REVISITING THE CALVINE ‘UFO’ PHOTOGRAPHS, PART 1
THE WORLD FIRST became aware of the Calvine incident in 1996 when Nick Pope mentioned the existence of the Scottish photographs in his book Open Skies Closed Minds. His book was promoted as an account of his time on the MoD’s UFO desk and purports to describe his transformation from skeptic to a believer.
Pope says he saw a first generation print of one image on his arrival at Secretariat (Air Staff) in 1991 to take over UFO duties from Owen Hartop. Both men were civil servants with the designation Sec(AS)2A. Their office was the public focal point for UFO matters at MoD and their head of division at that time, according to the Civil Service Yearbook, was someone called J.R.G. Clark.
In his book, Pope describes the Calvine incident ‘as one of the most intriguing in the Ministry of Defence’s files’. But until his book was published, no one in the UFO community had heard of the photographs and, up to that point, no media source had ever published stories about them.
In April 2001 Nick agreed to an interview in London. During the meeting I asked a series of questions about his book, his time at the so-called ‘UFO desk’ and how incidents were followed up by the Ministry.
In response to a question concerning ‘a photo taken in Scotland’ that was mentioned in Open Skies, Closed Minds, he responded:
‘…It was taken I think in 1990, before my tour of duty, and it was actually in poster form, blown up by various people who had looked at it and stuck on the wall. It really was Fox Mulder (The X-Files tv show fictional UFO investigator - Ed) stuff. It didn’t have ‘I Want To Believe’ on it but it was on the office wall when I joined … it subsequently came to be removed but it was there and it had as far as I can recall been taken by two people who had been out walking in Pitlochry who had heard a low humming sound, looked around, done a double take, shot off I think, I’m not sure if they shot off a few pictures or just one [but] it had been sent to the MOD. I don’t think that we had the negative, indeed they may have asked that we send it back …
‘That was simply on the wall…it had certainly been looked at and analysed by some people who would know a lot about that sort of thing, who had assessed it as being a solid structured craft and not a hoax; who had made some assumptions about its size, I can’t recall what those were … but it was sufficiently at least the size of a Hawk or a Harrier, certainly aircraft size, and some people had clearly started doing some intellectualisation about aerodynamics, propulsion, things like that and there was a perception in certain quarters that this was for real, that it was a good one…‘
What happened next?
‘…then the whole debate over Aurora broke and there was a lot of very defensive mentality around and inevitably there is a sort of cross-over from those sorts of things and the job that I was doing and my head of division came in one day and took the photo down and locked it in his desk drawer … I’m just trying to remember what my head of division’s room number was, but as far as I know it is still locked in that drawer.
‘He thought it was Aurora, and he thought oh, goodness, the Yanks won’t like us having this on the wall, I’m going to take it down, now of course at the time we were asking the Americans, I was asking through the Embassy, through various specialists, hey do you guys have a diamond or triangular shaped hypersonic thing that has a low humming sound and does zero type five, no sonic boom, how do you do that and, you know they were saying ‘no, do you? Because we have sightings as well and we were wondering maybe if it was an RAF plane?’ and we were saying ‘oh I wish!’
Others read Pope’s brief written account of the incident and began asking questions. One of them was Martin Redmond, Labour MP for the Don Valley. In July 1996, Redmond asked the Secretary of State for Defence ‘what assessment his Department made of the photograph of an unidentified craft at Calvine on 4th August 1990; who removed it from an office in Secretariat (Air Staff) 2a; for what reasons; and if he will make a statement’.
In a written response in the House of Commons, MoD said:
“A number of negatives associated with the sighting were examined by staff responsible for air defence matters. Since it was judged they contained nothing of defence significance [my emphasis] the negatives were not retained and we have no record of any photographs having been taken from them.” (Hansard, 23 July 1996).
As Nick Pope mentioned in the 2001 interview, at the time the photographs were taken, MoD were fending off a series of press and Parliamentary questions about an hypothesised hypersonic US aircraft code-named Aurora. Some aviation pundits continue to believe this was used to describe a top-secret black project developed as a replacement for the SR-71 Blackbird.
Two of these long-range, high altitude Mach 3 aircraft operated from the USAF base at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk from 1982, with permission from PM Margaret Thatcher’s government. According to MoD, the last aircraft departed UK soil on 18 January 1990.
Artist’s impression of an ‘unmanned diamond-shaped hypersonic vehicle’ published in Aviation Week magazine December 1990. Coincidence? (credit: Mark McCandlish)Aurora became the subject of much speculation in the media and specialist aviation magazines from 1992, following claims that it had been operating secretly from a base in the Scottish highlands.
Possibly the first mention of Aurora was in March 1990, five months before the Calvine incident, when Aviation Week & Space Technology revealed a ‘secret’ project had been inadvertently included in the 1985 US budget under a $455 million allocation for ‘black aircraft production’.
Although the reference was later explained as a budgetary code name for the B-2 Spirit bomber, aviation writer Bill Sweetman continues to believe Aurora is one of a number of experimental programs under active development.
Indeed, the Pentagon’s intelligence report on Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP) published in June 2021 speculates that some unexplained ‘sightings’ could be observations of ‘classified programs’ developed by the US Government and industry.
And the British MoD intelligence report on UAPs produced in 2000 also speculated that ‘certain… friendly aircraft may be authorised for covert entry into UK controlled airspace’. It says these could be reported as UFOs because of their unfamiliar shapes.
The report’s author refers to projected US priority plans ‘to produce unpiloted air-breathing aircraft with Mach 8-12 capability and trans-atmospheric vehicles…as well as highly supersonic vehicles at Mach 4 to 6’.
Fast forward to 2020 when The Sun newspaper quoted Nick Pope as claiming, once again, that the Calvine photographs show ‘a structured craft of unknown origin, unlike any conventional aircraft’.
He said tests showed the photos could not have been faked and ‘because the photos had been taken in daylight with the surrounding countryside visible’ this allowed MoD experts ‘make some calculations about the mystery object’s size…it turned out to be 100 feet in diameter’.
In a follow-up article published in May 2021 he repeats the claim that the photo had been authenticated by the Defence Intelligence Staff and ‘the photos are pretty much as good as it gets’.
At the time the civilian RAF Air Staff branch where Pope was employed copied all UFO reports to a branch of the DIS, DI55, that had been responsible for UFO investigations since 1967 when the task was transferred from the Air Ministry’s former Technical Intelligence branch.
DI55 could, if it was deemed necessary, initiate follow-up investigations of any incidents that had any potential defence threat to UK airspace.
DI55 investigates…and the mystery deepens
According to a brief, hand-written report from the MoD’s UFO files, the photograph/s at the centre of the mystery were taken at 9pm on Saturday 4 August 1990 by two people walking near the village of Calvine close to the A9.
Nick Pope’s account says ‘the two men became aware of a low humming sound’ before they turned to see a large object hovering.
But the original hand-written MoD account of the incident, released at The National Archives in 2009, makes no reference to any sound.
It says a large diamond shaped object appeared in the sky and hovered for ten minutes ‘before ascending vertically upwards at high speed’.
During the sighting both also saw what they believed was a RAF Harrier jump jet make number of low-level passes. During this time a series of six colour photographs were taken by the informant and ‘1 unidentified other [person]’.
The hamlet of Calvine is in a rural part of Perthshire that is often used by the RAF for low-flying practice but this does not normally take place at the weekend.
Although it was 9pm and late in the evening, as this was British Summer Time there would have been sufficient light for photographs to have been taken.
The MoD summary asks for confirmation of the date and time and details of the camera, type of lens and focal length used. But the sparse papers released in 2009 do not contain answers to these questions.
They do however reveal that shortly after their experience the photographer sent his negatives to the Glasgow-based Daily Record newspaper. The paper subsequently passed them to the Press Officer at RAF Pitreavie near Edinburgh, a joint MoD/NATO base, that closed in 1996.
The hand-written report does not say why the men were in the area but a source from Defence Intelligence claims they were poachers who had killed their prey and were posing with the animal when the ‘UFO’ appeared.
One of the poor-quality ‘vu-foils’ of the prints, released by the MoD at the National Archives in 2009 (Crown Copyright applies)He claims a DI55 officer was sent to Scotland to examine the evidence and interview the men. The two photographers were reassured they not in any trouble as a result of their activities. Afterwards they simply ‘went on their way’. Their identity remains unknown and, since that time, they have not come forward with their version of the story.
Poor quality photocopies of one image, showing the object and the Harrier, are all that have survived in UFO files released by the MoD to the National Archives in 2009. The papers generated by the Sec(AS) desk officer Owen Hartop refer to analysis of the negatives by a specialist branch. This identified a Harrier and a ‘barely visible second aircraft, again probably a Harrier’ alongside the large diamond-shaped UFO in the images.
A UK Confidential memo in DEFE 31/180/1, a file opened by the DI55 UFO desk officer, confirms my source’s claim that the negatives were examined first in September 1990 and were subsequently sent to the RAF’s Joint Air Reconnaissance Centre (JARIC) at RAF Brampton in Cambridgeshire for detailed analysis.
Image showing part of the 2mile (3.2 km) runway at RAF Machrihanish on the Kintyre peninsula, Scotland. The base became known as ‘Britain’s Area 51’ in 1992-93 following a flurry of unexplained radar and visual sightings of fast-moving aerial objects, widely reported in the media. (credit: The Scotsman)
According to him, the investigation concluded the ‘object’ was a US experimental aircraft flying from the former RAF airfield at Machrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre.
He claims that first generation prints, taken from the negatives, do exist and ‘they have cleverly kept them away from the public’ for three decades.
‘There was nothing extraterrestrial about what was seen in Scotland,’ he added. ‘No one else other than the Americans had anything like it at the time. But we knew what it was‘.
But surely an aircraft that was operational in 1990 could not have been concealed from the public for three decades?
‘Thirty years is nothing,’ he responded. ‘It takes a very long time to go from a drawing on the back of a cigarette packet to operational capability.’
He went on to claim the two other aircraft visible in the photographs were a British Harrier and a US aircraft. These were escorting, not shadowing, the ‘object’. If true this implies official approval from both UK and US governments, something that has been repeatedly denied by ministers.
If the second aircraft was also a Harrier it could possibly be a US Marine Corps AV-8.
But where did these aircraft originate? Research by Graeme Rendall and others have established there were no Harriers based in mainland Scotland at the time.
This fact is confirmed in a ‘defensive briefing’ prepared by Hartop or his Head of Division for the MoD’s Press Office, copied to Under Secretary of State for the RAF in September 1990 (right).
This says MoD had ‘no record of Harriers operating in the location’ at the time and place.
It also reveals that departmental experts had examined the images but reached no ‘definite conclusions’ regarding the UFO. The cover note adds the negatives were returned to the Daily Record.
But the newspaper never published their exclusive story and the fate of the negatives remains a mystery. This has prompted some UFOlogists to speculate that a D-Notice was used to stop publication (see part 3 of this post).
In response to a number of FOI requests since 2009, MoD claim they have not retained any of the images after the negatives were returned to the paper in 1990.
Extract from the ‘defensive’ press briefing prepared for the MoD press office following the sighting in Scotland (Crown Copyright applies)This implies that prints, line drawings and vu-foils have either been destroyed or sent to an agency that is not subject to Freedom of Information requests.
The MoD’s story is also contradicted by former desk officer Nick Pope who, as we have seen, says he saw a ‘poster-sized’ blow-up print of one photograph that was pinned to the Secretariat (Air Staff) office wall in MoD Main Building. Pope says the object visible in the blow-up print was sharply outlined and grey, against a background of a lighter grey sky and ‘clearly visible as a 3-D craft’.
We know that further copies of the images were, at that time, held by DI55 and by JARIC. I sent a a FOI request to JARIC in 2009 using the correct tasking number, 00920009. Their response said following standard MoD policy all records they might have held had been destroyed after a period of five years if they were not selected for preservation at the Imperial War Museum or similar public archive.
According to Pope, his head of division, JRG Clark, later removed the poster and locked it away in a safe in his office at MoD Main Building. Pope’s former boss has yet to come forward with his version of this story but so far, no one appears to have made any effort to ask him. He could easily resolve this little ‘mystery’.
A story published by The Scotsman newspaper in February 1992 led to a flurry of questions in the British Parliament (extract from MoD UFO file released in 2018)But if Clark really did remove the evidence because he shared DI55’s belief the photograph showed a top secret US experimental aircraft, as Nick Pope suggests, that was entirely understandable given the Press coverage of the Aurora story at the time.
Stories published by The Scotsman and Jane’s Defence Weekly in February 1992 (below) led a number of Scottish MPs to table Parliamentary questions about alleged ‘hypersonic flights’ by US aircraft from RAF Machrihanish.
The Scotsman claimed an RAF air traffic controller ‘was startled to see a radar blip emerge from the area of the joint NATO-RAF airbase at approximately three times the speed of sound’. But when the puzzled controller phoned the base on the Kintyre peninsula to ask what type of aircraft it was he ‘was promptly told to forget what he had just seen’.
Media and Parliamentary interest in 1991-2 may have led MoD to order a second examination of the Calvine images. The DI55 UFO files released at The National Archives in 2009 reveal how, 16 months after the photographs were taken the branch sent copies of five ‘vu-foils’ to the RAF’s Joint Air Reconnaissance Centre (JARIC).
Oddly, these were in the form of acetates taken from the original negatives. This was, I am informed, to allow analysts to project the images onto a wall-mounted whiteboard for more detailed scrutiny.
As part of this ‘re-tasking’ DI55 asked JARIC to produce calculations such as height above ground and distance from camera to determine the true ‘diameter, size and dimension [of the UFO] where possible’.
The confidential tasking says ‘sensitivity of the material suggests very special handling’ was required.
This document also mentions the task had ‘already [been] discussed with Ops 4 Squadron‘. This is significant as No 4 Squadron flew ground attack Harrier jets from RAF Gutersloh in Germany in 1990. Pairs of pilots from squadron were undergoing training for low-flying exercises at the outbreak of the Gulf War.
The re-tasking is covered by a note from another DI branch dated 29 January 1992. But the remainder of the file tells us nothing about what happened next. From here the paper trail goes cold.
This article is the first of a three-part series and has been reproduced with kind permission by Dr David Clarke from his own website. Part 2 will be online from tomorrow. If anyone has any further information regarding the above case you can get in touch with us at uapmediauk(at)protonmail.com
