Around 10.30 in the morning on 9 November 1979 Robert Taylor parked his pickup near the M8 and walked up a path in a newly planted area a little north of Dechmont Law. He reported a flying dome about twenty feet across, dark grey with a sandpaper texture and a flange around its edge, hovering over the ground about a quarter of a mile from his truck. Two smaller spheres, three feet wide and resembling naval mines, came from both sides, their spikes catching his trousers and pulling him towards the larger object. He noticed a hissing sound and an acrid smell described as like burning brakes, and lost consciousness. He woke lying on the grass, unable to speak, with his trousers torn and grazes on his chin and thighs, and walked home.
His wife called a doctor and the police. Officers examined the area and found ladder shaped marks in the soil where the craft was said to have stood and marks along the path of the spheres. Because of his injuries the police recorded the matter as a common assault, and the case is often promoted as the only UFO report to be the subject of a criminal investigation. His damaged trousers are held by the British UFO Research Association, according to Mysterious Britain.
Taylor died in 2007. The researcher Malcolm Robinson accepts the account as possibly one of the few genuine encounters, and the sceptic Steuart Campbell, who visited the scene with police in 1979, first called Taylor the most reliable witness BUFORA had known but later argued he had seen a mirage of Venus. Campbell also suggested that stored PVC pipes caused the ground marks. Other explanations mentioned on Wikipedia are temporal lobe epilepsy and, in a 2013 report, a mini stroke leading Taylor to mistake a water tower for a spacecraft. The case remains argued over.
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