Incident at North Berwick

By Jeff Nisbet

(Originally published in Atlantis Rising #49--January/February, 2005--under the title "Incident at North Berwick: The Skies Are Buzzing over Bonnie Scotland")


Anytime I find myself back in Scotland I try to spend at least one day in North Berwick, a picturesque coastal town about 20 miles to the east of Edinburgh. The views of the offshore islands are glorious. The gulls cry, the waves lap, and it's a great place to sample some of the fine local seafood. It is also one of the strangest places on the face of the planet.

I had known for some time that the area from North Berwick west to the town of Bonnybridge is considered to be a UFO "hotspot" which, considering the population, has had more sightings than anywhere else on Earth. In Canada, the ratio of sightings to inhabitants is one per 61,200, and one per 136,450 in the United States. There are 300 registered sightings in Scotland each year, which translates into one per 17,000 inhabitants. Skeptics have blamed the whisky.

If you had asked me just a few months ago how much thought I had given to the phenomenon, I would have said "not much." But that was then ...

I made two trips to Scotland in 2004, and on the second trip I was accompanied for the first time by all of my immediate family and their respective spouses. On Sunday morning, July 4, I naturally dragged them all out to North Berwick. We had a nice stroll about the town, visited the new Seabird Center beside the harbor, took photographs of the glorious views, and sampled some of the fine local seafood before heading back to Edinburgh in the late afternoon. It was a grand day for all.

A few weekends after returning home to the U.S., I was reviewing my vacation photos while my daughter was visiting. With the above photograph on my computer screen, I pointed to an object in the sky and said, "Look, Sarah, a UFO!" Well of course she thought I was either playing a prank on her or that there had been dirt on my lens. But a few hours later she emailed me a photo, taken that same day on her own camera, which showed a similar object. Needless to say, my photo had suddenly gained many points in my daughter's credibility department.

Here is her photo.


Over the next few days, I reviewed all of the photos I had taken over my last three visits to Scotland and, though none were as spectacular as the two shown above, several of them were extremely interesting.

I list three of them here:

• A sunset view of three "objects" photographed from my Newhaven hotel room in May 2003. Two of the objects appear to the west above the world-famous Firth of Forth Rail Bridge. The third object appears more in the direction of Bonnybridge, the official Scottish UFO capitol.

• A shot of Newhaven harbor, looking northwest, which shows an airplane on its approach to Edinburgh airport. There is also a seagull flying in the photo, and some other object, high in the clouds, that looks like neither.

• A photograph taken from Edinburgh's Calton Hill of Arthur's Seat, an ancient and extinct volcano, with two objects in it -- one in the sky above the summit, and one silhouetted against the hill below. It is the only photograph in my collection that shows the objects in a setting that gives a measurable idea of the distances involved, and therefore a fair shot at estimating the actual size of the object that flew between Arthur's Seat and me.

But none of these photos, even the two shown here, would have compelled me to write an article about a subject that I've been advised to avoid.

It was my "movies" that did it.

After I had found the "still" photos mentioned above, I decided to look more closely at my movies, too.

My Nikon digital camera has the ability to shoot 35-second "QuickTime" movies. The QuickTime technology is relatively new, but it is not exclusive to Nikon. In fact, many other cameras that have entered the consumer market over the past couple of years share the same technology. And the fact that digital cameras topped the 2003 Christmas gift "wish list" means that there are now scads of QuickTime-enabled cameras hanging from the necks of tourists pretty much everywhere. But if they have used their cameras to shoot QuickTime movies yet, it's unlikely that many would have bothered to click through them frame-by-frame.

I have.

During my first 2004 trip to Scotland, in April, I shot two of those 35-second movies from the same vantage point as the photos my daughter and I shot later in July. The first was a slow pan from North Berwick out to Bass Rock Island, and the second panned from Craigleith Island back to North Berwick. While the first of these movies is by far the more spectacular, with several of the aforementioned objects appearing in the same frame, I have chosen to publish just four frames from each in this article.

It is due to these eight frames, which combined amount to a mere half-a-second of "real time," that I have been able to calculate the objects' minimum airspeed, as well as discover where these objects come from. And so I feel that these eight brief moments in time will be the most interesting to the readers of this magazine.

Look at the following four-frame composite, which you can click on to enlarge in a new window, and then read on.


While viewing my second movie I suddenly realized it began with a complete view of Craigleith, and therefore with a known quantity -- the fact that Craigleith is a quarter-mile long. The object first appeared about three seconds into the movie, and remained visible in the next two frames. Although the object appears three times in the movie, the QuickTime imaging technology only captures an image once every one-fifteenth of a second (as opposed to video, at 24 fps, and film, at 35 fps), so the duration of time the object is actually visible in the movie covers a period of just two-fifteenths of a second -- less than the blink of an eye.

Using Craigleith's quarter-mile length as a "benchmark" of distance, I was able to calculate that the object was traveling at an astonishing 1.25 miles per second -- if it was flying directly over the island. But since it is traveling on an oblique angle, and may also be a considerable distance beyond Craigleith, that calculation may actually be quite conservative.

Conservative or not, 1.25 miles per second translates to a blistering 4,500 miles per hour, which is 6.6 times the speed of sound -- Mach 6.6 in air-force jargon. Chicago to Vienna in just under an hour, think of it! Imagine flying over the Atlantic in less time than it took to check your luggage.

It is indeed a sobering thought that the official aircraft world speed record is held by the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird that, on July 28, 1978, clocked in at just half that speed, or Mach 3.3. In the meantime there are objects that are moving at twice that speed in the lower-atmosphere skies above North Berwick, too fast for the naked eye to catch. And, as my movies show, they are not always flying in a straight line. A particularly memorable sequence shows one following a S-curved path across the sky in just 14 frames -- less than a second -- and another performing a graceful loop-de-loop! They are quite the aerial hot-rods.

All that said, there is no reason to believe that my Mach 6.6 airspeed estimate proves that their pedals have been pushed anywhere near the metal.

So what are these objects? Who or what might be in them? And where did they come from?

There are many diverse theories held by as many diverse groups, none of which has ever managed to slip past the ever-vigilant guardians of acceptable mainstream thought.

The skeptics are able to shake off most reported sightings by trotting out, often with a chuckle, one or more of the following time-honored explanations: weather balloons; swamp gas; earth lights; reflections in a window; experimental aircraft; the whisky.

And the list goes on.

True believers have their own unique set of problems when it comes to putting forth their theories. They do not constitute a unified front, and have little or no power over the mainstream press, which tends to report the few sightings that make it past the news desk with a wink-and-grin delivery. Disappointing, but hardly surprising considering the disparate theories held by the believers.

Some believers tend to focus less on the extraterrestrial vehicles than on their pilots. And since none of those vehicles has ever been officially found, there is an additional layer of mystery added to their speculations that is not likely to be penetrated anytime soon.

The few Christian Fundamentalists who also happen to believe in extraterrestrial vehicles quite understandably believe that Satan and his band of fallen angels pilot the craft. What other explanation could they allow themselves to have?

Those who believe that Earth's human population did not spring from the loins of the biblical Adam and Eve, but instead came from the stars, have their own set of insurmountable problems to contend with -- as you might well imagine.

There are also those who feel that extraterrestrials may have actually been the Gods mentioned in the world's various mythologies, which came down to Earth and took the daughters of men as their wives -- which would understandably be a very unpopular theory, indeed.

The incomprehensibly vast distances of space throw yet another spanner in the works, and have spawned the theories that either the vehicles have the ability to enter a "portal" or "wormhole" that immediately transports them to star systems that would otherwise take many light years to get to, or that they have in fact always been with us, and actually exist below the surface of the earth, from whence they come and go at will. Hmm?

Let's take one of these two theories at a time, and think how easy it would be to fit my little QuickTime movie into either scenario.

• The "Beam me UP, Scotty" scenario: A few frames of my first movie actually show objects that appear to have expanded, and so it doesn't take too great a leap of the imagination, if you have one, to speculate that they may actually be in the process of atomically dematerializing in order to rematerialize someplace else -- perhaps at some far-flung point in the universe.

• The "Beam me DOWN, Scotty" scenario: Let's consider that from the Bass Rock westward to Edinburgh's Castle Rock there are no fewer than six "extinct" volcanic plugs. As most of us here know, live volcanoes are ever connected to the molten core of the earth by a tube. Is it possible that these ancient tubes have become flyways of sorts, and is that where the "expanded" objects are heading?

I will consider, for now, the second scenario.

As I have toggled back and forth along several microsecond sequences in my movies, it has become apparent that these objects are not coming down to us from above, but are instead emerging from below. At least three sequences in my movies show that these objects are rising out of the sea, one of which is shown below. You will notice that, perhaps most amazingly, the object shows no sign of having to visibly accelerate from the surface of the water in order to reach its cruising speed in the air. Instead, it appears to be operating at top speed from its first appearance!


My observations are supported by a recent Pravda news article, which reports, "In 1963, the U.S. Navy was conducting training not far from Puerto Rico. Suddenly, the training session had to be stopped. Sonar operators determined that one of the submarines was changing its coordinates and was following a strange object. The object was moving at an incredible speed: 150 knots. No modern submarine is capable of traveling at such rapid speed. (On average, subs cannot exceed 45 knots)."

The article goes on to say that "American scientist A. Sanderson, who devoted many years of his life to studying ocean depths, writes the following about a mysterious occurrence which he observed from the deck of an ice-breaker in the Atlantic: 'Suddenly, something emerged from the waters, breaking thick ice; the huge silver object disappeared in the sky.'"

Let's assume it is unlikely that I, with my 4.2-megapixel camera, have been the first to discover the origin of these objects -- or to calculate their speed. While non-traditional investigators such as myself would dearly love to have made such discoveries, I find it inconceivable that the top governments in the world, with their ultra-high-tech hardware and software, would be utterly in the dark about these objects, and so I think it's fair to assume they are not.

Most disturbingly, the claim has been made that the memberships of certain "shadow governments" have been in touch with diverse extraterrestrial life forms for quite a while -- some benevolent and some considerably less so -- while the rest of us have been allowed to toddle on in ignorance.

The eminently credentialed Dr. Michael E. Salla has published an extensive and highly interesting paper on this subject at www.exopolitics.org.

While available editorial space forbids me to excerpt too much of Salla's data, I can do no less than to say that two of the extraterrestrial races he mentions are thought to live below the surface of the Earth, and have done so for many millennia. If one considers that humankind has always set its sights on the stars, and that it took us millennia to break out of the thin pocket of atmosphere that surrounds our planet, one might also begin to consider, with newfound wonder, the mysteries that have ever lain beneath our feet.

Now, how does the idea of extraterrestrial life square with the idea of a God? It should come as a comfort to many of you that the two are not mutually exclusive.

On more than one occasion Monsignor Corrado Balducci, a Vatican demonologist, has stated his belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life. Here is what he said in an interview with Zecharia Sitchin:

" That life may exist on other planets is certainly possible. The Bible does not rule out that possibility. On the basis of scripture and on the basis of our knowledge of God's omnipotence, His wisdom being limitless, we must affirm that life on other planets is possible, credible, and even probable."

On February 17, 1600, the Inquisition burned Giordano Bruno to death in the center of Rome for having the temerity to suggest, among other "heresies," the very same thing, having first taken the final precaution of driving a nail through Bruno's tongue to stop it from blaspheming further.

The times do change.

So, you ever-growing legions of amateur QuickTime cinematographers out there: Why not put my claims to the test?

Just pick up your cameras, head on over to the UFO hotspot nearest you, and let 'em roll!

It's time to meet the neighbors!




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