by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
People react to UFO encounters in different ways. Some are profoundly moved, some are terrified, some take them in stride, and some become fascinated. Tom Moir, a young man in the Aberdeenshire village of Muchalls, Scotland, was moved to become an investigator after his sighting in 1971, and he spent three decades videotaping UFOs in his area that he said were showing up on a regular basis. He came to believe they were monitoring him and his neighbors and this disturbed him to the point where he ended up moving thousands of miles away to Aukland, New Zealand.
Moir’s story appears in the 1998 book by Ron Halliday, UFO Scotland. Moir is identified in the book as Tom McClintock. According to Halliday, Tom was walking home from a bus stop near his home after his weekly violin lesson. On his right, “he noticed a red, pulsating light.” Another identical one appeared on his left and then, a third. He was not scared, but rather, curious as to what they were doing.
One of the lights then came down until it was just above the ground. It was then that a brightly glowing creature dressed in a long gown suddenly appeared. Tom moved towards it and the creature disappeared.
According to Halliday, Tom told his story as soon as he got home, and he and his sister went back out to see if they could see anything. When they got to the end of the road, a red light appeared. It came towards them and then hovered over their heads. The only detail they could make out was a small ring of lights. The UFO then moved over some nearby hills.
Halliday reports that Tom had other sightings, including one in 1988 where he saw another red, pulsating light. On this occasion, he was able to make out an object behind it that was flat-topped, drum-shaped, and had diamond-shaped facets on its circumference. It went behind a hill, and “a white-coloured halo appeared, flashed, then disappeared.”
Over three decades later, Moir’s story appeared in the January 12, 2005 Aberdeen Press and Journal after he’d told his story for an upcoming episode of Grampian TV’s “Beyond Explanation.” At this point, Moir is 44 and living in Aukland, New Zealand. The article (page 8 of the pdf) headlined “Aliens Forced Me to Flee the Country, Says Varsity Lecturer” begins with the information that Moir had fled from Muchalls because he was “plagued by UFOs” that he believed were monitoring his every move. Moir explained that he didn’t have a choice and that, while he was intrigued by the lights, he was also frightened by them. He said that he’d had no sightings in New Zealand.
In this version of Moir’s story, as told by him for this article, he was coming home from a piano lesson when he saw the lights. He describes seeing lights afterwards that “appeared at the same time every night of the week from then on.” He believed they were controlled either automatically or by some intelligence.
Moir is described as “an electronics engineer with BSC and PhD degrees who has published more than 50 papers.” He told the reporter that he started using a video camera to capture the lights and explained, “It was me doing the gathering this time instead of someone gathering the information on me.”
Moir shows up in an article covering a different mystery known as “The Aukland Hum.” The article by Stephen Hutcheon was posted on the Sydney Morning Herald website and is headlined “Mystery Noise is a Real Humdinger.” Moir, described at this point as a computer engineer at Massey University’s Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, had been taking reports from people who said they could hear the hum, and they had tested four of them. Of those, three centered in around 56Hz while one was inconclusive.
According to Hutcheon, Dr. Moir was working with Dr. Fakhrul Alam, and they “had been approached by about 30 sufferers” since mid-August of that year, all of whom were from the northern parts of Aukland. With the help of one of them, Moir created a simulation of the noise. Moir’s UFO experience is not mentioned in this article.
Moir was featured recently in an article written by Jamie Saunderson posted June 24, 2022, on the Aberdeen Live website headlined “Academic Who Saw ‘UFOs’ During Childhood in Aberdeenshire Recalls Encounters.” Saunderson describes Moir as seeing UFOs “so regularly he got bored of them.” At this point he is identified as an engineering professor at Aukland University of Technology and author of 160 publications.
Moir’s work on the Aukland Hum is mentioned, but he is described as having recorded it rather than having created a simulation. In this version of his story, he is said to have been coming home from school on the night of his first sighting. Regarding the UFO activity after that, Moir is quoted saying “They’d be there every night of the week, almost like clockwork in the same area. In my later years when I used to watch them I used to get bored because it was so routine.” Moir said he came to believe that there wasn’t anyone in the UFOs because it would be too boring for them to do what they were doing every night, and therefore, they must be machines using artificial intelligence to gather information on people. There is no mention of Moir fleeing England and the article ends with him quoted as saying “On of my ambitions is to go back and have another look.”
According to another Aberdeenhire Live article by Sauderson posted June 24, 2022 headlined “The sleepy Aberdeenshire village considered a ‘UFO hotspot,’” Scottish UFOlogist and author Malcolm Robinson declared that Muchalls was, indeed, a UFO hotspot. Moir’s first sighting, which appears in Robinson’s 2011 book UFO Case Files of Scotland Volume 2, is described as an example. However, according to Saunders, sightings reports “died down” by the time Robinson’s book was published, and Robinson is quoted as saying “Today Muchalls, (as far as we are led to believe!) sees very little in the way of UFO reports, and we can but wonder why.”