Even today, many witnesses of unusual phenomena are afraid to tell friends and family, let alone the press.
Such reports can easily lead to being labeled a drunkard, drug addict, or even mentally ill by society.
And decades ago, when UFOs were mainly discussed by rare researchers, seeing something strange in the sky and telling everyone about it almost certainly meant becoming the target of ridicule for a long time.
67-year-old Scotsman Gordon MacKerracher from Edinburgh kept silent about his sighting of a large UFO for exactly fifty years and only recently decided to share it with journalists.
According to Gordon, he was 17 at the time and was walking along a road in rural West Lothian, Scotland, when he suddenly spotted a strange flying object in the sky, about the size of a van. The object appeared metallic and had a cone shape.
Observing the object slowly moving away, Gordon immediately ran to the nearest phone booth. He understood that what he had seen was neither an airplane nor a helicopter.
“For some reason, I looked to the left, and above me in the sky was a brown conical craft, completely silent. I could see the moonlight reflecting off it. And funny enough, I don’t remember being scared of it while I was watching it, although I might have been.”
He then decided to call the nearest airport—Edinburgh Airport—to report the mysterious flying object.
The article does not explain why Gordon made this decision, but it was 1974, at the height of the Cold War, and it is likely that the Scot was scared of potential enemy spies.
However, the dispatcher told him that according to their radar and flight schedules, no aircraft had been in the surrounding airspace in the last hour. So Gordon was left completely perplexed.
He then carefully considered the situation and decided not to tell anyone about his sighting. He was afraid of being immediately labeled an “idiot” and being called “the one who saw space people” for the rest of his life.
“I never told anyone. I was too scared because I didn’t want to be considered an idiot, so I just kept silent when I returned to my parents. I never thought it was just my mind playing tricks on me, because I knew exactly what I saw. At that time, I wasn’t interested in UFOs and didn’t think about them or anything like that.”
Gordon later did tell his son Ross, when he grew up, and his wife Margaret about the UFO, but until recently, no one outside the family knew. He says that both Ross and Margaret don’t particularly believe in aliens, but they accepted Gordon’s story calmly.
Many years later, Gordon watched the TV series “Mysterious World” about enigmatic phenomena, where a story about a UFO was featured, and a witness’s drawing showed an object exactly like the one Gordon had seen at 17 on that rural road.
