Is the Calvine UFO actually a mountaintop with cairn, small loch and tower ruins?
An analysis of new textures identified on the surface of the Calvine UFO.
Is the Calvine UFO actually a Mountaintop with Cairn, Small Loch and Tower Ruins?
I was recently interviewed by a journalist from the Scottish Newspaper The Courier who contacted me asking for comment on suggestions made by James Easton, the founder and moderator of the FaceBook Group ‘The UFO Research List’, regarding the Calvine UFO. The journalist informed me that Easton had recently shared ‘enhanced images’ of the Calvine UFO which he suggested might actually show a distant peak, with landscape features, above a cloud inversion.
I was directed to a Facebook post on the ‘Pitlochry Now’ group where Easton suggests that “the original photograph, when enhanced, depicts what would appear to be a mountain top landscape” and that this landscape “resembles… a local mountain top, with cairn, photographed above mist and seemingly visible are both a small loch and tower ruins”.
Indeed, the image does appear to show textures and landforms within the familiar outline of the Calvine UFO shape however the texture, shape and forms present in this version do not exist in the original.
I have produced adjusted versions of the Calvine UFO photograph from the highest resolution scans available in order to extract as much detail of the UFO surface as possible (see above). Altering the contrast and density of the diamond shaped UFO can reveal further textual detail and applying filters highlights this texture in different ways, but unfortunately this is of little help in identifying what this object might be. The additional detail present in these variants also reveals none of the shapes and textures seen in Easton’s image: there is no cairn, lock or ruined tower visible.
So how might these features come to be present in this image when they are not in the original? The explanation would seem to be that Easton has not used a copy of original Calvine image for his analysis but rather a version of the image similar if not identical to that posted on Twitter by Fernando Jimenez on the 13th August 2022 shortly after the Calvine photograph was first published (see below / link).
The side by side comparison below reveals how closely the image Easton has shared matches the image posted by Jimenez in 2022 suggesting this is the source.
Jimenez’s images are taken from what he describes as an ‘upscaled’ version of a copy of the original image which he includes in another post and suggests that the textures present “look like some kind of build up on the hull... like the underwater side of a rusty boat“. The four different versions of the upscaled Calvine image shared by Jimenez would seem to modified or altered in some way. The image could have been sharpened, cleaned or enhanced using AI, or perhaps a digital filter has been applied. Whatever the explanation, as can be seen below, the textures visible in the upscaled image do not appear on the original (I have reached out to Jimenez asking how the image was produced and will update this post if I hear back).
Easton himself states in another post that he is “concerned that enlarging a relatively poor-quality image, could be deceptive” and may this indeed explain the textures present.
Easton also notes that the UFO he suggests might be a mountain top, appears to have been “photographed above mist”. Here he is resurrecting an earlier suggestion which has become part of the mythology surrounding the Calvine Sighting – that suggestion we are actually seeing a distant mountaintop emerging from a sea of mist due to a cloud inversion.
This explanation has attracted a great deal of attention online, gained numerous supporters, and has been referenced in newspaper stories about the sighting (see here). However, there are many reasons why a cloud inversion could not explain the image. Most importantly, if we were to look eastwards from the presumed location of the sighting at An Teampan towards the peak suggested by Easton, Ben Vrackie some 9.8 miles away, we would see Tulach Hill directly in our line of sight. If An Teampan at 420m was above the clouds, then Tulach Hill at 470m, lying approximately halfway between our position and Ben Vrackie, would be visible too (for a more detailed discussion of the cloud inversion theory see here).
In conclusion, this would appear to be another Calvine red herring. It is imposible for a cloud inversion to explain the image while the shapes and forms on the surface of the Calvine UFO in the copy of the image shared by Easton would seem to originate from an ‘upscaled’ modified version of the image, posted by Fernando Jimenez in August 2022, rather than the original print. Unfortuantely there is no mountaintop, loch or ruined tower present however appealing this explanation might be.
Since its original publication the Calvine research team have made high resolution copies of the origanal image available for research purposes and we would encourage anyone wishing to study the image to download a copy HERE
© Andrew Robinson, 2024.
(Please Note - The paragraph dicussing Fernando Jimenez’s images was updated with additional information and images on 15/10/24)