For 30 years, the British Ministry of Defence has sat on the fabled “Calvine photo,” said to be one of the best snapshots ever captured of a UFO. Now 32 years after the picture was taken, journalist David Clarke has managed to release the picture for the very first time. Set against a cloudy sky, a diamond-shaped UFO can be seen hovering above the countryside as a fight jet flies by in the distance.
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The image was taken by two hikers on August 4, 1990 before they gave it to Scotland’s Daily Record. That newspaper then handed it over to the Ministry of Defence, which kept the photo under lock and key due to security concerns.
“Oddly, despite all the publicity, the two chaps who took the photographs have never come forward,” Clarke said in a recent interview with Newsweek.
“The negatives have never been seen since they reached the Ministry of Defence. Now, the Ministry of Defence say that they returned them to the Daily Record,” the journalist and professor at Sheffield Hallam University added. “But the Daily Record say they never received them and they have no idea what happened to them. So there’s a lot of questions to be answered.”
Before sharing the image, Clarke made sure to have one of his colleagues—Sheffield Hallam photography lecturer Andrew Robinson—look over the print making sure it wasn’t doctored in some way.
“It follows that this is either a genuine unidentified flying object in the sky,” Robinson’s report reads, “or that any construction or manipulation used to create this effect occurred in front of the camera and not in the capturing of the scene on film nor in the subsequent processing and printing of the image.”
Clarke admitted he doesn’t believe the UFO in question is from an alien race but rather, a top-secret military project that was being worked on at the time.
“The other option is that the whole thing is a practical joke, a prank that got out of hand,” Clarke concluded. “The whole 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.”
