"In the beat of a heart, it was gone," said an eyewitness.

John Macdonald was driving at night through rural Scotland when suddenly, he says, an amazing circular bright object appeared in the sky.

John Macdonald / Cascade News

Macdonald, 65, estimated the object -- displaying several rows of brilliant lights -- was less than 100 yards from him, hovered for a few minutes, and then vanished near his Perthshire home around 11 p.m. on Feb. 28.

"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," Macdonald told The Courier last week.

He claimed the UFO was louder than his Jeep.

"My Jeep is quite noisy, but this sounded like a thousand hoovers," he said. "When I phoned my friend, who's a shepherd, he said, 'Don't worry about it, we get this up here quite a lot.'"

John Macdonald / Cascade News

According to a local Civil Aviation Authority spokesman, it most likely wasn't a drone that Macdonald encountered.

"It's possible to fly a drone in darkness," the spokesman said in a statement, "but you have to keep it in your line of sight at all times. 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."

Drone pilot Jonathan Hall doesn't think the unusual object was a drone.

"I have flown quite a lot at night and the size and shape of the lights look like no drone I have ever seen before," the Daily Mail reports.

The rural Perthshire, Scotland, countryside near the area where John Macdonald snapped a photo of a UFO.
The rural Perthshire, Scotland, countryside near the area where John Macdonald snapped a photo of a UFO.
Getty Images

Drone or no drone, Macdonald is convinced he saw something otherworldly.

"There is no doubt in my mind. I know what I saw. It's definitely a spacecraft of some sort."

Another UFO sighting occurred in Scotland earlier this week.

On Wednesday, a cluster of aerial lights was videotaped over Pentland Hills, Scotland. The following video was posted on the Nick Thomas TV YouTube channel, which specializes in UFO-related material, but it's not exactly clear who made the video.

The lights in the above video -- casting a reflection above a body of water -- appear to blink out, one at a time, until they all vanish. Following extreme shaking of the camera, the lights return, in the same pattern or formation.

No explanation is offered as to whether it really happened this way, or if this second batch of lights is merely a replay of the first group. Also, no attempt is made to zoom in on the lights.

When the U.S. Air Force ended Project Blue Book -- the last official long-term UFO investigation that the military has made public -- in 1969, they stated that approximately 5 percent of UFO reports remained unexplained. Those numbers might be even higher today, based on data from groups like the National UFO Reporting Center and the Mutual UFO Network.

With so many images and videos showing up almost daily on YouTube, it's increasingly difficult to find that one needle-in-a-cosmic-haystack that could ultimately explain all of those unknown sightings.

We don't yet know where the UFOs in this article fall, but we keep trying to find the answers.

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