On the evening of Saturday, August 4, 1990, two men were walking on the moors above Calvine, a hamlet on the A9 in Highland Perthshire.
According to the account that later reached the Ministry of Defence, they heard a low hum and turned around. Over the hillside hung a huge, diamond-shaped object. It made no movement. They took cover under some trees and watched it for around ten minutes while one of them took six photographs. A military jet made several low passes nearbyβ"as if the pilot had seen the object as well," one MoD officer later wrote.
Then the object rose straight up at great speed and was gone.
The pictures go missing
The two men took their story to the Daily Record, a Glasgow tabloid, and handed over their prints and negatives. The paper contacted the military. A print went to the RAF press officer in Scotland, and the case reached the Ministry of Defence's UFO desk, a section called Sec(AS)2. The MoD took it from there.
The Daily Record never ran the story.
Inside the MoD, the images were taken seriously. Nick Pope, who worked on the UFO desk from 1991, later wrote that analysts concluded the photos were not fakes, that the object appeared to be a solid craft at least the size of a fighter jet, and that the plane in the frame was identified as a Harrier. He also wrote that a poster-sized blow-up of one of the photos hung on his office wall until his head of division had it taken down. The file was marked, in Pope's account, "object unexplained."
When the National Archives began releasing the MoD's UFO files, researchers found the Calvine paperworkβbut the images were only poor photocopies of overhead-projector slides. The original prints and negatives have never been found.
The print in the envelope
One clue survived the redactions. A handwritten MoD note said the report had been passed to the "RAF Press Officer, Pitreavie MHQ." The name was blacked out.
David Clarke, a journalism academic at Sheffield Hallam University who had supervised the release of the UFO files, tracked down the man in that job in 1990: a retired RAF press officer named Craig Lindsay. When Clarke first called him in August 2021, Lindsay said, "I've been waiting for someone to call me about this for 30 years!"
In 1990 the Daily Record had sent Lindsay one of the prints along with a contact for one of the witnesses, who was working at a hotel in Pitlochry, down the road. Lindsay phoned him, typed up a short report, faxed it with a photocopy to London, and was told to leave it to London. He kept the print.
In May 2022 he showed it to Clarke. That June, he donated it to Sheffield Hallam University. On August 13, 2022, the image was published.
It is sharp. A dark, hard-edged diamond hangs over a hillside, with a jet in the frame. Andrew Robinson, a photographic specialist at the university, examined the print and concluded that "as far as can be determined the image itself is a genuine photograph of a scene before the camera." He couldn't rule out something staged in front of the lens, but he found no evidence of it.
"Copyright Kevin Russell"
On the back of the print, in red grease pencil, is a credit: "Copyright Kevin Russell c/o the Daily Record, Glasgow."
The Daily Record told Clarke nobody by that name had ever worked for them. His team contacted more than 400 Kevin Russells around the world. A former co-worker identified a man of that name who had worked as a kitchen porter at a Pitlochry hotel in the summer of 1990. When he was finally tracked down in 2024, he denied any knowledge of the UFO.
The photographers have never come forward.
The explanations
A secret aircraft. Clarke has said an MoD officer told him people at the ministry believed the object was an experimental craft belonging to the US. No document released so far says that.
A reflection or a prop. Sean Kirkpatrick, former head of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, has argued the image shows a reflection in a lake, saying the top and bottom of the object mirror each other. Others suggest something small hung from a tree branch. These theories have to account for the Harrier and for what the MoD analysts concluded in 1990.
Something genuinely unidentified. That is roughly where the MoD's own paperwork left it.
What's documented, and what isn't
Documented: Six photographs reported from the hills above Calvine on August 4, 1990; the Daily Record passing the case to the military; MoD analysis identifying a Harrier; only photocopies in the archive release; one print kept by Craig Lindsay, analysed at Sheffield Hallam and published in 2022.
Unknown: Who took the pictures. Where the negatives went. What the diamond was.
The Ministry of Defence took the pictures, studied them, and filed them away. One print survived because a press officer in Scotland held on to it for 32 years.
The Short below shows the photo and the timeline in a minute. Look at the diamond and tell us what you think it is.