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 [0:09] Highlands. But is it real, fake or something stranger? A helicopter, it's no aeroplane, [0:19] it's a UFO. Whatever you might think, this photo refuses to be forgotten. Ah yes, this is the [0:34] Calvin photo, this is the one we're talking about. It's a great image, I mean people refer to it as [0:40] the best or one of the best images of a UFO ever taken. That's Craig Williams, a BBC journalist [0:46] who's agreed to help me go back in time to understand what happened. I've asked them to [0:50] meet the team in the BBC archive vault. It's a good location to discuss a story with more twists and [0:55] turns than a Spielberg plot. Only quieter and more Scottish. So as far as we know, in August the 4th, [1:01] 1990, two guys who were working as chefs in Pit Lockery went for a walk after work. During the [1:07] course of their walk, what they told is that they saw an object hanging in the air. They described it [1:15] as being fairly big, probably around about 80 feet or so is what you can kind of guess from the [1:20] photographs that we've now seen. It was diamond shaped, it apparently didn't make a noise or in [1:26] some retellings of it, this is it maybe made a low hum and it was hanging in the air above the glen [1:32] that they were walking in. They were a bit freaked by it, they hid by the side of the glen beside a fence [1:38] which is what we see in the photograph and they took six snaps of this. And in the course of taking the [1:46] snaps, what is now seen to be a Harrier jet, which was an RAF jet that was in service at the time, [1:52] flew around it and flew by it and that's pictured in the actual photograph. They said they grabbed [1:58] these six photographs and then they went about their way. In the course of watching it, at some [2:03] point this aircraft, or whatever you want to call it, lifted vertically very, very quickly. So it went up [2:10] the way quite fast and that was the last they saw of it. Here's what happened next. So the two men [2:18] sent the photos to the Daily Record, one of the biggest tabloids in Scotland at the time. The [2:23] paper wanted an official statement from the Ministry of Defence about the photos. So they got in contact [2:28] with the press officer, a guy called Craig Lindsay. Remember that name. Craig Lindsay took statements from [2:34] the two men, wrote up a report, sent it to his superiors down in London. The Daily Record never ran [2:41] the story or printed the photos, completely out of character for a tabloid at that time. But that wasn't the [2:47] only weird thing. According to Craig Lindsay, later that year or quite soon afterwards, [2:53] he went down to London for a standard meeting that he would always have with his bosses in [2:57] the Ministry of Defence. And he went up to the office of the people who dealt with this sort of [3:00] thing. And when he went into the office, there was a massive blown up poster of the wall of one of the [3:06] images. So obviously he was, you know, interested to know why they were looking at this and asked them [3:11] about it. What they said to him was that it was being dealt with. So it seems the MOD did look into the [3:17] strange sighting. At least at one point, the photograph remained undisturbed in the National [3:21] Archives until 2009, when investigative journalist and academic Dr David Clark discovered the [3:27] reproduction of the image. His subsequent search for answers lasted more than a decade [3:32] and ultimately led him to Craig Lindsay. So he phoned Craig Lindsay, who by then was long [3:37] retired in his 80s, living in Fife, gave him a call and he says that the first thing Craig Lindsay [3:43] said to him is, I know what you're phoning about and I've been waiting for this for 30 years. [3:46] In Craig Lindsay's garage lay another copy of the Calvin UFO photo. His copy had been [3:52] sitting untouched in a file for more than 30 years. All it took was a phone call. The photo [3:57] was finally published by the Daily Mail in 2022 and its resurfacing was widely discussed online. [4:02] But the Calvin photo isn't the only UFO mystery to come out of Scotland during that period. [4:08] You've heard of the Bermuda Triangle, tales that there's life on Mars. But strange goings on in [4:13] Bonnie Bridge, Scotland, doesn't have quite the same ring about it. Yet the villagers there have [4:19] come across a host of unexplained happenings that would have ex-file scriptwriters scrabbling for [4:24] their pens. What made me look into the story was the fact that in the 1990s, just about 30 years ago, [4:31] there was this extraordinary amount of coverage given to what those in UFO circles call a flap in the [4:38] area known as the Falkirk Triangle, which is a kind of section of central Scotland which covers [4:44] places like Grangemouth, it covers Falkirk, it covers a little village called Bonnie Bridge. [4:49] And from around 1992 onwards, there was a lot of talk about UFOs being seen in the skies above there. [4:55] Nearly a thousand people have attended a packed meeting at Falkirk Town Hall hoping to find the [5:00] truth behind thousands of claimed UFO sightings over Bonnie Bridge. [5:04] I'm jumping out of the edit here. The so-called Falkirk Triangle witnessed an incredibly high [5:09] number of UFO sightings during the 90s. At the time, the media hype was huge. [5:14] Where have you come from? Birmingham. To find out the answers, you have to raise any. [5:22] This area is supposed to be rather, it's quite a hot spot for UFOs, so I just wanted to see what the [5:28] experts were going to say. The people in here have paid two pounds a time for the privilege of finding [5:32] out what may or may not be in the skies over Bonnie Bridge. Many of them want to know the answers. [5:37] In a poll, a third of the audience said they'd seen UFOs. They'd come looking for an answer to [5:42] things they couldn't explain. Instead, they heard things they couldn't understand. Phyllis Schlemmer [5:47] claims to have been kidnapped by aliens twice, and she says she receives messages from the Council of [5:52] Nine, believed to be a group of extraterrestrials. The Council of Nine are nine beings, pure energy, [6:01] light. They're not physical beings that say that they are nine principles of the universe. [6:05] They talk about planet Earth being the paradise of the universe, the prototype for the paradise [6:11] of the universe, the only planet in the entire universe that has individual free will. [6:18] Coverage like this put Scotland in the centre of the UFO map, but it's hard to know if the hysteria [6:25] was a product of the media circus that surrounded all the sightings, or if it was just part of the [6:29] wider obsession with extraterrestrial life that people had in the 90s. [6:33] I'm always sitting in the window and I'm always looking at the sky and I've never seen nothing. [6:36] I have seen flashes, yes, but I wouldn't say there was anything alien at all, no. [6:41] I firmly believe in myself there is something obviously different that goes on in the universe. [6:47] It was a time when magazines which cover strange phenomena like 14 times were selling hundreds of [6:52] thousands of copies. There was a TV programme based on that magazine, and one of the biggest things at [6:57] the time was the X-Files which came out in 1993, an American TV programme about researchers trying to [7:05] find out an overarching conspiracy to hide from us that UFOs are alien visitors, and that kind of [7:12] conspiracy to cover this up and to cover up what they were doing to us. And that was an enormous thing, [7:18] and it really all built into a kind of atmosphere of people being interested in this sort of stuff, [7:23] and I think that's really interesting culturally. But on the ground you just had people in that area [7:29] apparently phoning in detail after detail of what was happening in the skies above. [7:34] It was like a big disk and the colours started off white, you see the red colours coming up through it, [7:41] then I went back to white, and it started moving. I knew it wasn't a helicopter or a balloon or anything, [7:49] but I just couldn't give you an explanation. She goes, Barry, is that a UFO? And I said, Jane, [7:54] didn't I talk daft? I just started laughing after that. There have been a lot of explanations for what [7:59] this might have been. You could talk about mass hysteria, you could talk about people seeing things, [8:05] but there's an old adage that the act of observing something changes the thing being observed, and so if [8:10] people are looking up more, and people are actually looking for this, they might be seeing them. [8:16] Okay, back to the Calvin photograph. I still have a few questions. Andrew Robinson, a colleague of [8:22] Dr David Clark at Sheffield Uni, confirmed the photo was real. It hadn't been faked. It doesn't [8:29] prove the object was an alien craft, it just means the image wasn't edited later. Whatever's in that frame [8:35] had to be there when the shutter clicked. Now, there is no doubt some big mysteries remain. We never found [8:42] out the identities of the two men who took the photo. The Daily Record didn't explain why they dropped [8:47] the story. There's no trace of the Harrier jet or its pilot. And why did the MOD keep the original photo [8:54] locked away for decades? Can any of it be explained? Probably the most interesting, probably the most [9:01] realistic idea of what was seen there is that this was some kind of military hardware. And the research [9:08] is going on. There are people living in Calvin and the researchers from Sheffield Hallam University are [9:13] still digging into this. As they say, you know, a mystery is a great thing for a journalist. You want [9:19] to solve it and you want to know what's going on. So they're going to keep doing that. And who knows, [9:25] at any point, something else might come out that lets us know what actually was in the skies above [9:29] Calvin that night in August 1990. So perhaps this is a mystery that will always set just out of reach. [9:36] But then again, stories like this have a habit of surprising us. And who knows, [9:40] the next piece of the puzzle might already be out there. You might be surprised by this, [9:45] but the BBC has done loads of reporting on UFO sightings across the UK. [9:49] You can find out all of these and more on the BBC News website. See you next time.