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
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.
Some observations. Firstly, the idea that this is an American aircraft so secret that 33 years later the public still don't know it exists being tested in a foreign country a very long way from the USA is just plain daft. A hypersonic aircraft must by definition have a top speed of at least Mach 5, so this thing should be capable of flying at 4,000 mph or more. If something zips by at that speed, you need to be awfully quick off the mark to snap even one photo, let alone five!
You could of course argue that it was being testflown at less than a tenth of its normal operating speed. But wouldn't that kind of baby-steps preliminary testing be done at somewhere like Area 51 rather than in a distant foreign country over public land in broad daylight accompanied by extremely noisy fighter planes? It's true that the area is thinly populated and Calvine is a tiny village, but it's only 100m from the A9, one of the three main roads to the North of Scotland.
Also, it frankly doesn't look like any kind of feasible aircraft. Unless that picture was taken at a moment when it happened to be swooping in a curve and its wings were pointed vertically, a possibility we can totally discount if it looks the same shape in the other pictures, it's either an aircraft designed to operate with its wings at an angle which entirely defeats the purpose of it having wings at all, or it has two sets of wings at 90º to each other, which apart from anything else would render it not so much "radar-invisible" as "very, very radar-visible indeed".
Now, if it was supposed to be a huge target of some kind being towed by another aircraft for training purposes (google "dart aerial gunnery target" for pictures of something similar), that I could accept. And since the towing cable may be thousands of feet long, the aircraft at the other end probably wouldn't be in the same picture. Though you'd think people would have noticed. And even if they somehow didn't, why would there be any secrecy about that?
But if we assume it's neither a secret weapon from this planet nor a spaceship from another one, and is in fact a small model suspended from the branch visible at the top of the picture, none of this is a problem. And since it doesn't look much like most classic UFOs (though as Wim van Utrecht points out, it does bear a suspiciously close resemblance to one particular UFO photo taken shortly before 1990 which is definitely a hoax), it's probable that rather than going to the trouble of crafting a purpose-built model spaceship, the hoaxer used some object he happened to already own.
Wim van Utrecht goes to great, and in my view, excessive lengths to demonstrate that it could have been a certain type of Christmas decoration. But why would a hoaxer choose something that had to be photographed from exactly the right angle for the illusion to work? Especially if the object has to be dangled on a string outdoors, where the slightest breeze will ruin the shot? Personally I'd pick something which looks equally convincing from any angle. So what might a Scotsman with an outdoor lifestyle have which is that shape?
Well, how about a fishing float? Many thousands of types of float currrently exist, and doubtless many thousands more have gone off the market since 1990, so I'm not going to waste my time attempting to find one absolutely identical to the object in the photo, but it's very easy to find plenty which are near-as-dammit. In particular, an X-shaped cross-section may be a silly configuration for an aircraft, but it's an excellent one for something which is meant to maintain a stable position while floating upright in water. And doesn't that appendage on the right, which I suppose you'd say was either a rocket nozzle or a ray-gun depending on which end is meant to be the front, look rather like a thing for tying a fishing line to?
The only problem with using a fishing float as an improvised extraterrestrial starship is that they tend to be brightly coloured in a way that says "small plastic thing" as opposed to be "huge metal thing". So for this method to work your casual snapshots would, somewhat unusually for the modern era, have to be in black and white. Just like the picture above.
Of course I could be wrong about the fishing float, just as Wim van Utrecht could be, and most likely is, wrong about the Christmas decoration. It might, for example, be an ornamental spearhead broken off a rusty old gate. But not being able to identify the exact item, which might be almost impossible if it happens to be something really obscure (there's still a certain amount of confusion as to what the famous Adamski flying saucer from Venus actually was, though the prevailing opinion seems to be that it was the upper part of a certain obsolete type of chicken brooder) doesn't invalidate the argument that the UFO is a small object suspended on a thread unless the evidence shows that this is intrinsically impossible, or at least unlikely.
Apart from the testimony of the witnesses, which they could simply have made up, the only real evidence that this picture genuinely shows a conventional aircraft in the same shot as a huge and extremely unconventional flying machine is purely circumstantial, and based on probability. Wim van Utrecht admits you'd have to be implausibly lucky to set up a pretend UFO dangling from a tree and then have a couple of RAF jets serendipitously turn up to improve the shot. Therefore he suggests that the Harriers were toys dangling from fishing rods, a conjecture you contemptuously dismiss as totally implausible compared to all other possible explanations, because the idea of more than two people being involved in a UFO hoax is less believable than the RAF covering up all those times they've been called out to cope with space invaders.
Could I suggest a third possibility? As a resident of Scotland who used to live in a fairly remote area sometimes used by the RAF for exercises - round about the same time as these photos were taken, as it happens, though not anywhere near Calvine - I know, as does anyone who has ever lived in such a place, that once the planes show up, they'll probably be doing their thing for several hours, most likely several days in a row. And since they want to avoid any chance of civilian casualties if there's an accident, they have flight-plans that avoid any clusters of human habitation bigger than a farm.
Therefore their movements are somewhat predictable. Sufficently so that if you see a couple of jets roaring over a piece of terrain some distance away, you can be fairly sure they'll overfly it several more times over the next few hours, and probably again tomorrow. No need for any fiddly business with wee toy planes on fishing rods; just suspend your flying saucer in front of a piece of sky recently vacated by the RAF and wait for them to come back again.
It is indeed a mistake to theorise before one is in full possession of the facts, though under the circumstances, quoting a fictional character invented by a man who for reasons totally unconnected with logic allowed himself to believe so much nonsense that he ended up falling for one of the silliest photographic hoaxes ever is perhaps not the best choice you could have made.
I dont know about that object specifically. I see it as a triangulation process. The more "sublte evidence" the more I believe in it. I saw UAPs 2008 myself and I read some science back then – there was no technology publicly out there capable of what I have seen. It were about 8-12 light balls flying in the heavens. Back then, I did not even tell anybody because what would you expect from people to answer? Nowadays, fortunately, the times are shifting. I am very certain that there are these "effects" or phenomena, I dont know what they "suffice" to. I have not seen a UFO but as I have seen UAP I can imagine there are also UFOs and those are "metal-like" objects – so to out best knowledge they were created by somebody. The alternative would be that nature has grown them – what would be even harder to imagine than some (a) secretly hidden presence of earth (maybe originating from earth) or (b) some space-faring civilization. There would be some "weird" third option. Something to do with idealism and how the universe operates. Mix a bit Ludwig Boltzmann in it but then you land at solipsim. So, everything would just be your or mankinds imagination. I try to pick the most likely choice and that is either something like Atlantis or beings from another star system. From what I read there are over 200 space-faring civilizations known. I guess that this century mankind will meet those beings. But if it is 5 years or 80 I cannot know. And btw: There is one last option I forgot about: A hidden group of humans having this secret technology. But I rather give it to a "higher species" than other humans. Back then, they called them gods. Some called it "god". Whatever you name it. My best guess is that it is a higher intelligence of any kind.
Greets