The Calvine UFO Photograph (1990): Britain's Best UFO Picture and Its 32-Year Disappearance

On the evening of August 4, 1990, two young men hiking near Calvine, in Perthshire, Scotland, said they watched a large, silent, diamond-shaped object hover for several minutes while a military jet circled nearby, and took six photographs before it shot straight up. They sent the pictures to the Daily Record in Glasgow, which contacted the Ministry of Defence, and the negatives and prints went to the MoD and did not come back.

Nick Pope, who worked on the MoD's UFO desk in the early 1990s, has said an enlargement hung on his office wall and that the image was the best he ever saw; the files were sealed, with the photographs withheld from release until 2072 on the stated ground of protecting the photographers' privacy. In August 2022, Dr. David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University published a print that a retired RAF press officer, Craig Lindsay, had kept since 1990, and the picture the MoD had guarded for three decades was finally public.

A large dark diamond hangs in a grey sky above a fence and trees, with a small jet, identified by some as a Harrier, at right. It is sharp, uncropped, and unlike most UFO photographs, which is why it impressed the MoD. Skeptics have argued the "diamond" is a rock or an island reflected in a loch, with the picture flipped, or a small model hung from the fence in the foreground; the photographers have never spoken publicly, and Clarke has said he believes it is a hoax while continuing to look for them.

Calvine is the rare case where the government's secrecy, rather than the object, is the documented fact: a British ministry classified a photograph for eighty years and only a retired officer's keepsake ended that. Whatever the diamond is, the handling of the file is a case study in how withholding an image guarantees that it will be believed.