A dark, stormy night in the town of Pitlochry, in the Scottish Highlands. The August heatwave had finally broken with a spectacle of thunder, lightning and torrents of rain, and outside the back door of a town centre hotel, a group of young chefs gathered to cool off after a hot night in the kitchen.
Usually, there’d be banter, of the bawdy kind, cigarettes and a bottle passed around, but tonight was different. Two of the group were discussing, animatedly, an incident they’d witnessed a few nights earlier.
At about 9pm, while walking high in the glens, in Calvine, on the edge of the Cairngorms, they’d seen something that had scared them out of their wits: a huge, solid, diamond-shaped object, about 100ft long, hovering silently in the sky over their heads.
It could have been a scene from The X-Files or Men In Black, but this was rural Scotland.
Luckily, they’d had a camera with them and managed to capture some images as they cowered in the bushes. They’d taken these to the Daily Record, Scotland’s largest circulation newspaper.
The young men were excited and terrified in equal measure: this was dynamite. Had they seen a UFO? Were they going to be rich and famous? Was Earth about to be invaded?
As they chatted, a dark car pulled up outside the hotel and two mysterious figures, dressed in black suits, emerged from the back seat. They called to the two chefs by name.
‘Cigarette break’s over lads,’ one of them barked to the rest of the group. ‘In you go and mind your own business.’ The pair were then led off somewhere ‘for a chat’.
Two very different young men were on breakfast duty the next morning, as one of the original members of the group, retired chef Richard Grieve, tells me today.
Breaking his silence after 34 years, Richard, now 55, spoke exclusively to the Mail to describe what happened that mysterious night in 1990.
The pair were ‘visibly shaken’ by whatever was said to them, he remembers, though they refused to divulge specifics, saying only that the men ‘were from the Royal Navy’.
‘Not long after that it all went a bit hush-hush and they started talking about being followed around Pitlochry.
‘Their demeanour changed. They stopped showing up for work, went off the rails and one began drinking heavily. He was sacked soon afterwards.
‘The other, who was usually outgoing and larger than life, became introverted and sullen. Within a few months of the visit from the men in the car, they both left the hotel. I haven’t seen them since.
‘Whatever it was they knew, they were not meant to see it. They never really talked about it but one of them said: ‘It was the Americans.’
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