Ireland and the entire cost of Scotland and England seems to have retained a sort of magical mundane atmosphere. Here is a funny antedotal story that actually happened to me and my wife Caroline.Off the southern coast of western Scotland lies the small town of Campbeltown, known for its whisky and mysterious standing stones . As the clear days turn to darker nights, there are plenty of eerie tales of battles long past that still seem to linger. Tales such as the Jacobite, known as the moldy man, or the Pipers cave seemed to run rampant through every hill and dale. On such an occasion, the local papers broadcast a local reoccurrence of phantom lights above the former Kilkeran castle. Caroline and I read the tale with enthusiastic vigor, laughing at the local constable chasing what was described as eerie fairy lights dancing alongside the graves of their long deceased ancestors. Our perception was that the local teenagers were at once again trying the patience of the village elders. Only a short while prior they had desecrated a newly erected sign that had formally read, "Drive slowly children at play" to "Die Slowly Children Will Pay " After finishing our evening meal, Caroline and I prepared for our weekly rendezvous to Davaar Island, a place sparsely populated with heather ladden hills and the cries of Seals, otters, whales and wild goats. Our laughter turned to sheer awe and bemused terror, for as we scanned the beautiful star lit night, a queer movement of light caught my eye in the distance. A round, milky white ball of light, surrounded by a haze of blue appeared to travel around the rocky Cliffside road, which meandered its way into town in the distance.

At first our reason told us it was some slow moving biker, pedaling his way to town with an excessively bright light, but then our "perceptual set" kicked in. The ball of light veered suddenly out over the water past the lighthouse of Davaar Island and shot straight up. My hairs on the back of neck rose as the ball of light descended once again into the field nearby our old German car. At first, out of panic or unknown reason the car refused to start, but it finally did. As we rocketed back to town, refusing to look over our shoulders, our laughter did not begin anew till we were safely at home in our beds. Our mental predisposition had influenced what we thought we were seeing. Our perceptual set can influence what we hear as well as what we see. Consequently, the fears of what we had read from the local papers aided in our perception of what we thought we saw near our home.