On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre craft shot away vertically and disappeared.
Craig Lindsay was a press officer at the RAF base in Pitreavie Castle in Dunfermline, 80 kilometers away, when the Daily Record got in touch a few days later. The hikers, who worked as chefs at Fisher’s Hotel in Pitlochry, had sent six photos of the diamond to the newspaper and told their story. The Record’s picture editor, Andy Allen, sent Lindsay the best of the bunch.
Lindsay had never seen such a clear photograph of a supposed UFO, so he forwarded the picture to the Ministry of Defense (MoD), which told him to ask the Record to send the other five photographs and their negatives. The MoD also instructed him to phone the hikers, which he did. One of them told Lindsay the whole story: the diamond, the jet, how it levitated eerily with no sound and accelerated with no obvious propellant.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The MoD told Lindsay to leave the case with them. He pushed the diamond to the back of his mind.
That autumn, Lindsay attended a routine meeting in London. On his lunch break, he went for a wander around the MoD’s offices and saw something familiar.
“There, on the wall in front of me, was a great big poster-size print of the best of them [the photographs]. So, I spoke to the guys that were there and I asked them what their other photographs were like.”
The ministry’s staff placed the other photographs on a windowsill. The snaps showed the Harrier jet moving from the right side of the frame to the left, while the diamond didn’t move an inch.
He quizzed some of the specialists who had investigated the photos. They told him there was no evidence of a hoax, but they didn’t know what the diamond was.
“I gradually forgot all about the thing,” says Lindsay. “Nothing had appeared from the first inquiry … I assumed that everything had just been forgotten.”
The Record didn’t run the story, the hikers never spoke publicly about the photos and the images weren’t seen by the public for 32 years.
‘LE CARRE THRILLER’
David Clarke, a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, worked as a reporter in the 1990s. When Clarke was beginning his career in journalism, his editor told him he needed to be an expert in something if he wanted to be successful. Clarke was studying for a PhD in folklore, so his editor handed him the spooky beat.
“You know, everything weird: UFOs, ghosts, ESP [extrasensory perception], remote viewing,” Clarke says.
He says his research into Calvine has had “more twists and turns than a John le Carre thriller.”
Clarke became aware of the Calvine UFO in 1996 when Nick Pope, a former civil servant with the MoD, published Open Skies, Closed Minds, a book on ufology. Pope is sometimes known as “the real Fox Mulder” because of his work on the MoD’s “UFO desk.” In the book, he touches on Calvine, describing the case as “one of the most intriguing in the Ministry of Defense’s files.”
He says that MoD analysis found that the photos were “not fakes” and concluded “object unexplained, case closed, no further action.”
Clarke read the book, but didn’t think much of Calvine until more than a decade later.
By 2009, he was using his encyclopedic knowledge of UFOs to curate the release of thousands of UFO documents for the National Archives. Among the papers was a photocopied drawing of a diamond shape next to a plane. Alongside the sketch was a note intended for defense ministers in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. Under the heading “Defensive lines to take,” it read: “Have looked at the photographs, no definite conclusions reached regarding large diamond-shaped object. Confident that jet aircraft is a Harrier. Have no record of Harriers operating in location at stated date/time. No other reports received by MoD of unusual air activity or sightings at location/date/time.”
Clarke’s colleague analyzed the image. Whatever the diamond was, it was a real object in a genuine photograph
Clarke endeavored to track down the source of the photograph, but reached a dead end. He phoned the Record and spoke to the news editor and the picture editor, but they said they couldn’t find any trace of the Calvine pictures and no one else at the paper remembered them.
Over the next decade, Clarke continued to visit the National Archives to browse UFO files as they became declassified. In 2018, he struck gold: he discovered that the MoD had failed to redact the name of a former official from its Defense Intelligence department.
“If there was a UFO investigator, it was him,” Clarke says.
He won’t reveal the identity of the investigator, but says he had an unusual name: “I just typed it into the internet … and, lo and behold, I was on his LinkedIn page. Within a couple of minutes, I was on the phone to him.”
Clarke asked the former UFO hunter if he had seen anything “truly inexplicable” during his time at the MoD. The intelligence officer immediately mentioned “a couple of poachers up in Scotland” who in 1990 had photographed a peculiar object and sent the pictures to the Record. The officer told Clarke that the photographs caused a stink around the ministry and that they knew what the object was: an experimental craft belonging to the US. From here, the trail quickly led to Lindsay.
When Lindsay took Clarke’s call in 2019, he told him: “I’ve been waiting for someone to call me about this for 30 years.”
Lindsay eventually gave Clark a copy of the photo, which he published in August 2022. The story went viral.
WHERE IS THE PHOTOGRAPHER?
The identity of the man (or men) who took the photographs remains a mystery, as does the identity of the diamond. Some ufologists think that because the diamond looks like no known terrestrial aircraft, it must be an alien spaceship, or possibly a craft recreated on Earth based on a crashed alien vessel. Others say it is evidence of Aurora, an alleged reconnaissance aircraft developed by a clandestine outfit in the US military, purportedly responsible for significant advancements in aviation technology. But there is little evidence of the program’s existence.
Another reason to suspect the diamond could be a UFO is the story Richard Grieve told The Program. Grieve said he worked with the hikers in the kitchen of the Fisher’s Hotel. He said they were having a cigarette break one rainy evening when a black car pulled into the car park. Grieve claimed two men in dark suits got out and barked: “Break time is over,” while beckoning the hikers. “They were fucking spooks; they were men in black. And they stood outside in the pissing rain speaking to them,” Grieve said.
According to Grieve, the pair returned to the hotel looking “white as a fucking ghost. Something happened to them. They’ve seen something. Whoever came out of the car scared the absolute crap out of them.”
By refusing to comment, the MoD is simply feeding the conspiracy theories
Grieve said the men were not the same afterwards. They drank heavily, took days off work and slept in their cars outside the hotel. Grieve claimed the pair vanished without trace four weeks later.
“Chefs don’t just disappear out of the kitchen for 34 years and not have no other job. You don’t just fuck off and never work again. Where are they?”
The one organization that could end all the speculation is the MoD.
“I am afraid we no longer offer comment on UFOs/UAPs [unidentified aerial phenomena] etc,” said an MoD spokesperson, adding that a quick Google search could solve the mystery.
They also sent a link to an article in the Daily Express featuring a hypothesis that the diamond is a mountain peak covered by fog — an idea that Clarke says his photography expert has debunked.
“The MoD could easily clear up this mystery by releasing the conclusions of the analysis they carried out on the images in 1990 and 1992,” Clarke says. “If this concluded the photos were faked, it can be released without having to release personal information about the photographer. By refusing to comment, they are simply feeding the conspiracy theories and the idea that they are hiding something.”
To the hikers, he says: “It is the 35th anniversary of what has been described as the best UFO photo ever taken. Now is the time to come forward and tell us what really happened.”
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