burning brakes". Then he heard a loud swishing sound like a cane swung through the air, and he passed out.^[1][2][4]

After the encounter

When he came to, apparently 15 to 20 minutes later, he was lying face down. He heard something moving very fast in the distance, and the clearing was empty apart from marks on the ground and his dog, running about and barking wildly. He had a headache, aching legs, a sore throat and a bitter taste in his mouth, and for a time he could neither stand nor speak. He crawled to his truck. Most accounts say it would not start; one says he drove off but ended up stuck in a ditch. He then walked more than a mile home, stumbling and falling.^[1][2][3]

Investigation

His wife, Mary, found him muddy and dishevelled, with his clothes and trousers torn. Taylor told her he had been in an accident and assaulted, and that the attackers were not exactly human. She called a doctor, the police and Taylor's boss, Malcolm Drummond, head of the Livingston Development Corporation. Drummond came to the house to hear the story, while Taylor kept saying he had been "gassed". The doctor treated grazes to his chin and thighs and sent him to hospital, but he checked himself out without being examined. He had a headache for hours and a raging thirst for two days, then recovered fully.^[1][2]

The marks in the clearing

Police went to the clearing with Taylor and Drummond. They found ladder-shaped marks where Taylor said the dome had stood. Drummond said the marks seemed to show that something had come down vertically and pressed into the turf. Around them were about forty small, shallow, circular holes that followed the path Taylor described for the mine-like spheres. The police fenced off the area and photographed the tracks. They were puzzled because the marks were confined to one grassy patch, and on the soft ground there was no sign of anything entering or leaving the clearing. None of the corporation's vehicles or the forestry equipment used in the area matched them. The police checked local manufacturers and found no record of helicopter traffic that day or the day before, and searched without success for signs of a mobile crane. Trees would have hidden anything in the clearing from the nearby motorway.^[1][2][3]

A police report quoted by researchers said the marks indicated an object of several tons, but that nothing had been learned to explain them. Detective Sergeant Wark admitted he was highly skeptical when first sent to the scene, but said the holes and tracks puzzled him. He concluded that Taylor "genuinely reported what he saw, or believed that he had seen", and later said the case was still open. One investigator said he did not believe in anything from outer space and thought the marks must have been made by a solid, man-made machine coming straight down, perhaps a secret government device. The police recorded the matter as an assault by persons unknown.^[1][2]

The trousers

Because the case was treated as a suspected assault, Taylor's trousers were sent to the police forensic laboratory in Edinburgh. The scientist Lester Knibb found tears on both sides, consistent with Taylor's account of being grabbed at about waist height. He said the damage could have been caused as Taylor described but would have needed something mechanical, not an electric shock or lightning. The Scottish group SPI (Strange Phenomena Investigations) later obtained the trousers, which were of heavy serge like police uniform trousers, and had them examined again. Its investigator Malcolm Robinson said the tests showed considerable upward force. He accepted this was not conclusive, but felt it added credence to the account. The trousers later went to the archives of the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA).^[2][3]

Ufologists

The story drew wide attention from ufologists, and Taylor became known among enthusiasts for "the only UFO sighting that was subject to a criminal investigation". Robinson spent many hours with Taylor and accepts his story, calling it possibly "one of the few genuine cases of a UFO encounter". He describes Taylor as down-to-earth and regarded by his workmates as reliable and stable. Steuart Campbell, then an investigation co-ordinator for BUFORA, reportedly said after about two and a half years' work that BUFORA had no reason to disbelieve Taylor and that he was the most reliable close-encounter witness the association had had. Campbell later changed his view. Taylor did not seek publicity, gained nothing from it and found it an annoyance, and he later moved to Berrydale Road in Blairgowrie and Rattray.^[1][2][3]

Skeptical explanations

Pipes and marks

Campbell, a former architect and science writer, visited the scene with the police in 1979, convinced that a simple explanation would be found. On a second visit he noticed PVC pipes in a neighbouring field and found that the local water authority had laid a cable duct within 100 metres (330 ft) of the clearing. He concluded that stacks of pipes might have been stored in the clearing and made the marks.^[1][2]

Epilepsy and a mirage

Patricia Hannaford, a qualified physician and founder of the Edinburgh University UFO Research Society, advised Campbell on the medical side. She suggested that Taylor's collapse was an isolated attack of temporal lobe epilepsy and that the objects were hallucinations. She pointed to his earlier meningitis, the strong smell that nobody else detected, his headache, dry throat, paralysed legs and period of unconsciousness. Steve Donnelly, a physicist and editor of The Skeptic, also attributed the incident to an epileptic attack.^[1]

Campbell went further, proposing that the attack was triggered by an astronomical mirage. Using a planetarium program he found that Venus and Mercury were low on the horizon that morning. He argued that Taylor saw a mirage of Venus, with the spheres as mirages of Mercury, caused by a layer of warm air lying over cold air. In 1994 he published a book claiming this mirage theory explained 90% of UFO sightings. Philip Mantle, BUFORA's director of investigations, said the theory was convincing up to a point, but that explaining everything this way stretched the imagination. Taylor, then 75 and recovering from a stroke, said he had never had an epileptic attack before or after. "I can assure you that Venus had nothing to do with it," he said, adding that he was pretty certain he had seen a vehicle from outer space. For a long time afterwards he carried a camera in case the objects came back.^[1][2]

Other theories

Other suggestions have included ball lightning and a bomb-disposal robot. The Fortean researcher Duncan Lunan proposed that Taylor stumbled on a military operation to recover a crashed pilotless aircraft using a "wheelbarrow" bomb-disposal vehicle of the kind later familiar in Northern Ireland. In 2013 a local businessman, Phill Fenton, published a report suggesting Taylor "may have suffered a mini-stroke and been exposed to harmful chemicals". He thought the UFO could have been a saucer-shaped water tower nearby. No one has doubted that Taylor believed what he saw was real.^[1][2][4]

Legacy

The Livingston Development Corporation was sufficiently impressed to mark the site with a plaque on a large boulder. Wikipedia dates its installation to January 1992, and Undiscovered Scotland to 1991. The plaque had been stolen by 1994, but a plaque marks the rock today. A "Dechmont UFO Trail", with an information board and map, now leads visitors from a car park by Deans Community High School, over the flank of Dechmont Law and past Deer Park golf course to the site. The forest has since grown into mature woodland, so the clearing looks very different from 1979, and traffic noise from the M8 can still be heard. Taylor died in 2007, aged 88. The council says the case remains one of the most important UFO encounters in the world.^[1][2][3][4]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Robert Taylor incident”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.