Classic cases · United Kingdom · Classic case

Calvine, 1990: a diamond-shaped object, a fighter jet and one surviving photo

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On the evening of August 4, 1990, two young men took six photographs on the moors above Calvine, Scotland. The pictures show a diamond-shaped object and a military jet. The negatives went to the UK Ministry of Defence and then disappeared. A single print survives, and it is still unknown who took it or what it shows.

When: August 4, 1990
Where: Calvine, United Kingdom
Witnesses: two young men working at hotels in Pitlochry, still unidentified
Official position: the UK Ministry of Defence and JARIC examined the negatives but reached no definite conclusion about the object. In 1996 the ministry said they contained nothing of defence significance.

An August evening in the Highlands

Calvine is a hamlet of a few houses in central Scotland, northwest of Pitlochry, beside the A9 road. According to a handwritten note from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), two people were walking near the village at around 9 p.m. on Saturday, August 4, 1990. They saw a large, diamond-shaped object in the air.

The note says the object hovered for ten minutes, then rose vertically. The witnesses said a Harrier jet made several low passes nearby while they watched. One of them took six color photographs.

Two days earlier, on August 2, Iraq had invaded Kuwait.

Where the negatives went

The photographers took their pictures to the Glasgow newspaper the Daily Record. The paper passed the negatives to the Royal Air Force (RAF) press officer at RAF Pitreavie, and from there they reached the ministry.

The MoD examined the negatives in September 1990. It sent them for detailed analysis to the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre (JARIC) at RAF Brampton. JARIC identified a Harrier and a “barely visible second aircraft” in the images.

The trail of the Calvine negatives. Of the six pictures, only one print is known today. Graphic: Sky Glitch

According to a later reconstruction by Andrew Robinson, the negatives reached the ministry on September 10 and were returned on September 14. Robinson notes that this timeline rests on considerable conjecture.

On January 29, 1992, the DI55 branch of Defence Intelligence sent five acetate copies to JARIC for further work. The tasking said the material required “very special handling.”

The Daily Record never published the pictures. Malcolm Speed, its news editor at the time, said picture editor Andy Allan showed him one image in August 1990. Allan later told him the RAF considered the photos fakes. Speed said nobody ever explained why they were not published.

“Nothing of defence significance”

In September 1990, the ministry prepared a briefing for the minister in case the Daily Record ran the pictures. Its suggested line for reporters read: “Have looked at the photographs, no definite conclusions reached regarding large diamond-shaped object. Confident that jet aircraft is a Harrier.” The briefing added that there was no record of Harriers operating at the stated location and time.

Nick Pope joined the ministry’s air staff secretariat, Sec(AS), in the summer of 1991. The secretariat also handled UFO reports. Pope says a poster-sized color enlargement of one of the Calvine photos hung on the office wall. His head of division later locked it away.

In 1996, MP Martin Redmond asked in Parliament who had removed the photograph from the secretariat’s office and why. Armed Forces Minister Nicholas Soames gave a written answer on July 24. He said staff responsible for air defence had examined a number of negatives. Because they contained nothing of defence significance, the negatives were not retained. There was also no record of any photographs having been made from them.

Only photocopies left

In 2009, the MoD’s UFO files went to The National Archives and were opened to the public. The release was overseen by journalist David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University. In the files he found the handwritten note and two poor, cropped photocopies of the picture. At first, Clarke thought the photos were a hoax.

In answers to Freedom of Information requests, the MoD says it kept no images. JARIC says its records were destroyed after five years unless kept elsewhere. The Daily Record staff who handled the negatives have since died. In 2020, a senior journalist at the paper said the negatives may have been destroyed by accident.

The press officer’s drawer

Clarke spent years searching for the original images. He eventually found Craig Lindsay, the RAF press officer for Scotland who handled the story in 1990. Lindsay had kept a print for 32 years. In June 2022 he donated it to Sheffield Hallam University’s Special Collections. The Daily Mail first published it in August 2022.

Researchers call it the “Lindsay print” to set it apart from the lost originals. It is a slightly cropped black-and-white copy. It shows a flattened, diamond-shaped object, a small blurred aircraft and a fence in the foreground.

In 1990, Lindsay spoke by phone with one witness, who worked in the kitchen of a Pitlochry hotel. Lindsay says the witness described the object hovering silently for four or five minutes, then slowly rising vertically. That differs from the ten minutes in the MoD note. The note does not mention any sound, though Nick Pope’s later account includes a humming noise.

Lindsay’s only public appearance on the case came on August 2, 2025. On the 35th anniversary, he answered questions at a research event in the village hall in Blair Atholl.

Who was Kevin Russell?

The back of the print reads “Copyright Kevin Russell, C/O Daily Record, Glasgow” in red chinagraph pencil. Robinson thinks a Daily Record picture editor probably wrote it.

Clarke’s team traced about 140 Kevin Russells of the right age in Scotland and abroad. None said he was the photographer. A man of that name worked as a kitchen porter at the Pitlochry Hydro Hotel in 1990. He came forward in May 2024 but said he knew nothing about the sighting. He could not explain why his name was on the back of the print.

Former chef Richard Grieve tells a different story. He says the two photographers were chefs who worked with him at Fishers Hotel in Pitlochry, and neither was named Kevin. Grieve recalls that soon afterward, on a stormy evening, three men came to the hotel. Two said they were from the Royal Navy and questioned the chefs. Grieve says both chefs left their jobs soon after.

Lindsay recalls that a receptionist at a Pitlochry hotel put his call through to the witness. He believes it was the Atholl Palace. He threw away his notebooks about ten years ago and cannot remember whether the man was Kevin Russell. The photographers remain unidentified.

What do the sources say? Where the MoD note, Lindsay, Grieve and Robinson differ. Graphic: Sky Glitch

What does the image show?

Andrew Robinson, a photography lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, scanned the print at high resolution and analyzed it. His expanded 2024 report says it is a borderless 10 × 8 inch (25 × 20 cm) print on Kodak color paper. About 17% of the negative’s width was cropped off.

Robinson concludes that the print matches the photocopy faxed from Pitreavie to the ministry in 1990. The film grain runs evenly through the object and the rest of the frame, and there is no sign of a collage or other manipulation. Robinson notes that rephotographing onto coarser film could hide such work, but he considers that unlikely.

According to Robinson, the grain and the printing settings point to black-and-white film, with the print code suggesting Ilford XP-1. The MoD note, however, describes color photographs.

From the field of view and depth of field, Robinson infers a 35–80 mm lens. By his calculations, the fence was about 7–11 m from the camera and the aircraft 530–755 m away. If the aircraft was a Harrier, it was flying at roughly 117 m.

Robinson’s distance estimates. Schematic, not to scale. The object’s size holds only if it really was near the aircraft. Graphic: Sky Glitch

Robinson puts the object’s length at between 20 and 40 m, depending on where it is assumed to be, and favors 30–40 m. That estimate assumes the object was in the air near the aircraft. The image alone does not prove this.

Robinson says weather data for August 4, 1990, showing overcast skies and diffuse light, are consistent with the picture. The image itself cannot confirm the date or the location, which rest on witness accounts.

Where was it taken?

Giles Stevens, a local resident on the research team, proposed An Teampan, the 420 m summit of Struan Point south of Calvine. Clarke, Lindsay and documentary maker James Fox have all visited it.

Robinson says the location remains uncertain. The sheep fencing there has no barbed wire, while the lower wire of the fence in the photo is barbed. Nobody has found the spot where the camera could have sat below the fence line, looking uphill.

Insiders who disagree

Over the years, several former military and ministry sources have spoken about the case, and they contradict each other. Air Commodore Simon Baldwin called the photos a spoof and compared them to the Loch Ness Monster. He said the Pentagon shared that view.

A Defence Intelligence source said the photographers were poachers, and that the object was a US experimental aircraft flying from Machrihanish. Another former intelligence official told Clarke the two jets were a US and a UK aircraft “escorting the object.”

Nick Pope considers it a solid, structured craft, possibly a US experimental aircraft. In 2020 and 2021 he gave its size as about 30 m (100 ft) across.

In fall 2022, Labour MP Louise Haigh put questions to the ministry on Clarke’s behalf. Armed Forces Minister James Heappey replied that the MoD no longer holds records on the photograph. The only surviving papers are in file DEFE 24/1940/1, opened in 2009. Any secret US aircraft, he said, would be a matter for the US government. The UK had not authorized any such flight and had no evidence that one took place.

Where the case stands

At the 35th anniversary, Clarke still called the case unsolved. In his words, “the final piece of the jigsaw is missing.” The picture could be a hoax, or it could be a genuine photo of an unidentified object. He has previously said he leans toward secret military technology, while admitting he is unsure how reliable his sources are.

In February 2025, Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of the Pentagon’s UAP office, told the Guardian that the image is a reflection in a lake and that the photo had been doctored. He offered no evidence. Kirkpatrick said he believed the Pentagon and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) had issued a statement about it a few years earlier. Clarke says no one knows of any such statement.

In February 2026, Andreas Zätterqvist published a reconstruction report. It examined whether the photo could have been made with the analog techniques of the time. In a forum post, he wrote that he thinks it is probably a fairly simple hoax using small models.

The sober take

What is certain

A print exists that, according to Robinson’s analysis, matches the image faxed to the ministry in 1990. It shows no sign of manipulation.
The MoD received and examined the negatives in 1990. JARIC identified a Harrier and a second aircraft in them.
The ministry reached no definite conclusion about the object. In 1996 it said the negatives contained nothing of defence significance.
The original negatives and the other five pictures are lost.

What is not established

The date, time and location. These rest on the witnesses and the MoD note, not on the image.
The object’s size and distance. The 30–40 m estimate assumes it was in the air near the aircraft.
The accounts also differ on key details. The note mentions ten minutes of hovering and color photos, Lindsay recalls four or five minutes, and Robinson’s analysis points to black-and-white film.
That the jets were “escorting” the object. A single anonymous former official makes that claim.
The visit to the hotel. It rests on Grieve’s recollection, decades later.
Who the photographers were, and how the name Kevin Russell ended up on the print.

Strengths and weaknesses of the explanations

Reflection in a loch: this theory holds that the image is upside down and shows a small island and its reflection. Robinson argues against it: the “reflected” half is brighter, the two halves are not mirror images, the water is perfectly still, and distant landscape is visible beyond the fence. One 3D reconstruction came close only with a higher camera position and a cliff, and it had to replace the Harrier with a bird. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of the Pentagon’s UAP office, makes the same claim and says the photo was also doctored, but he has offered no evidence.
A mountaintop above a sea of mist: the suggested peaks are Farragon Hill (782 m) and Ben Vrackie (841 m). Robinson says the top of a cloud inversion is lumpy, while the background in the photo is smooth. Mist that high would also have covered An Teampan, and Tulach Hill (470 m), which lies in between, would show above it.
A model hung close to the camera: Wim van Utrecht suggests a Christmas star hung from a branch, with the jet a model moved on fishing line. Robinson calls this the most credible alternative and does not rule it out. Against it, the object would have had to stay in place across six frames on a windy hillside while an aircraft circled it. The witnesses said some negatives showed a second aircraft. No string has been found, though fishing line is hard to see in photos.
A kite, balloon or airship: skeptic Mick West raised this possibility. We found no detailed comparison with the image.
A secret aircraft: Pope favors this, and Clarke leans toward it. Simon Holland proposes a radar-evading test platform built by BAE Systems. Against it, no document supports it, and the UK government says no such flight was authorized. Holland says the Harriers were privately owned, but another source says BAE did not operate Harriers. Skeptical analysts note that no comparable technology has surfaced in 35 years.
A deliberate hoax: the photographers never came forward, and one RAF account says the air force considered the photos fakes. Robinson, however, found no trace of manipulation in the image.

Open question

The missing material would settle the case: the other five pictures or the original negatives. The sequence would show how the object and the aircraft moved relative to each other, and whether any string or support is visible. If the photographers came forward, the location and circumstances could be confirmed. Until then, the Lindsay print could be a photo of an unidentified object or a very good fake.

What was that?

A bright sphere hanging motionless in the sky? Party and weather balloons mistaken for UFOs