The Calvine UFO photo: an unsolved mystery

They say that nature abhors a vacuum and that is definitely true in the case of the mysterious Calvine UFO photographs

One of the six images showing a mysterious object shadowed by a military jet taken at the hamlet of Calvine in Scotland, on the afternoon of 4 August 1990…with the caption written by a picture editor on the staff of the Scottish Daily Record.

Last week the Scottish Daily Record reignited the hunt for the elusive photographer when it revealed the name Kevin Russell. That name appears on the reverse of the print that was processed in their Glasgow office in August 1990, before the paper turned over the negatives to the Ministry of Defence.

The Calvine investigation team, with whom I have been working, were aware of the name since early last year, but we decided not to release it until we had done everything possible to trace Russell using publicly available sources.

But despite a ten month investigation, during which our team contacted more than 200 people in Scotland and further afield who share that name, no one has ‘fessed up to the being the Kevin Russell.

Our inquiries established that a man of that name, at that time in his mid-20s, both lived and worked at the Pitlochry Hydro Hotel in 1990-91 as a kitchen porter. Those who worked with him said he came from Glasgow or Falkirk (a town close to the so-called ‘Bonnybridge Triangle’ UFO flap zone of the mid-1990s). But despite wide media publicity no new leads have emerged…adding to the growing mystery.

How can someone disappear so completely? Has he emigrated? Or been abducted by aliens or MIB? Even so, one would expect his family or friends to know something about this story.

In the absence of a resolution the legend has continued to grow and move in some very odd directions. Since the only first-generation print of the iconic image was released, via my Daily Mail exclusive in August 2022, online debate has raged about its reality status.

The lack of an immediate satisfactory resolution to the mystery created a level of intolerable psychological dissonance among those who are fascinated by the story. American folklorist and legend scholar Bill Ellis in his book Aliens, Ghosts and Cults (2001) talks about how people keep rumours and ambiguous events alive, via a debate about their reality status that both create and sustain modern legends.

This type of heated debate as to whether a story or a photograph is ‘true’ or ‘false’, is characteristic of UFOlogy. The skeptics and believers are both playing roles in the creation of the Calvine legend, with story-tellers (such as myself) providing the raw materials. The dialectic becomes most intense when these sub-cultures come into contact with each other.

Since the Calvine story broke social media has been buzzing with competing and contradictory theories. Believers in the ETH see the photograph as validating beliefs they already hold about the alien presence on Earth and the government cover-up. On the other extreme are the skeptics who seek to dismiss the image as ‘just another’ obviously hoaxed UFO photograph. From their perspective as UFOs (and other exotic aerial objects) do not exist the photo must by definition be false. All that has to be done is to establish, to their satisfaction, how the hoax was carried out….but there lies the problem.

One of the earliest and most bizarre of all the theories suggests the photo is actually an inverted image not of a UFO hovering in a cloudy evening sky, but a rock or island submerged in a perfectly still body of water! What appears to be a Harrier jet manoeuvring below it is actually a man in a rowing boat. Some of the original promoters of this theory including Simon Holland, of whom more later, abandoned this idea when analysis of the photograph established that clouds were visible and angles were all wrong for it to be a reflection. But there are still folks on Twitter who continue to believe it holds water.

More convincingly, Belgian skeptic Wim van Utrecht, put forward a carefully argued case that the diamond-shaped UFO is actually a small model hanging on a thin thread close to the camera. He is convinced the ‘object’ is a five-pointed cardboard ornament of the type commonly used to decorate Christmas trees. But what about the Harrier? Well, according to van Utrecht, that is a tiny model. After suspending the Christmas star from a tree, one of the ingenious pranksters used a fishing rod and moved the small Harrier around the the ‘UFO’ while his companion snapped the pictures.

So far so good…but, as one of the five missing images in the sequence analysed by MoD also actually shows a second more distant Harrier this seems to stretch the fishing rod just a little too far. To quote Sherlock Holmes:

‘…it is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts…’

Step forward film-maker Simon Holland who believes he has single-handedly ‘solved’ the mystery: the diamond shaped object is a stealthy radar-evading platform on a test flight. He believes it was launched from defence contractors BAE systems plant at Warton in Lancashire for the exercise over the Scottish Highlands.

Holland gets around the tricky issue of where the Harriers came from (MoD said none were airborne at the time of the ‘sighting’) by stating they were ‘privately owned’ , presumably by BAE systems.

Privately owned Harriers? If true this would be easy to prove. Has Holland identified them? Of course not. Another source assures me that BAE did not own or operate Harriers and if true they must have been military aircraft on loan.

So theories such as these are entertaining and, in the absence of Kevin Russell (or the original negatives), they help fill that annoying vacuum and resolve a ‘mystery’ - at least for some - that stubbonly refuses to be resolved.

To be fair, when I first looked into the Calvine story, back in 2009 when MoD paperwork was released at The National Archives, I was convinced the photographs were a clever hoax.

The evidence available at that time appeared to suggest as much. It would not be the first time that military intelligence had been fooled by a convincing UFO photograph.

But since that time a mass of new evidence, including the discovery of the first generation print kept by Craig Lindsay, led me more towards the type of idea now promoted by Simon Holland. Namely this was a case of secret military technology on a test flight. My sources suggested the technology was an American stealth platform, operating in the North Atlantic at the time of Operation Granby (the West’s response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait that led to the first Gulf War in 1991). But I have to accept that I may have been led to believe that for reasons best known to my sources.

Now I simply do not know what to believe. All I know, as a journalist, is that it is a cracking good story…and one that, as my former news editor would say, ‘has legs’ (it keeps on running).

What I also know - as a folklorist - is that charting the evolution of the story and the continuing reactions to it, from a spectrum of skeptics and believers, is proving far more interesting and insightful than the true or false status of the photograph itself.

It is a case that would have delighted Charles Fort, who was skeptical of all dogmatic explanations from scientists and others who argue according to their own personal beliefs rather than the rules of evidence.

Who knows where this modern legend will go next. But if you want to keep up to date with the latest developments, check out this investigative update released on YouTube by the Disclosure Team on 10 March.

It features Vinnie Adams, Matthew Illsley, Giles Stevens and me talking about the quest to find the photographer and the other avenues we have been following in our attempts to resolve the case.

And keep watching this space for more updates.