‘Best’ UFO photo of all time, photo of Calvine, found after 30 years of disappearance

On August 4, 1990, two hikers near Calvine in Scotland took a photo of a mysterious diamond-shaped flying object hovering in the middle of the sky.

For 32 years, this image, dubbed the “Calvin photo”, disappeared from the public eye, becoming the subject of speculation, theories and myths. But now the groundbreaking image has finally resurfaced thanks to the efforts of British journalist David Clarke.

After 13 years of research, Clarke – who has worked as a curator for Britain’s National Archives and is currently an associate professor at Sheffield Hallam University – has discovered that the former Royal Air Force (RAF) press officer ) Craig Lindsay had kept a copy of the last remaining original print, waiting for someone to find out about the mysterious image.

In the photo – one of a series of six hikers are said to have taken – a diamond-shaped object can be seen flying across the sky, while a fighter jet can be spotted in the background not too far away from him.

This is the first time the public has had access to the elusive image, which has been described as the best UFO photo ever taken.

In 1990 the two hikers brought the picture to Scotland Daily recording newspaper for publication. But instead, the newspaper handed the image over to the UK Ministry of Defence, which has kept it secret until now.

“The Daily recordingThe editor at the time sent them to Craig Lindsay, who was the RAF press officer in Scotland. He forwarded the print to the Ministry of Defense in London, the Ministry of Defense in London then asked him to obtain the negatives. So he went back to the Daily Record, asked the Daily Record to send the negatives to London, which they duly did – surprisingly enough – and that’s where they disappeared.”

Clarke writes that the information related to the photo, as well as the image, should normally have been released now, as 30 years have passed.

But the identities of the two hikers who took the photo are still unknown and are not expected to be revealed until 2072, as the Ministry of Defense cited “privacy issues”.

“Surprisingly, despite all the publicity, the two guys who took the pictures never came forward,” Clarke said. Newsweek.

“The negatives have never been seen since they arrived at the MoD. Now the MoD says they have returned them to the Daily recordingbut the Daily recording say they never received them and have no idea what happened to them. So there are a lot of questions that need to be answered.”

What does the photo show?

While we don’t know what happened to the men who took the photo, we do know what they described 32 years ago.

According to what Lindsay told Clarke, the pair were working as cooks at a hotel in Pitlochry, in the Scottish Highlands, when one summer evening they decided to go for a walk in the hills near Calvine.

While walking, the two spotted a huge diamond-shaped flying object, moving silently across the sky.

“They saw this thing in the sky and it scared them,” Clarke said. Newsweek.

“They ran into a forest to keep their heads down, and they heard this jet coming down the valley, then two minutes later it came back and started circling the object. And that’s when ‘they took the pictures.

It is still unclear whether what the two men saw that summer evening in 1990 was in fact a UFO, as the two men then believed.

Clarke had the photo analyzed by one of his colleagues, Senior Lecturer in Photography at Sheffield Hallam University Andrew Robinson, who said the image shows no signs of manipulation.

“It follows that it is either a real unidentified flying object in the sky,” Robinson’s report states, “or that any construction or manipulation used to create this effect occurred on camera. not in the capture of the scene on film nor in the subsequent processing and printing of the image.”

Lindsay is also convinced that the image is not a hoax.

But while Clarke admits the photo is “by far the best UFO photograph” he’s ever seen, the reporter says he doesn’t believe the object in the image is actually an alien flying saucer .

“Unfortunately, I don’t believe this mysterious plane arrived from another galaxy,” Clarke wrote in an article he published in the Daily mail. “I believe it was man-made somewhere in a secret shed – and anything remains on the secret and highly sensitive list.”

He thinks the mysterious flying object could have been ‘the Aurora’, a top-secret reconnaissance plane the US allegedly built in the 1980s, although there has never been evidence of such a project, and the US government has always denied its existence.

“While there has never been substantial evidence that it was ever built or flown, there have been numerous unexplained sightings and incidents in the US and UK over the years which have fueled the Aurora mythos, including Calvin,” Clarke wrote.

Although Clarke is “100% sure that someone somewhere in the military establishment in Britain or the United States knows exactly what the photo shows“, the journalist also admits that it is possible that the image could be anything, including a prank.

“The other option is that this is all a prank, a prank that got out of control,” Clarke said. Newsweek.

“The purpose of publishing this story is hopefully to get either the photographers themselves, or someone who knows the photographers, or knows something about the circumstances, to come forward and solve the mystery. .”

Newsweek contacted the Pentagon and the UK Ministry of Defense for comment.

Update, 8/15/2022 12:15 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to include an interview with David Clarke.