British UFO researcher and filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee claims to have solved one of Britain’s most famous UFO mysteries: that of the Calvine UFO.
The story goes that in August 1990 in Calvine, Scotland, two witnesses saw a diamond-shaped UFO being chased by a military aircraft and took pictures of it. These photos were taken to the Scottish Daily Record for publication, but after the newspaper contacted the MOD the story was never published.
It wasn’t until 1996 that former MOD UFO head Nick Pope wrote an unclassified version of the event in his book – Open Skies Closed Minds – that the story became public. Pope states that he had an enlarged copy of the photo hanging on the wall of his office at the Defense Department, but it was removed by his superiors.
Recently, in August 2022, retired RAF press officer Craig Lindsay released one of the original photos to the press.
The question no one has been able to answer is: what was this diamond-shaped vehicle and why was it followed by a military plane?
“Fortunately I have recently had access to the UFO archive of retired CID officer John Hanson in Stratford Upon Avon. It is a treasure trove of UFO sightings dating back to the 1940s,” says Lee.
“If you look through all these documents, it appears that many diamond-shaped crafts have been observed since the 1970s, especially around British military bases.
“There seems to be a connection: is the Calvin UFO a secret military technology of ours or an adversary that has been kept secret? Why is this diamond-shaped craft apparently accompanied by military fighter jets?
From these archives comes a sighting from April 1978 in which an Essex girl named Janet Bull reported seeing a diamond-shaped UFO being chased by two RAF jets.
In 1979, Brett Lyne, a police officer serving at RAF Coltishall in Norfolk, reported:
“At 7 a.m. I had just unlocked the padlock when there was a terribly loud thump right above my head. I instinctively recoiled, then looked up at the sky where the sound came from.
There were now and then clouds, but between two of them was moving a very large DIAMOND SHAPED spacecraft… it was certainly several times larger than any aircraft I had ever seen and the shape was unlike anything I had seen before.
The entire underside of this craft was covered with equally spaced sets of diamond-patterned lights. Different lights had different colors. such as red, orange, purple, green and yellow, but kept in groups of the same color> There was no sound at all and the craft moved silently through the air.
John Hanson, the owner of this UFO archive, wonders if there is a link between this 1979 sighting and the subsequent 1980 Rendelsham UFO case where a US military saw a UFO land in Rendelsham Forest next to RAF Bentwaters. This case is considered by UFO researchers to be Britain’s Roswell.
Brett Lyne added: “Many years later I recalled this sighting to another police officer friend and he told me about the Rendelsham incident, which I had never heard of.
“He said that prior to Rendelsham there was a sighting by two men standing on the coast at night in Suffolk, about 20 miles from RAF Coltishall, when they saw the same diamond shaped craft flying over the coast and this too was silent . Their sighting took place about twelve months after mine.”
Also in the archives is a sigh of a diamond-shaped vehicle just before the Rendelsham incident of December 1980.
On October 25, 1980, a diamond-shaped UFO was spotted over Lowestoft in Suffolk. It was reported by Lowestoft chemist James Edington, who said:
“I’ve never seen anything like this before. I was standing with an older neighbor of mine. We both saw it and noticed a flashing light at each point of the diamond. IT was quiet. All we could hear was the rushing of the air as it flew over.”
Further data on diamond-shaped crafts seen in the 80s and 90s.
September 1981 in Lowestoft, Suffolk, Anna Sidle and her children were on holiday. As night fell, they saw a silver diamond-shaped object appear in the sky above. She wondered if it had something to do with the nearby USAF base.
Then, in September 1990, the month after Calvine’s sighting, Deborah Jones drove from Ipswich to Kirby Cross with her husband and two sons:
“As we continued our journey, the road opened up and we all saw the object, which resembled a crushed silver diamond, the upper half of which was rotating as it ran along the side of a file. He then flew parallel to us for about 10 miles, traveling at about 60-60 miles per hour. As we started to see the chimneys of Ipswich Docks it suddenly accelerated out of view at tremendous speed.
Mark Christopher Lee adds:
“Here are just a few examples of this diamond-shaped vessel that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s and may have been the same vessel or type of vessel photographed at Calvine in Scotland.
“Are we dealing with our technology that is still secret or is it alien but the Ministry and the military know about it? Is this also the same craft observed in Rendelsham Forest in 1980 – I think so.
“There appears to be a connection between this diamond-shaped vehicle and the military – it is escorted by our own jets or spotted near areas with military bases.”
Lee spoke to Nick Pope about the military connection. Pope said: “While my predecessor at the Department of Defense UFO Desk took over the original investigation, I inherited its consequences and became involved in the follow-up work. We concluded that the six photos were genuine and that they showed a large, structured vessel that remained unidentified.
“Many in the UFO community believe the Calvine UFO was an alien spacecraft, while aviation enthusiasts believe it was a secret prototype aircraft.
‘Calvine was only about a hundred miles from the secret RAF base at Machrihanish, on the Kintyre Peninsula, where it was rumored that an American spy plane codenamed Aurora was operating here. It is notable that the Calvine UFO was spotted just two days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, so that could be an important clue.”
So was the diamond-shaped aircraft spotted at Calvin and near USAF bases in Britain actually the Aurora spy plane and was this the aircraft or an earlier version of it that they saw at Rendelsham?
