Calvine is a small settlement on the old A9 road in Glen Garry, in Highland Perthshire north-west of Pitlochry, surrounded by open moorland and hills. Its name is now attached to a single photograph sometimes billed as one of the best UFO pictures ever taken, which for three decades almost nobody had seen.
What happened
According to the account given at the time, two young men walking in the hills above Calvine on August 4, 1990 watched a big object shaped like a diamond hang overhead while a military jet flew close by. They took six color photographs and passed them to the Scottish Daily Record in Glasgow.
The paper never ran them. Instead its picture desk sent a print to Craig Lindsay, the RAF press officer for Scotland at RAF Pitreavie Castle near Edinburgh, who made photocopies and faxed them to the Ministry of Defence in London. The negatives followed and reached the ministry on September 10. Lindsay spoke by phone to one of the men, who worked at a hotel in Pitlochry, but did not keep his name. At the MoD the images were copied onto transparencies and examined by the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre, whose analysts noted a second, fainter Harrier jet in one frame.
The investigation
Nothing more was heard officially until 1996, when a defense minister, Nicholas Soames, told the House of Commons that air defense staff had examined the negatives and not kept them because they showed nothing of defense significance. When the MoD’s file on the case, DEFE 24/1940/1, was opened at The National Archives in 2009, it held only degraded photocopies. An unredacted report, which may name the witnesses, is closed under data protection rules until 2076.
The picture resurfaced in 2022, when David Clarke, a journalist and folklore researcher at Sheffield Hallam University, tracked down Lindsay in retirement. Lindsay had kept the 10×8-inch print the Daily Record sent him, still in its original envelope, since 1990. He donated it to the university’s special collections, and the Daily Mail published it as a double-page story on August 12, 2022.
The photograph shows a wire fence and trees in the foreground and, above them, a large dark angular object, roughly diamond-shaped, with a small jet off to one side. Andrew Robinson, a photography lecturer at the university, examined the print and in a revised report in 2024 concluded it was without doubt a genuine copy of the image the MoD studied. It is a black-and-white print made from a copy negative of an original color print, probably on the newspaper’s own processing machine. The film grain showed no sign of darkroom or negative manipulation, so if anything was faked it was faked in front of the camera. Assuming a standard lens, he estimated the object at 30 to 40 meters long and the aircraft at about 755 meters away and 117 meters above the ground, with an outline consistent with a Harrier. The name written on the back of the print belongs to a former hotel worker who says he knows nothing about it, and the photographers remain unidentified. Robinson suggested An Teampan, a summit on Struan Point south of Calvine, as a possible location but could not confirm it.
The explanations
Suggestions have included a secret aircraft, perhaps an American stealth or hypersonic design; a rock or piece of wood in a still loch, photographed so that its reflection looks like a floating object; a hilltop poking through low cloud; and a hoax using a model hung close to the camera. The researcher Wim van Utrecht proposed a cardboard star ornament hung from a tree, with a model jet on a fishing line. Robinson judged the reflection theory unlikely, because the supposed reflection is too light and shows no water surface, but could not rule it out. Answering questions from the MP Louise Haigh in 2022, the government said it held no further records, that any secret American aircraft was a matter for Washington, and that it had no evidence one had flown in Britain.
Where it stands
The case rests on one photograph whose chain of custody is now well documented and whose subject is not. Without the two men, the other five frames or the original color negatives, there is no way to establish the object’s size or distance, or to exclude a model. The picture is genuine as a photograph; what it shows remains unproven.