This summer, we traveled further north than our usual stay in the Scottish Borders to tour the fabled North Coast 500, the scenic, twisting ring road in the Highlands. Along the way, we drove up the A9 and took the opportunity to make a brief stop in Calvine—a remote hamlet and the alleged location of one of the most talked-about UFO photos ever taken…or created.
The story, in brief, is that on 4 August 1990, two men walking on the moors around 9pm spotted a large, diamond-shaped object hovering in the sky. One or more military jets were seen making low-level passes near the craft, which hovered in place silently before ascending vertically at high speed. Six photographs were allegedly taken, but only one has made it to public view.
What the object was is still unknown, and the mystery surrounding who the two men were remains. The photo and its convoluted origin story have been doggedly researched by Folklorist Dr. David Clarke from Sheffield Hallam University and discussed in thousands of posts in online forums such as Metabunk. Interest was renewed when, in August 2022, Clarke tracked down and published a significantly better copy of the photograph that had previously only been seen publicly as a poor-quality copy from a “vu-foil,” resembling a photocopy, in the Ministry of Defence files.
Before this new image was rediscovered The Sun newspaper, in 2015, created a mockup of the scene. Exercising artistic licence they combined witness statements and conjecture to create a picture with a level of detail not present in the actual photograph. This stirred the imaginations of those inclined to believe the photograph showed a secret exotic machine still not identified by aviation enthusiasts nearly four decades later — or even aliens…
Andrew Robinson, a senior lecturer in photography, also at Sheffield Hallam University, has published his analysis of the photo.
Since the newer photo has been released a number of alternative explanations have been hypothesised for how the image could be a hoax, these include it being a photograph of:
- A kite, balloon, or model aircraft
- A model/prop on a fishing line or string — or a similar cutout on glass (like they do in the movies)
- A reflection of an object sitting in water such as a small rock or even a distant islet
- A distant mountain top above a cloud inversion
Having walked the Hills at Calvine and many other rural Scottish locations it’s clear to me that lugging props, wires or plates of glass around to fake a UFO picture or waiting to be in the right place at the right time to capture a rare atmospheric phenomenon while simultaneously capturing a passing fighter jet would be less preferable than figuring out some more exacting way to prepare for the shot ahead of time.
Double Exposure
One possible explanation that has received relatively little discussion is double exposure—a popular technique among photography enthusiasts in which the film frame is exposed more than once, often producing an artistic, artificial-looking layering effect. With careful planning, exposing the frame once for a subject and once for a landscape can make an object appear physically present in the second exposure, especially when the landscape features the blank canvas of an overcast sky.
Double exposure had been dismissed because the British Ministry of Defense reportedly examined the photographic negatives. Former employee of their UFO desk, Nick Pope, who began the public discussion of the Calvine case in his book Open Skies, Closed Minds (1996), said “Expert analysis had revealed that the photographs were not fakes” but didn’t elaborate.
According to Clarke, the MoD inspected the film negatives and considered whatever was captured in the image was “of no defence significance”, so it seems their priority was to determine whether there was a threat rather than figuring out exactly how the photo was taken. What lengths did the MoD go to in analysing the image? Did they inspect the negatives to check for misaligned frames that would indicate a double exposure?
This new, higher-quality image is possibly a tighter crop of a wider field of view—so it offers no answers to these questions. Adding to the mystery, the original negatives are presumed lost and unavailable for examination. While the image is significantly better than what had been seen before, it remains poor quality and unfocused when inspected closely, offering very few clues as to what it actually depicts.
Given the lack of information about what kind of “expert analysis” was undertaken by the MoD double exposure should not be ruled out, especially when there are a number of good reasons — Occam’s Razor being one of them — why this old photography trick is the simplest of the methods mentioned above of creating a UFO image undetectable as a hoax.
Baraúna’s Flying Saucer
Double exposure has been used in other famous UFO photographs such as those taken by Almiro Baraúna from the deck of the Almirante Saldanha sailing off the coast of Trinidade Island in 19581.
Using a Rolleiflex 2.8, Model E, Baraúna combined the exposure of a small object—two joined metallic ferry tokens hung by string—with that of a landscape under an overcast sky. The resulting images show a faint, saucer-shaped object (not dissimilar to the Calvine object) appearing as if flying in the distant overcast sky.
In the Trinidade Island case the negatives were examined by military and aviation technicians who could not detect any trickery. Barauna went on to make a significant amount of money from his photographs, selling their rights to international newspaper and magazine publications.
One clue to the hoax is the fact that a few years earlier November, 1954 Baraúna had authored an article for the magazine O Mundo Ilustrado titled “A Flying Saucer was in my House” where he essentially gave the game away ahead of time. In it he described “How to make a Martian Aircraft” using a photographic trick.
Baraúna fooled the Brazilian Navy and many people around the world with a double exposure “montage” and whoever took the Calvine photo may have fooled the British Ministry of Defence and legions of UFO believers desperate for that smoking gun evidence of alien visitation.
Evidence of Double Exposure?
While it’s difficult to say anything with confidence about the Calvine print there are elements of it that could be evidence of a double exposure.
- An unusually overexposed sky
- The unnatural gradient from top left to bottom right
- The mismatch in shadows between the diamond-shaped object and the jet aircraft supposedly flying nearby.
1). The overexposed sky in the Calvine image seems too bright to have been a typical exposure from a handheld shot. As the story goes the photograph was taken at around 9pm on an August evening, just before sundown in Scottish summertime. While it would still have been light, the sky in the calvine photo is so overexposed that only a slight haze indicating clouds can be made out, and despite this its main object of focus retains distinct contrast.
It’s possible this unusual brightness of the image is due to photographic enlarger settings, or it could indicate a second actual scene that the film was exposed to. I will argue the latter, that the unusually bright sky indicates the film was exposed twice, brightening the tones across the entire image.
This argument seems reinforced by the second oddity 2.) the unnatural 45° gradient that appears across the plane of the print from the top left corner to darker tones in the bottom right. In his technical report Robinson has said he’s unable to determine the exact cause of this gradient, saying it’s possible camera lens vignetting or light fall off from the lab enlarger. But, perhaps it is the product of a second separately illuminated scene.
A similar gradient can be seen in this photo I took of a stick floating in water on an overcast day (shown upside down here relative to how I saw it). The slight brightness in the bottom-right corner (B) is light reflecting off the water’s surface. There is a gradient in my photo because of this surface—which is virtually undetectable—reflecting the light. If the Calvine image is truly a single exposure looking at a hazy sky, we must wonder what caused that gradient and how it was possible.
3.) The diamond-shaped object in the Calvine image appears to be three-dimensional. It has a lighter top half and darker lower half, as if illuminated from above. However, the jet, also presumably three-dimensional, does not have matching shadows, they appear inconsistent, almost the reverse—its upper wing appears darker than the lower one. This seems to be the case whichever way we interpret the jet as banking and seems at odds with what appears to be general diffused lighting from an overcast sky. The impression I get is that the object and the jet are not part of a single coherent scene.
Experiments
With these oddities and Baraúna’s case in mind, I wondered how a small model might have been used to create the Calvine image. I assumed that the object would be photographed first and needed to be dark in color and three-dimensional since, in the Calvine image, it appears darker than the surrounding sky and appears to have two distinct tonal regions. I looked for a suitable prop to use, and being in rural Scotland at the time, made use of what was close at hand, namely a small stone.
I found a piece of granite around 45mm with a distinct longitudinal ridge offering a “top” and “bottom” that was reminiscent of the diamond-shaped object in the Calvine photo. It also conveniently had two edges angled in a way that closely resembled two sides of the diamond-shaped object, and as a bonus in certain lighting it gave off a mottled, blotchy appearance.
Rather than using Barauna’s method of suspending the prop on string I used Blu-tak and a straw to make a stand for the rock so it was not sitting directly on the background surface casting a shadow. Using a tripod I shot it from above. Mounting it on a ridgid support, rather than dangling haphazardly on a thin string allowed precise positioning it over multiple takes.
My hunch was that the gradient seen across the Calvine image is from a second exposure, so I emulated this gradient by lighting the stone from a 45° angle, placing black card on the opposing sides to deepen the shadows of the underside.
Matching the Tones in the Calvine Photo
If we consider the Calvine image as having broadly three tonal areas – from darkest to lightest:
1) Foreground fence and foliage — dark, virtually in silhouette,
2) The diamond-shaped object and the jet — two medium midtones one slightly darker than the other,
4) Sky — bright, almost completely white.
So the challenge was to combine two exposures where the tonal relationship of a separately photographed scene matched that of the Calvine image.
On negative film stock, a double exposure operates additively, so exposing a dark object in one frame and then exposing a light overcast sky in a second frame would bleach out or wash out the dark object raising its tones.
This might be exactly what we see in the Calvine image, especially if the diamond-shaped object photographed and illuminated separately was actually black.
Simply put—my hypothesis is that the Calvine image is the product of two underexposed scenes: a landscape with an overcast sky with foreground elements (branches and fence posts), and a separately illuminated subject (the UFO) shot against a plane background.
Hits and Misses
I started testing using an old Lumix LX5, a digital point-and-shoot camera that has a fully manual control option and even a dedicated multiple exposure setting.
The intention was to find how to match the range of tones in the Calvine image in the camera without the use of any digital adjustment afterwards.
I shot RAW at ISO 400, shooting the object at f/2 and bracketing shutter speeds from 1/50 to 1/500, and shooting the landscape between f/5.6-f/8 and bracketing shutter speeds from 1/640 and faster. The LX5 has an option to equalize the histogram of each exposure. I had this turned off.
I also made some tests using the Dynamic Black and White film setting with Contrast at +1 to try to simulate the high contrast black and white 35mm film believed to have been used for the Calvine photo (later adding a sepia tone at 5% saturation in photoshop to bring it closer in appearance to the Calvine print – which according to Andrew Robinson and others is a print on Kodak colour paper from a black and white negative — so any “colour” perceived in the photo comes from the paper used not the scene photographed).
I conducted initial tests shooting the object against a black background. While this preserved the internal tones of the object very well, it also meant that when the second exposure was added—with light from the overcast sky adding to the rock’s highlights—those areas of the rock became lighter than the sky. This is the reverse of what we see in the Calvine image.
My first attempts at double exposure (with a different smaller granite stone) while maintaining the strong contrast of lighting on the top and bottom of the object were interesting, but unconvincing. The object looked entirely unreal and disconnected from the landscape. (It also didn’t help that the sky was heavily contrasty). The results were surreal — more René Magritte than Calvine.
A double exposure taken with the Lumix LX5 (left) and
René Magritte’s The Castle of the Pyrenees (1959)
Shooting against a white background I bracketed exposure times going from underexposed to overexposed. While the above image looks dark when seen by itself all of the tones will be made brighter by the subsequent exposure of an overcast sky. Essentially the second exposure adjusts what we see in the first. If the prop image is too dark relative to the landscape exposure nothing survives and likewise if it’s too bright the final result is completely washed out — so it’s a balancing act. I seemed to get the best results shooting the prop at ISO 400, f/2 between 1/200 – 500 underexposing 1 stop and then pointing at a smooth overcast sky.
The first few tests shooting the object against white were interesting. The aim was to get the tones of the foreground, object and sky in the right order “in camera” without the use of any digital adjustments. i.e. the object being darker and contrasting with the sky, but not as dark as the foreground (the window frame and tree in this example). This test was encouraging. It gives the impression that the object was outside the window further away than the tree.
However, nearly all of the contrast within the object itself was lost. It needed to have a lighter top and darker bottom like in the Calvine image.
This test shows that the bleaching effect of the second exposure gives a sense of distance to the object. This made me think of the much-talked-about hazy tones in another famous UFO image, which also happens to depict an object supposedly hovering amidst an overcast sky: the McMinnville UFO, where apparent atmospheric haze gives the object the appearance of distance from the camera.
Like my prop, the McMinnville UFO is virtually toneless; it’s a flat grey, appearing almost two-dimensional. While the Calvine object has two distinct tones. This meant that the prop in the first exposure must be given strong directional light but also underexposed in order for some of that contrast to survive the second exposure.
In another example (below) the shadow from the stand supporting the stone is too obvious although much of it is washed out by the second exposure. It’s also unrealistically well focused. After this I moved from using a paper straw to a thin piece of wire about a paperclips width.
But What About the Jet?
I’ve focused mainly on the diamond-shaped object in the Calvine photo, but there is a lot of discussion about the aircraft seen in the image, with people wondering what kind of aircraft it was. Was it a Harrier or a Hawker? Others wonder if it’s a plane at all, saying it could be a bird—or, for those who believe the entire image is of a rock reflected in water, it could just be a bit of flotsam that pareidolia leads us to interpret as a known object.
For this discussion, what matters is that it does not appear to share the same lighting or shadows as the “UFO”. It is darker on top and lighter underneath. This is consistent with what might be expected if the double-exposure hypothesis is correct, with the “UFO” being a separately illuminated object captured in a prior exposure, and the jet being part of the actual landscape scene.
In this next test shot, I had resolved the shadow issue and was playing around with focus (which is a bit fiddly to do on the LX5 because it has no viewfinder, limiting you to the preview screen). I found that the focus setting when I pressed the shutter was often quite different from how the photo turned out. However, I like the slightly blurred background. The object here is too sharp and dark (darker than the window frame), making it appear disconnected rather than part of the scene — another miss!
The Film Grain
After inspecting the 10”x8” Calvine print—a direct 1990 print from the original 35mm negative—Andrew Robinson determined that the film grain texture is consistent and “continuous across the object boundaries”, concluding the image represents “a genuine recording of a scene in front of the camera“. However, does uniform grain on a single negative truly rule out a double exposure? Because an in-camera double exposure exposes two separate scenes onto the exact same film emulsion, the resulting negative will show continuous film grain across the entire frame. While grain analysis can rule out a physical paste-up or a re-photographed composite, it can’t really distinguish between a single exposure of a real object and two in-camera exposures captured on the same frame.
In another test, I purposefully defocused the prop, shooting it first against white paper before tilting the tripod up and pointing the camera at the wall. The aim here was to see what the boundary noise/grain looked like.
Although this is a digital test, I think it shows that creating a double exposure in this way creates a “film grain” (or noise) of a consistent, continuous texture across the object boundaries, masking the fact that the image was captured in two separate exposures.
After these tests relying on the LX5 to combine exposures in-camera, I moved on to a digital Canon SLR with a faster 50mm lens. This made tracking the settings for each exposure easier, as the LX5 only records data for a single exposure.
‘90s Cameras
Many single-lens reflex cameras can be set to take multiple exposures by pressing the film rewind button while winding the film advance lever to recock the shutter.
Other cameras like the Olympus Infinity SuperZoom 330, featured dedicated double exposure buttons that prevented the film from advancing, allowing for a second exposure.
However, these methods require the photographer to set up both the landscape shot and the prop in the same location at the same time. Whereas I’m proposing that the exposures of the prop are done beforehand, preparing the film, and then the photographer seeks out a suitable landscape framing with some foreground elements and enough overcast sky to place the object in.
The challenge is to capture six consecutive shots containing both the landscape, the mystery object and a jet. (as Andreas Zätterqvist – has recently done in a hypothetical reconstruction using an analog camera and models suspended on wires).
It Hovered in Place for 10 Minutes
One significant claim in the story is that the mystery object hovered in place while jets flew around it. It’s not clear if the UFO remains in exactly the same place within the frame across all six images, as the other five images are not available and we only have hearsay about what they show. However, this is the kind of detail a hoaxer might include in the story if they wanted to pass off film that had been pre-prepared with a studio-lit “UFO” positioned in the same way over multiple frames.
Since there are no records of jets flying over Calvine on the date the photo was allegedly taken, perhaps their appearance was anticipated by the hoaxer, who planned to go where jets were likely to fly. Alternatively, it may have simply been a happy accident captured alongside their UFO model.
Another method is “double-rolling“—where the whole roll of film is shot once, then rewound and shot again. Marking the leader when loading the film provides a reference point to start from when the film is rewound and reloaded. However, alignment is the biggest issue here, and being off by even a single sprocket will create negatives with obvious overlaps at the frame edges, indicating that they have been exposed more than once.
Results for now…
These tests show that, in principle, preparation for a UFO photo hoax could be done beforehand. Preparing several sequential frames with a separately photographed scene would mean all that was needed for the landscape shoot is the camera itself. To anyone seeing you out taking photos, you would inconspicuously appear to be doing just that, rather than creating an elaborate hoax using a handful of equipment.
To explore this idea I created mockups using the Screen blend mode for layers in Photoshop. These mockups demonstrate the additive effect of combining two underexposed scenes to create a new composite image: the overall image becomes lighter, while the separately illuminated prop retains some of its internal tonal contrast. At the same time it is given a haze that makes it appear distant in the final image. Any imperfections outside its boundaries are disguised by the surrounding overcast sky from the second landscape shot.
Another test exaggerates the 45° gradient seen in the Calvine shot and shows how it could come from the first exposure, unnaturally lightening the leaves and branches in the top left of the final exposure.
Next steps…
As it happens we own a Canon AE-1 Program with a 50mm lens, the single lens reflex camera some think the Calvine photo was taken with, and as a bonus from my student days I found several rolls of Ilford HP5 400 black and white film (respectably best before 2008…) perhaps also a good substitute for the actual film used.
So, while these tests show that, in principle, a shot similar to the Calvine image could be achievable, it’s my intention to conduct further tests using period equipment. I’m especially interested to see how accurate the spooling of the camera actually is and whether several frames can be exposed twice in alignment without it showing on the negative.
- For more about the 1958 Trinidade case refer to the exhaustively detailed thread by Jeff Knox here: https://x.com/mrjeffknox/status/1747168929574002766?s=20 ↩︎
