The story of the Calvine UFO photograph | In Case You Missed It

0:00 Look at this photograph. It was snapped back in 1990 above a tiny village deep in the Scottish Highlands. Is it real? Or something stranger? >> No helicopter, there's no airplane. It's a UFO. >> Whatever you may think, this photo refuses to be forgotten. >> So, yes. This is the Calvin photo. This is the one we're talking about. It It's a great image. I mean, people refer to it as the best or one of the images of a UFO ever taken. >> That's Craig Williams, a BBC journalist who's agreed to help me go back in time to understand what happened. I've asked him to meet the team in the BBC archive vault. It's a good location to discuss a story with more twists and turns than a Spielberg plot, only quieter and more >> So, as far as we know, August the 4th,

1:01 1990, two guys who were working as chefs in Pitlochry went for a walk after work. During the course of their walk, what they told is that they saw an object hanging in the air. They described it as being fairly big, probably about about 80 ft or so is what you can kind of guess from the photographs that we've now seen. It was diamond-shaped. It apparently didn't make a noise, or in some retellings of it, this is it maybe made a low hum. And it was hanging in the air above the glen that they were walking in. They were a bit freaked by it. They hid by the side of the glen, beside a fence, which is what we see in the photograph, and they took six snaps of this. And in the course of taking the snaps, what is now seen to be a Harrier jet, which was an RAF jet that was in service at the time, flew around it and flew by it, and that's pictured in the actual They said they grabbed these six photographs and then they went about their way. In the course of watching it,

2:03 at some point this aircraft, or whatever you want to call it, lifted vertically very, very quickly. So, it went up the quite fast and that was the last they saw of it. >> Here's what happened next. So, the two men sent the photos to the Daily Record, one of the biggest tabloids in Scotland at the time. The paper wanted an official statement from the Ministry of Defense about the photos. So, they got in contact with the press officer, a guy called Craig Lindsay. Remember that name. Craig Lindsay took statements from the two men, wrote a report, sent it to his superiors down in London. The Daily Record never ran the story or printed the photos. Completely out of character for a tabloid at that time. But, that wasn't the only weird thing. >> According to Craig Lindsay, later that year or quite soon afterwards, he went down to London for a standard meeting that he would always have with his bosses in the Ministry of Defense. And he went up to the office of the people who dealt with this sort of thing. And when he went into the office, there was

3:03 a massive blown-up poster on the wall of one of the images. So, obviously he was, you know, interested to know why they were looking at this and asked them about it. What they said to him was that it was being dealt with. >> So, it seems the MOD did look into the strange sighting, at least at one point. The photograph remained undisturbed in the National Archives until 2009, when investigative journalist and academic, Dr. David Clarke, discovered the reproduction of the image. His subsequent search for answers lasted more than a decade and ultimately led him to Craig Lindsay. >> So, he phoned Craig Lindsay, who by then is long retired in his 80s, living at living in Fife. Gave him a call and he says that the first thing Craig Lindsay said to him is, "I know what you're phoning about and I've been waiting for this for 30 >> In Craig Lindsay's garage lay another copy of the Calvine UFO photo. His copy had been set untouched in a file for more than 30 years. All it took was a phone call. The photo was finally published by the Daily Mail in 2022, and its resurfacing was widely discussed online.

4:03 But the Calvine photo isn't the only UFO mystery to come out of Scotland during that period. >> You've heard of the Bermuda Triangle, tales that there's life on Mars, but strange goings-on in Bonnybridge, Scotland, doesn't have quite the same ring about it. Yet, the villagers there have come across a host of unexplained happenings that would have X-Files scriptwriters scrabbling for their pens. >> What made me look into this story was the fact that in the 1990s, just about 30 years ago, there was this extraordinary amount of coverage given to what um those in UFO circles call a flap in the area known as the Falkirk Triangle, which is uh kind of section of central Scotland. It covers places like Grangemouth, it covers Falkirk, it covers a little village called And from around the 1992 onwards, there was a lot of talk about UFOs being seen in the skies above there. >> Well, nearly a thousand people have attended a packed meeting at Falkirk Town Hall hoping to find the truth behind thousands of claimed UFO sightings over Bonnybridge.

5:05 >> I'm jumping out of the edit here. The so-called Falkirk Triangle witnessed an incredibly high number of UFO sightings during the '90s. At the time, the media hype was huge. >> Where have you come from? Birmingham. >> To find uh the answers if there is any. >> This area is supposed to be rather it's quite a hot spot for UFOs, so just wanted to see if what the experts were going to say. >> The people in here have paid £2 a time for the privilege of finding out what may or may not be in the skies over Bonnybridge. Many of them want to know the answers. In a poll, a third of the audience said they'd seen UFOs. They'd come looking for an answer to things they couldn't explain. Instead, they heard things they couldn't understand. Phyllis Schlemmer claims to have been kidnapped by aliens twice, and she says she receives messages from the Council of Nine, believed to be a group of >> The Council of Nine are nine beings, pure energy light. They're not physical beings. They say that they are nine principles of the universe. They

6:05 talk about planet Earth being the paradise of the universe, the prototype for the paradise of the universe, the uh planet in the entire universe that individual free will. >> Coverage like this put Scotland in the center of the UFO map, but it's hard to know if the hysteria was a product of the media circus that surrounded all the sightings, or if it was just part of the wider obsession with extraterrestrial life that people had in the '90s. >> I was sitting there one day, and I'm always looking at the sky, and I've never seen anything. >> I have seen flashes, yes, but I wouldn't say there was anything alien at all. No. >> I couldn't believe it myself, but there is something, obviously, different. Goes on in the universe. >> It was a time when magazines which cover strange phenomena like 40 times were selling hundreds of thousands of copies. There was a TV program based on that magazine. And one of the biggest things at the time was The X-Files, which came out in 1993, TV program about researchers trying to

7:05 find out an overarching conspiracy to hide from us that UFOs are alien visitors, and that kind of conspiracy to cover this up, and to cover up what they were doing to us. And that was an enormous thing, and it really all built into a kind of atmosphere of people being interested in this sort of stuff, and I think that's really interesting culturally. But on the ground, you just had people in that area apparently phoning in detail after detail of what was happening in the skies above. >> It was a big like a big disc, and the colors are started off white, then you see the are colors coming up through it, then they went back to white, and they started started moving. >> I knew it wasn't a helicopter. I don't believe in anything, but I just give any explanation. >> She was worried, "Is that a UFO?" And I said, "Jane, don't be daft." And she started laughing after that. >> Now, there have been a lot of explanations for what this might have been. You could talk about You could talk about mass hysteria. You could talk about people seeing things, but if

8:06 you know, there's an old adage that the act of observing something changes the thing being observed. And so, if people are looking up more, and people are actually looking for this, they might be seeing them. >> Okay. Back to the Calvin photograph. I still have a few questions. Andrew Robinson, a colleague of Dr. David Clark at Sheffield Uni, confirmed the photo was real. It hadn't been It doesn't prove the object was an alien craft. It just means the image wasn't edited later. Whatever's in that frame had to be there when the shutter clicked. Now, there is no doubt some big mysteries We never found out the identities of the two men who took the photo. The Daily Record didn't explain why they dropped the story. There's no trace of the Harrier jet or its pilot. And why did the MOD keep the original photo locked away for decades? Can any of it be explained? >> Probably the most interesting, probably the most realistic idea of what was seen there is that this was some kind of military hardware. And

9:07 the research is going on. There are people living in Calvin, and the researchers from Sheffield Hallam University are still digging into this. As they say, you know, a mystery is a great thing for a journalist. You want to solve it, and you want to know what's going on. So, they're going to keep doing that. And who knows? At any point, something else might come out that lets us know what actually was in the skies above Calvin that night in August 1990. >> So, perhaps this is a mystery that will always sit just out of reach. But then again, stories like this have a habit of surprising us. And who knows, the next piece of the puzzle may already be out there. You may be surprised by this, but the BBC has done loads of reporting on UFO sightings across the UK. You can find out all of these and more on the BBC News website. See you next time.