One Flew Over the Council Estate: A 1980s Cruise Missile Encounter (Part 1)

In a quiet street of a small seaside town during the Scottish summer of 1985, three kids were left stunned when a missile thundered past merely 50ft above their heads. The discovery of a classified Ministry of Defence report alludes to the missiles identity, while also revealing a secret Government exercise with startling ramifications.

Scotland 1985

The terror on my friends faces will forever be etched in my mind. As I Covered my ears with both hands and applied an intense head squeeze that would rival that of any vice, I averted my gaze from theirs to witness an object streak past overhead. The deafening roar was immense as it banked to the right above our heads at an extremely low altitude and disappeared behind the rooftops in the street in which we stood.

With eyes as wide as dinner plates and completely frozen in shock, we stared at one another desperately seeking confirmation that we all saw the same thing. Telepathically assured, I cast my Tensor BMX to the ground and abandoned both my friends in a frantic run resulting in a crash landing through the back door of my then home. Did you see it? I yelled at my startled Mother while rudely interrupting her dish washing session at the kitchen sink. Encouraged by her interest, I excitedly described the object that flew past. Long and thin with a round bullet shaped nose, the object flew so mind-blowingly low that alphanumericals were visible along its body with two protubarances near the centre and small fins at the rear. Confirming she had heard something thunder past, I eagerly followed my instinct to be close to the action and hastily returned to the street outside. 

Now eerily calm, I scanned the area in a search of my friends. Unable to find them (more than likely recounting the event to their bewildered parents) I swiftly ran to the end of the street, frantically searching in every direction as I desperately tried to catch sight of it once again. After patiently waiting for what seemed like a lifetime, I soon sauntered back to the original spot of the sighting in reluctant resignation that whatever the object was, it most likely wasn’t coming back. With only the distant sounds of the occasional passing car and a lively starling tweeting his best chat up lines, there I waited with my head flung back, mouth wide open and my eyes fixed firmly on the sky in the vain hope that it would return.

Dire Straits and Fleetwood Mac were among the prominent sounds emanating from my Father’s SDT-400 Hitachi Music Centre as the Scottish summer of 1985 pressed on. Cars were endlessly dodged while honing my Kerby skills or as they rudely drove through our make shift Wimbledon tennis court that my friends and I had rashly chalked on the road. Boris Becker had nothing on me. I often gazed skywards; however, there would be no more UFO incidents, at least over my street in Troon, much to my disappointment. Whether because of Jesse Mach and his Street Hawk or the multiple plans of Hannibal Smith, my sighting was soon pushed to the back of my mind, and by the time Marty McFly and his DMC-12 arrived I had officially moved on. My sighting was destined to lie dormant in the deep recesses of my mind, no different to the locked bottom drawer of a rusty old filing cabinet.

After a lifetime of Secondary School, growing up and a healthy serving of life in the rat race, my UFO sighting would return to my thoughts from a chance encounter during a long overdue garage clear-out. Stumbling across a weathered old box with an extremely faded Memories scribbled across the side, I threw off the lid with nostalgic anticipation of the historical treats to be discovered inside. I found nothing of particular fascination as I rummaged among cartoon drawings and old school jotters, no doubt saved by my Mother for future amusement. Following a chuckle or two, there was nothing that could have prepared me for the recollection juggernaut that was about to firmly slam me in the face head on.

It was back. There, staring at me from the bottomless pit of my childhood memorabilia, was my UFO. I had completely forgotten that Immediately following my sighting, I had diligently created a sketch of the object featuring all of the details that my memory would allow. It was then, while studying the drawing, that I became overwhelmed by the feeling of just how important my sighting actually was. It was time to get to the bottom of it once and for all.

Where the hell did it come from? I simply had to know. Despite it’s utterly alien appearance in the clear blue sky, it was obvious that the only world the object came from was most definitely this one. The high pitched roar of jet propulsion and the simple fact that it looked like a missile, left the only explanation to be a military one. Fuelled by my desire for the truth along with copious amounts of strong coffee, my investigation began.

It wasn’t long before the first comments trickled in. You saw the SR-71. Definitely a F-4 Phantom. It was the Aurora spy plane. The responses frustratingly continued on the UFO website I had chosen to report my sighting on and none of the explanations offered came close to the object that I witnessed. The niggling feeling slowly crept in that I had been marginalised as an ignorant civvy completely unable to tell the difference between missiles and jet aircraft. I could almost feel the sneers come through the monitor. Feeling decidedly dejected, it was time to take a break. 

After a much needed distractionary hour of pottering around and a wholesome lunch of yolky fried eggs on butter lathered toast with a complimentary drizzling of tomato ketchup, I felt sufficiently reenergised to log back onto the website. Scrolling through, I wasn’t surprised to see further comments offering the same explanations as before, but by now it had moved to infighting between two distinct camps, the believers and the disbelievers. On the verge of reading no further, a comment snapped me out of my scrolling daze. It was a dead warhead cruise missile from Machrihanish wrote the user Anyon. A wave of relief ran through my body. To hear someone else actually say that it was a missile gave me the validation I must have craved. Of course I’d heard of cruise missiles before, but all of a sudden came the realisation of how little I actually knew about them.

Assuming Machrihanish referred to RAF Machrihanish, a former U.S. Navy Airfield on the west coast of Scotland, I responded to Anyon. “Did they test cruise missiles at Machrihanish?” I asked, to which he replied “Without any doubt, dead warhead cruise missiles have been tested to land and crash there after being launched from U.S. submarines out in the Atlantic. I can only surmise the one you witnessed had been a stray, and that is what you encountered.” Was he telling the truth or was he just some Walter Mitty type? Following some quick research on American cruise missiles, I found that the BGM-109 Tomahawk was operational at the time and certainly shared a resemblance to my sketch, but his word ultimately wouldn’t be enough. I needed more information on the missile I saw that day and the only way to get it was to track down the only other witnesses that I was aware of, my childhood friends.

Bye then.