A Fife man says he had a close encounter with an extraterrestrial aircraft and has the photo to prove it.
John Macdonald says a UFO hovered above his head in the night-time Perthshire sky, making the noise of “a thousand hoovers”.
The quick-thinking Fifer managed to take a snap of the aerial object before it disappeared “in the beat of a heart”.
The 65-year-old from Dysart is convinced he saw an extraterrestrial aircraft at rural Rossie Ochil, to the south of Perth.
“It’s definitely a spacecraft of some sort,” he told The Courier.“I don’t know whether I frightened it or not with the flash of the camera, because in the beat of a heart it was gone.”
It happened at around 11pm on Sunday February 28 when he was driving home after visiting a friend.
He described how the noise drowned out the sound of his jeep.
“My jeep is quite noisy, but this sounded like a thousand hoovers,” said John, who estimates he was 50 to 70 yards from the object.
“When I phoned my friend, who’s a shepherd, he said ‘don’t worry about it, we get this up here quite a lot’.
“I always thought there was something out there, but had never seen anything until then.”
Although it bears a slight resemblance to the spacecraft in the science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the flying object is said to most likely have been a drone.
Use of the unmanned aircraft, which can be deployed for aerial photography, has increased in recent years both for commercial and leisure purposes.
The Civil Aviation Authority said someone flying a drone in the hours of darkness could be in breach of operating guidelines.
Drones must not be flown higher than 400 feet or within 164 feet of people, vehicles, buildings or structures.
A spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority said: “It’s possible to fly a drone in darkness, but you have to keep it in your line of sight at all times.
“If you are flying something in darkness it is difficult to keep it in your visual line of sight.Even though it has lights, you won’t be able to see it sufficiently well to control it.
“At night, you can’t see obstacles because the obstacles aren’t lit.You could argue that this was a rural location, and this is not such a problem, but it still is.”