What really happened in Calvine? The mystery behind the best UFO picture ever seen | UFOs

On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre craft shot away vertically and disappeared.

Craig Lindsay was a press officer at the RAF base in Pitreavie Castle in Dunfermline, 50 miles away, when the Daily Record got in touch a few days later. The hikers, who worked as chefs at Fisher’s Hotel in Pitlochry, had sent six photos of the diamond to the newspaper and told their story. The Record’s picture editor, Andy Allen, sent Lindsay the best of the bunch.

Lindsay had never seen such a clear photograph of a supposed UFO, so he forwarded the picture to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which told him to ask the Record to send the other five photographs and their negatives. The MoD also instructed him to phone the hikers, which he did. One of them told Lindsay the whole story: the diamond, the jet, how it levitated eerily with no sound and accelerated with no obvious propellant.

The MoD told Lindsay to leave the case with them. He pushed the diamond to the back of his mind.

That autumn, Lindsay attended a routine meeting in London. On his lunch break, he went for a wander around the MoD’s offices and saw something familiar. “There, on the wall in front of me, was a great big poster-size print of the best of them [the photographs]. So, I spoke to the guys that were there and I asked them what their other photographs were like.” The ministry’s staff placed the other photographs on a windowsill. The snaps showed the Harrier jet moving from the right side of the frame to the left, while the diamond didn’t move an inch.

He quizzed some of the specialists who had investigated the photos. They told him there was no evidence of a hoax, but they didn’t know what the diamond was. “I gradually forgot all about the thing,” says Lindsay. “Nothing had appeared from the first inquiry … I assumed that everything had just been forgotten.” The Record didn’t run the story, the hikers never spoke publicly about the photos and the images weren’t seen by the public for 32 years.

Prof David Clarke, a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, worked as a reporter in the 1990s. When Clarke was beginning his career in journalism, his editor told him he needed to be an expert in something if he wanted to be successful. Clarke was studying for a PhD in folklore, so his editor handed him the spooky beat. “You know, everything weird: UFOs, ghosts, ESP [extrasensory perception], remote viewing,” Clarke says. He says his research into Calvine has had “more twists and turns than a John le Carré thriller”.

Clarke became aware of the Calvine UFO in 1996 when Nick Pope, a former civil servant with the MoD, published Open Skies, Closed Minds, a book on ufology. Pope is sometimes known as “the real Fox Mulder” because of his work on the MoD’s “UFO desk”. In the book, he touches on Calvine, describing the case as “one of the most intriguing in the Ministry of Defence’s files”. He claims that MoD analysis found that the photos were “not fakes” and concluded “object unexplained, case closed, no further action”. Clarke read the book, but didn’t think much of Calvine until more than a decade later.

By 2009, he was using his encyclopedic knowledge of UFOs to curate the release of thousands of UFO documents for the National Archives. Among the papers was a photocopied drawing of a diamond shape next to a plane. Alongside the sketch was a note intended for defence ministers in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. Under the heading “Defensive lines to take”, it read: “Have looked at the photographs, no definite conclusions reached regarding large diamond-shaped object. Confident that jet aircraft is a Harrier. Have no record of Harriers operating in location at stated date/time. No other reports received by MoD of unusual air activity or sightings at location/date/time.”

Clarke endeavoured to track down the source of the photograph, but reached a dead end. He phoned the Record and spoke to the news editor and the picture editor, but they said they couldn’t find any trace of the Calvine pictures and no one else at the paper remembered them. “I just thought, at the time, possibly the best explanation for why the Daily Record didn’t run it is because they had worked out it was a hoax or a prank,” Clarke says.

Over the next decade, Clarke continued to visit the National Archives to browse UFO files as they became declassified. In 2018, he struck gold: he discovered that the MoD had failed to redact the name of a former official from its Defence Intelligence department. “If there was a UFO investigator, it was him,” Clarke says.

He won’t reveal the identity of the investigator, but says he had an unusual name: “I just typed it into the internet … and, lo and behold, I was on his LinkedIn page. Within a couple of minutes, I was on the phone to him.”

Clarke asked the former UFO hunter if he had seen anything “truly inexplicable” during his time at the MoD. The intelligence officer immediately mentioned “a couple of poachers up in Scotland” who in 1990 had photographed a peculiar object and sent the pictures to the Record. The officer told Clarke that the photographs caused a stink around the ministry and that they knew what the object was: an experimental craft belonging to the US. From here, the trail quickly led to Lindsay.

When Lindsay took Clarke’s call in 2019, he told him: “I’ve been waiting for someone to call me about this for 30 years.” Lindsay told Clarke that he hadn’t seen the Calvine photo for many years. But after a few weeks of trawling through mountains of papers in his garage, Lindsay found a copy of the photo hidden between the pages of an old reference book. “I must have put it there to keep it flat and safe and then forgotten about it,” says Lindsay.

Lindsay handed Clarke the copy on two conditions: that it be kept in Sheffield Hallam’s library; and that if either of the hikers came forward it would be returned to them. Clarke’s colleague Andrew Robinson, a senior lecturer in photography at Sheffield Hallam, analysed the image and verified its authenticity. Whatever the diamond was, he said, it was a real object in a genuine photograph.

Clarke published the image in 2022 and the story went viral. But Clarke held back one significant detail from the public. On the back of the Calvine photo was a note in red ink, which read: “Copyright Kevin Russell c/o Daily Record GLASGOW.”

It seemed unlikely that a hotel chef would have thought to claim copyright, Clarke thought. Maybe Russell was a Record photographer who had become involved, or perhaps a picture editor had scribbled on the name. Clarke checked with the newspaper, which said that no one called Kevin Russell had ever worked there, either as staff or as a freelancer. Allen, the former picture editor who had sent the images to the MoD, might have been able to clear things up – but he died in 2007.

Clarke withheld Russell’s name in the hope that the story would entice him to come forward, but no one did. He and some colleagues worked their way through a list of 140 Kevin Russells. The closest they got was a Kevin Russell who had worked as a kitchen porter in the area at the time, but he denied any knowledge of the UFO.

‘With apologies, I’m not going to comment on the various names I’ve seen,” says Pope, who staffed the MoD’s UFO desk from 1991 to 1994. Pope had a poster of the Calvine photo on the wall in his office and he has been thinking about the diamond ever since. “I’m aware that the name Kevin Russell has been given,” he concedes. “I’ve seen various suggestions.”

Why does he think the photographer hasn’t come forward? “I suspect that, at the very least, right at the outset, a fairly robust conversation was held,” Pope says. He pauses. Does he think they are still alive? “I’m not going to comment on that. I don’t want my non-comment to be misinterpreted. The idea that that these people were assassinated by the deep state – that’s just nonsense.” Many people talked to the MoD about UFOs on condition of anonymity, he maintains. “Many times, people who see UFOs don’t want to go public. Sometimes, they don’t even tell their family, their friends, their immediate colleagues. I want to be respectful of that.”

The identity of the man (or men) who took the photographs remains a mystery, as does the identity of the diamond. Some ufologists think that because the diamond looks like no known terrestrial aircraft, it must be an alien spaceship, or possibly a craft recreated on Earth based on a crashed alien vessel. Others say it is evidence of Aurora, an alleged reconnaissance aircraft developed by a clandestine outfit in the US military, purportedly responsible for significant advancements in aviation technology. But there is little evidence of the programme’s existence.

Maybe the whole thing is a prank or a hoax – a cardboard bauble attached to a string and hung from a tree branch, as some sceptics claim. Was the diamond an optical illusion created by the reflection of an island in a lake? The second theory is the one to which Sean Kirkpatrick, a former UFO hunter for the Pentagon, subscribes: “It’s a reflection in the lake and the photo has been doctored,” Kirkpatrick says. “It’s been analysed multiple times. If you look carefully towards the right side and in the raw [uncompressed] image, the top and bottom are reflections of each other.” However, there is no body of water on that Calvine hillside.

From alien spaceships to secret military projects, the more lurid conspiracy theories are bolstered by the fact that the Record’s editor in 1990, the late Endell Laird, was a member of the MoD’s D notice committee. D notices, known since 2015 as DSMA notices, are issued by the Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee to prevent the publication of news stories that may jeopardise national security. Did Laird conspire with the MoD to suppress the story? His membership of the committee could be a coincidence, given that it then contained 14 members of the media, but if so it is a curious one.

We don’t know if the Record was handed a D notice, but Pope has confirmed that the MoD prevented the release of the photographs. He told a 2024 UFO documentary, The Program, that if the Record had run the story “it would have blown our standard line out of the water. Therefore, we wanted to bury this – and we did. All the photographs and all the negatives were acquired by the Ministry of Defence and they were never seen again.”

The UFO desk was not convinced it was a hoax, Pope says: “The consensus was that it was a solid and reasonably large-sized object.” He points out that the photographs were taken two days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, which may explain why the military was testing advanced aircraft. On the other hand, if you wanted to keep a secret weapon secret, would you road-test it in broad daylight in a relatively populated area?

Another reason to suspect the diamond was more than a bauble on a string is the story Richard Grieve told The Program. Grieve said he worked with the hikers in the kitchen of the Fisher’s Hotel. He said they were having a cigarette break one rainy evening when a black car pulled into the car park. Grieve claimed two men in dark suits got out and barked: “Break time is over,” while beckoning the hikers. “They were fucking spooks; they were men in black. And they stood outside in the pissing rain speaking to them,” Grieve said.

According to Grieve, the pair returned to the hotel looking “white as a fucking ghost. Something happened to them. They’ve seen something. Whoever came out of the car scared the absolute crap out of them.”

Grieve said the men were not the same afterwards. They drank heavily, took days off work and slept in their cars outside the hotel. Grieve claimed the pair vanished without trace four weeks later. “Chefs don’t just disappear out of the kitchen for 34 years and not have no other job. You don’t just fuck off and never work again. Where are they?”

The one organisation that could end all the speculation is the MoD. “I am afraid we no longer offer comment on UFOs/UAPs [unidentified aerial phenomena] etc,” said an MoD spokesperson, adding that a quick Google search could solve the mystery. They also sent a link to an article in the Daily Express featuring a hypothesis that the diamond is a mountain peak covered by fog – an idea that Clarke says his photography expert has debunked.

“The MoD could easily clear up this mystery by releasing the conclusions of the analysis they carried out on the images in 1990 and 1992,” Clarke says. “If this concluded the photos were faked, it can be released without having to release personal information about the photographer. By refusing to comment, they are simply feeding the conspiracy theories and the idea that they are hiding something.”

To the hikers, he says: “It is the 35th anniversary of what has been described as the best UFO photo ever taken. Now is the time to come forward and tell us what really happened.”