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Calvine "UFO" Investigation Update
4k Plays1 year ago
Dr. David Clarke, Matthew Illsley and Giles Stevens join me to discuss the latest on our investigation into the Calvine photo, specifically our search for Kevin Russell. Other areas of the investigation are still ongoing also.
Scottish Daily Record article: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/sc...
IF ANYONE HAS ANY INFORMATION ON THIS CASE PLEASE EMAIL: [email protected] YOUR IDENTITY WILL BE PROTECTED
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Transcript
Revisiting the Calvin Case
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey guys, how's it going? We're back again. Hello. Hi guys. So another interesting period for the Calvin case, you know, it's come back into the limelight with this story that's just released in the Scottish daily record with the name that was on the back of the photograph. And yeah, let's, let's start this conversation going back to David, when you first got the name and let's try and go through the kind of timeline of what we've been doing for the last,
00:00:31
Speaker
seven, eight, nine, 10 months. Well, in terms of the name, I think we got the name around May or no, it must have been June or July last year from Craig Lindsay. And I think we said on the last recording we did that we decided to deliberately sit on the name
00:00:54
Speaker
which I think we've done now for about a good 10 months, precisely for the reason that we just wanted to see if anyone came forward when the original photo was first published in the Daily Mail. Obviously when you publish something like that you get lots of people coming forward saying that they know something about the photograph or the photographer and we thought that by not publishing the name we could sort of hold some information back so that we could test the authenticity of any
00:01:24
Speaker
claims that were made but bizarrely no one has actually come forward to claim that that's their photograph which i find utterly baffling although we have we'll get to this but you know there has been at least one person that's come forward who says that they were there at the time and they knew the photographers yeah absolutely um
00:01:47
Speaker
Now, obviously, we fast forward to the 12th of August and the Daily Mail article, which you wrote, David, and, you know, that was a double page spread in the mail. You know, obviously that suddenly, within a matter of hours, if not days, went all around the world. And, you know, it was an extremely busy time for us all. And apparently one of the best read pieces on the Mail online for the entire of 2022 in terms of number of clicks and shares, et cetera.
00:02:17
Speaker
Wow. I did not know that. That's impressive.
00:02:20
Speaker
Fantastic. So I mean, I suppose after that, you know, that really is when our investigation ramped up because, you know, we weren't just willing to sit on it. Oh, look, we've got the photograph out there. That's our job done. It was definitely not the case. So let's talk about the initial beginnings of the investigation after that.
Analyzing the Photograph's Location
00:02:39
Speaker
And I know this involves Giles here and our good friend Strafe Wilson, because, you know, the conversation that immediately came up was about the location and whether this was a reflection and all this kind of thing.
00:02:50
Speaker
Giles, do you want to come in on that and talk about the location on the photograph?
00:02:56
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, going back to the, we've obviously, when it was first publicized the picture, it wasn't obviously as clear as the initial reconstruction picture from the Pope. But we basically just had foreground, which was a shame. We didn't have any definitive background, which was unfortunate.
00:03:26
Speaker
the fencing certainly stuck out for me straight away and I told Dave at the time I thought I knew exactly where it was and when Dave came up and we did a we did a hike out into the hills and I took him up there and I think he thought it was pretty much where we believe it to be so yeah it's still ultimately I mean it's still it's still a guess it's just that little bit of information we've got from the picture but
00:03:56
Speaker
I mean, even since August, I've hiked out into the hills several miles out from Calvine and there's nothing similar at all fencing wise. And it just seemed to fit exactly where you'd think if you were coming out from Pitlockery and you wanted to do a walk, especially that late in the evening, you only had so much light left.
00:04:24
Speaker
you wanted to do an hour or two's walk, you're not going to get very far before you're right out in the middle of nowhere. So for me, there's actually not that many places, if it is Calvi, where you can walk because you're walking uphill and you're walking up to a certain altitude, elevation.
00:04:50
Speaker
which I think clearly this image shows that it is at an elevation because you would expect to see hills, mountains in the background if you were at a lower elevation, you'd have some background. The fact that there is no background to me suggests that they'd climbed up to a certain elevation before taking the picture.
00:05:29
Speaker
Yeah. I don't want to speak for Strafe, but I know that he has come up with a very similar description that when you look at the shrubbery, the fence and that, there aren't many other locations that have those things in that kind of... No, it's not. Strafe thought the same. Yeah, we went up together and he thought, yeah, it looks like a highly likely candidate. But again, it's our best guess. Yeah. Yeah, excellent.
00:05:40
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
Social Media Connections and FOIA Concerns
00:05:59
Speaker
Matthew, let's just jump on to the start of September because I think you spoke to us, somebody very interesting from the RAF. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah. When I started to investigate this case, a man came forward on social media and recounted a tale to me, which I, you know, substantiated to a reasonably high degree from what public sources are available.
00:06:26
Speaker
that his father had left the RAF in the late 80s, and then been subcontracted by the MOD to work on air defence investigations. And he, the man, the son, told me that his dad had investigated the Calvin photograph, along with the one on the oil rig, as he put it.
00:06:57
Speaker
which is the Chris Gibson site. And he was part of a three or four man company. And the company was wound up in the mid 90s when his father passed away. And this sort of led, lent credence to the idea that
00:07:17
Speaker
some of these things were being put beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act. If what evidence and materials had been submitted were transferred to a limited company with limited ownership, there'd be no way of anyone knowing that and no means of getting that information back into the domain where the general public could ever access it again.
00:07:42
Speaker
and he was very forthcoming and he seemed perfectly genuine and honest and I found his dad in the public records, all his promotions, all the way up to group captain and yeah so it was quite a promising start at that point that people were willing to be this sort of forthcoming. Yeah absolutely and I mean it also adds credence to the fact that these photographs were genuine as well and they didn't just show
00:08:13
Speaker
a rock in a lake and stuff like that, that if these groups are being tasked to look at these images, that there's something to it. I mean, kind of assuming a bit there. So let's move on further on in September, and we saw some of us here start contacting our local MPs. So how do we go on that part? I just wrote to mind, I think, David, you actually met with yours.
00:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, Louise Haig, who's a shadow Northern Ireland Transport Minister, MP for Healy and Sheffield, and she sent a letter with a list of questions to, I can't remember his name, but he was like one of the, well, she sent it to the Minister of Defence, whose name escapes me. Ben Wallace, that's it. And he got one of his minions to respond, one of the junior.
00:09:03
Speaker
It's exactly what I expected them to say, sorry, you know, that the thing that's been released at the National Archives is the only surviving historical record and we can't say anything more about it. It didn't, pointedly, did not answer one of the specific questions which was the QRA, which is the Quick Reaction Alert Squadron, triggered.
00:09:29
Speaker
by an intruder aircraft on that particular day they just ignored that question altogether which was a question that one of our RAF contacts said that we should put to them and that to me is a bit suspicious because they didn't even make an excuse like oh it would cost too much money to go looking through the records which is the usual way out so that was ignored but interestingly what the response about the thing about it being an American reconnaissance aircraft
00:09:57
Speaker
They just basically passed the book on that and said, well, that's something for the Americans. Which is pretty much how we answered all the parliamentary questions about it back in the 90s. When, coincidentally, Chris Gibson's sighting actually made it into the newspapers. This is the guy on the oil rig who we've been talking to quite recently, who was a member of the Royal Observer Corps and in those expert identification skills
Aviation Insights and Stealth Aircraft
00:10:23
Speaker
on aircraft. And he was on this oil rig in the North Sea.
00:10:26
Speaker
not long after the Calvin incident and he saw this triangular object being escorted by I think it was F-111s and a KC-135 tanker and he just couldn't identify what the object was and I interviewed him quite recently. His memory of this is still absolutely crystal clear and he still says he can't, to this day he doesn't know what it was he saw.
00:10:50
Speaker
Chris Gibson as well was a trained observer for aircraft really knew his stuff. So, you know that again for him to not identify this plane or object is it says something and if you don't mind can we just talk about the
00:11:05
Speaker
the intelligence source, let's say, David, that you spoke to on a number of occasions, because we've mentioned this on a previous recording about how he knew what he said he knew what it was, but he actually did give us a little bit of detail about what the object's mission was and things like that. Can we can we just talk to that to a little bit more? Yeah, he basically said that what it was that was seen was an American, some kind of reconnaissance, stealth, stealthy aircraft platform, whatever you want to call it.
00:11:34
Speaker
that was being used, that was used during the Cold War, sorry, the Iraq War, Operation Desert Storm. And it was some kind of thing that was invisible to radar that they sent in to basically identify targets with a directed laser beam. And that's then what the F1, the stealth fighters and the missiles used.
00:11:59
Speaker
And presumably this thing has been used in other theatres of conflicts as well. And it's still on the secret list after 30 years. Now maybe he's spitting me a yarn, but that's what he says it was. And he can't say exactly what it was, but that's effectively what he was saying. He thinks it was. And he was in a position to know. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one other thing that
00:12:29
Speaker
I found really interesting about that conversation was that to the question of why would it be above Scotland and you know his response being that they regularly flew things into RAF Macrahanish over on the west coast but also that the terrain above Scotland was similar to the terrain in these places that they were going whether you know there's hilly and there's mountains and stuff in
00:12:52
Speaker
in the theater of war and the conflict. So that really stood out as well.
Intelligence Agencies and the Calvin Photograph
00:12:57
Speaker
And another thing I suppose worth saying is that when listening to this conversation, this guy is not trying to... It seems genuine in the way he talks and things like that. I think that he's...
00:13:09
Speaker
Well I think we've gone over this before and like the first time I contacted him was before we even started investigating this particular story and I'd just come across his name by accident in the National Archives and I'd just phoned him up because I knew that he dealt with this subject at the time. Well I emailed him and just said well I've seen your name in the National Archives I know you had a responsibility for UFOs
00:13:33
Speaker
all right if we have a chat and he texted me back and said yeah no problem you know i'm retired now you know i can't talk about anything that was top secret but happy to talk to you about UFOs because they weren't top secret i was just having a general conversation like you know what did you do and how many reports did you handle every day and what was your feelings about them and i just sort of normal sorts of question was there anything any particular incident that stuck in your mind from that period that you were
00:14:01
Speaker
that you were responsible for investigating the UFOs and he just dropped it out. There was this occasion with these two lads in Scotland, so he didn't know I was going to ask him about that and I wasn't asking him about it.
00:14:16
Speaker
I've got the verbatim quote here. I've listened to it today and you just, exactly as you've said, you just said, is there anything inexplicable in your sort of career? And he said there was one case where there were a couple of poachers up in Scotland.
00:14:33
Speaker
And having photographed each other with their kill, they happened to catch some aircraft in the background and that caused a hell of a stink. That's his quote. And you then just start to talk about it. You know, it was about Aurora and he's like, yeah, that's the one. And then he starts just reeling off all the information. And he's if you've listened to this, I looked at it, there was sort of two and a half hours of sort of interviews, multiple separate conversations.
00:15:03
Speaker
And he's not, especially like in this, you know, when he's just off the cuff, unprompted, you know, you didn't mention Calvin, you didn't mention Aurora, at least initially, you know, you just asked him what was inexplicable and he just started to give the information about this case. And then just described, you know, the nature of the
00:15:27
Speaker
aircraft, the fact that there were two Harriers there, one American, one British. And yeah, the facts just kept coming. Absolutely. And I think it was when he said it was definitely not a hoax. It was definitely good film. Let's put it that way.
00:15:42
Speaker
because at the time I mean I knew something about the case obviously I'd seen it in the papers and I'd concluded as everyone knows it was a hoax yeah so I was sort of saying to him well wasn't this a hoax and he was saying no what makes you think it was a hoax
00:16:00
Speaker
yeah so yeah i always liked the bit about you you say something like uh aurora was a myth wasn't it and then you just go he laughs then he goes was it you know i mean to be fair i mean we have we have had contact with someone else from uh in british intelligence since then we've been again yes obviously we've got to protect these people's identity but he was telling
00:16:25
Speaker
pretty much the same story and he was saying that it was the talk of the office that they knew that this thing had been photographed and that they had a big poster sized version of it on the wall as well and that as soon as their sort of head of defense intelligence saw this thing, it was immediately classified secret and they were all told to keep, you know, keep Stump.
Photo Classification and Bureaucratic Mishandling
00:16:47
Speaker
Well, this is the thing where I get a little bit confused is was the photograph ever classified top secret? Was the actual photograph? Because it certainly doesn't reside in any of the MOD files pertaining to Calvin, does it?
00:16:59
Speaker
I think this second contact told us that it was classified secret, not top secret. There's a difference, obviously, in the importance of something. But I think certainly by 2009, when they released that crappy photocopied thing about it, it must have been downgraded to unclassified by then. But when we say unclassified, they've still never released an official sort of really good quality image of it, have they? No. We don't know.
00:17:29
Speaker
They're not very forthcoming about it. And they appear to have lost all their records on the subject. They don't know. This is the bizarre thing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think personally, there's a potential and it's sort of reading between the lines a little bit the when it got sent to Seca. Yes.
00:17:49
Speaker
it appears that somebody at that point made the copy that was on the wall that Nick Pope and Craig Lindsay both said they saw and then they were passed on to on the assumption I would imagine that they just thought this was a fake. I can imagine that it comes in and they just think oh this is
00:18:09
Speaker
clearly just something like it makes it rock in a lake or something like that. And then it gets passed on to the Di 55. And if they were sent everything, it's a bit like when Craig, they forgot about the copy that Craig had got, they overlooked it. And I can imagine that there was a potential for something similar to happen with the copies that SEC AS had. Di 55 gets it, they realize what it is, and it vanishes. And the
00:18:39
Speaker
don't go back to SEC AS because that would give the game away to people who didn't have a need to know as it were. And I think that might be some way towards what happened. Because various people have said, how could it have been secret if they had it on the wall and all these various people were wondering it and seeing it? That oddly suggests it was top secret. But the way you've just put it, Matthew,
00:19:06
Speaker
shows what's likely to have happened. If you read some of the latest stuff in the late 1990s, they didn't trust SEC-AS at all. They stopped sending them material. They didn't even send them the Condign Report because they didn't trust them because of what Nick Pope had been doing with all these sorts of becoming a TV celebrity. So it caused this huge rift between these two departments who dealt with the subject. Yeah, absolutely.
Identifying the Aircraft: Harrier or Hunter?
00:19:36
Speaker
And moving on, I think one thing that we have to keep mentioning as well is that although we're looking for these these witnesses and stuff, we're still very much interested in these two Harriers or whatever the aircraft where and you know, luckily we've had
00:19:48
Speaker
Graham Rendell doing great work on that is you know the resident aviation expert and I think it was in October that Graham had written an article for UAP media which pretty much ruled out it's 2370 CU which was suggested by Chris Gibson you know the oil worker so you know I think that's also
00:20:09
Speaker
definitely worth mentioning the aircraft side of the investigation and Matthew do you want to quickly speak to the fact that you've been looking into that recently by being on these these forums and the aviation magazines you know do you want to just talk to that yes you also want to mention the thing about various people have suggested it's not a Harrier it's a Hunter yeah I went on a forum called PP
00:20:37
Speaker
professional pilots rumour network and the people they were really good and they were forthcoming and for the most part they were really personable you know there's various places where that's not the case but the pp rune was really quite good and a lot of them people messaged me privately and there was quite a debate as to the nature of the the image and then some people were
00:21:06
Speaker
convinced that it was a hunter rather than a Harrier. And there was the general conflict as to, well, it was a Saturday and the Harriers simply just did not fly on a Saturday. It didn't make any indifference. Pilots wanted their weekends. And then there was a suggestion that British aerospace used hunters as camera platforms.
00:21:33
Speaker
so they'd have gun camera, wing cameras, and so on and so forth. And they'd fly alongside whatever new vehicle they were testing, record it, and then have that as playback so you can see the visuals. We never really got a final version. People were just content to say that the silhouette, given that it's quite blurry, could be one or the other. But it was certainly a possibility that
00:22:03
Speaker
it was a test if it was a hunter. Although other people were equally adamant that it was a Harrier. And that played into the fact with what we'd been told by the defence source that it's the diamond was being escorted. And that's why the Harriers were there. And that also was lent credibility by the fact that David found that there had not been a QRA in August 1990.
00:22:32
Speaker
or rather they had but you know at the very end of the month and obviously I think they used tornadoes is that right at the time so and this this was clearly not a tornado so Lucas RAF Lucas where the QRS cadre was yeah and that lent credibility to the idea that
00:22:53
Speaker
this wasn't being intercepted. It was being actively escorted.
Macrahanish Base and Strategic Secrets
00:22:58
Speaker
And then I went to the Scottish Air News, which was like a air spotters enthusiasts magazine at the time. And they went back and looked through their archives for me. And they'd got no records of Harriers at the time.
00:23:16
Speaker
So the mystery source of the Harriers continues, but if Makrihanish is, as the defense source suggests, the place where the origin of the diamond
00:23:31
Speaker
That housed US Navy SEALs, all sorts of secret things. Special forces. Special forces. It was the abort zone with one of the longest runways in the world. So you could land absolutely anything on it. If you needed to have a space shuttle come in at an inflight mishap, you could land it there. That's how long this runway was. So you could get all sorts in and out of there. And its location is very remote.
00:23:58
Speaker
And also the operation record book of Macrahanish for that year has just been opened at the National Archives, which as three of you know are checked just a couple of weeks ago. And although obviously he doesn't say yes, we had this prototype aircraft flying from there, he does actually confirm that US Navy Special Forces were operating from there at that particular time.
00:24:22
Speaker
interesting absolutely i just think it was worth mentioning that the investigation still has multiple prongs let's say and yeah and another one of those prongs was the the origin of the you know the photographs going to the Scottish daily record and i think it's in early October David you spoke to
00:24:40
Speaker
news editor Malcolm Speed. Malcolm Speed, yeah. He was news editor at the time and he contacted me having seen the story in the Daily Mail and said yeah he remembered the story. He was news editor and he remembered the photograph arriving at news desk and being shown it by the picture editor Andy Allen who we know sadly deceased. He really was the key to the mystery, solving the mystery but unfortunately he's not here.
00:25:08
Speaker
to answer their questions but Malcolm speed remember being shown it and unfortunately for us he was just about to go on annual leave for two weeks so he basically left the scene and told me that he just assumed that when he got back that there'd be a double page spread he'd be on the front page all the rest of it and he said when he got back nothing not a dicky bird and no one would talk to him about it the Andy Allen would just non-committal oh yeah he'd sent it to the RAF
00:25:37
Speaker
and they told him it was a fake. He said he'd tried to speak to the editor and all aired about it and he just would not discuss it at all. Just said, leave it alone. Don't want to talk about it. He said it really utterly baffling their attitude. And like me, he's someone who's worked in as a journalist for decades.
00:25:56
Speaker
And he can't understand it to this day why they didn't run the story. He said, it's like the biggest scoop that we missed. And like the rest of us, he's like wanting to get to the bottom of why they didn't run the story in the first place. Because if it was a fake, he said, regardless of its reality status, the photo is a stunning photograph and no journalist worth their salt.
00:26:19
Speaker
would not have run that story even if they knew it was a hoax it would have been you know hoax photograph from Calvin came to our office here you know the record of solve the the mystery we sent it to the RAF and the RAF told us it was a fake here it is you wouldn't not run the photograph
00:26:37
Speaker
And then, of course, we had this Stuart Little character, didn't we? The guy that came forward and said that he was a freelance journalist at the time and remembered seeing the other five images in a strip of negatives pinned on the wall of the office that the photographers used in Glasgow. Now, I'm sure
00:27:00
Speaker
He did see something. I'm not sure about the rest of the story, but, you know, this all seems to stitch together that there was something about the photographs that was that is generally mysterious. And the reason why that just as as mysterious as the photographs is why the record didn't publish in the first place.
00:27:20
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
Tracing the Photographer: Kevin Russell
00:27:21
Speaker
And this is around the same time that as we're pursuing this active investigation, looking for Kevin Russell, we we get another source, let's say, who gave us the surname Russell for a man and a woman who we believed may be Kevin Russell's parents. So who I forget if that was Matthew or you, David, that first got those names. Who was that?
00:27:45
Speaker
This was someone who contacted a colleague of ours, another ufologist, and I'm not going to say who it was because I don't want to reveal the name of the contact, but he came forward and I had a lengthy correspondence with him, which is still ongoing. In fact, he first contacted me when I was at a conference in Canada, and this must have been like before the mail.
00:28:10
Speaker
published my story about this and he basically said he worked with the two people who took the photograph and he's been able to give me their first names but not the surnames and he named a hotel in Pitlockery where he said he worked with them at the time and he said they were out basically on the moors picking mushrooms, magic mushrooms and that's when this thing happened and he said that
00:28:39
Speaker
a friend or they, I'm not clear whether it was them or someone who they knew that basically had the photographs developed and it was from a very cheap sort of camera, the sort of thing, a disposable camera you'd buy in boots and they took the photographs to the daily record in Glasgow and that's basically when things started going very very strange that these two guys who were like life and soul of the party, you know out drinking every night enjoying themselves suddenly a complete change in
00:29:08
Speaker
in their behavior. One of them went completely off the rails, ended up in trouble with the law. Both of them vanished, took off back home, wherever it was they came from, different parts of Scotland. And apparently what caused all this was when they turned the photographs over to the record, the record, as we know, turned them over to the Ministry of Defence and then within a couple of weeks, a car turned, this is classic Men in Black story, the car turned up
00:29:37
Speaker
at the hotel. Two guys who said they were from the Minister of Defence questioned all these people who were involved in this working in this in this part of the hotel. He remembered standing outside having a cigarette when this was going on and he said that it was that experience that after that these two lads were never the same again. And this chimes with what I was told by the defence source because he said that you know that
00:30:05
Speaker
officers from defense intelligence went to Scotland and interviewed the two guys and there are some details that I was given by this source that actually check out you know they are details that somebody would not have been able to invent so I'm pretty sure that he knows something but it sadly despite
00:30:27
Speaker
the the
00:30:46
Speaker
cleaning up, acting as porters, you know, when one job dried up, they moved to another part of Scotland to work in another hotel. This is something that I'm 30 years ago tracking those people down. I mean, ask yourself, you know, people that maybe you were at school or college with 30 years ago, would you remember their second names? Would you remember somebody who you knew briefly for a few weeks? Would you be able to find them now? Yeah, you could search for them on Facebook. It doesn't mean so that they're still going to be there or that they're even on social media.
00:31:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. That's the problem we've got. Yeah, Matthew, I know you were involved in looking at tracking down a lot of these people when we did get names. Is there anything you wanted to just bring in on that bit when we're talking about finding these potential parents? Yeah, it was the two men that this source describes are in exactly the same age group
00:31:40
Speaker
as other people have mentioned. And like David says, one of them went off the rails. But the other man was alleged to be the photographer. And he was the one who was alleged to have taken the bus to Glasgow to drop the negatives off at the record. And it's that man that was the most interesting because
00:32:07
Speaker
He apparently is still alive, by all accounts. And he was described as having left the hotel within a matter of weeks of this happening because of the change in his character. The description was really sharp and really severe. This man became extremely introverted, having, like you say, been a reasonable extrovert before that.
00:32:34
Speaker
The source says that this man took a bus back to Glasgow and from there went to the coast and returned to live on an island off the west coast of Scotland. And he couldn't be sure which, but he thought it might have been Arran or Islay. And he lived there with his mother. And it's these strange little details because we had another person elsewhere who said,
00:33:03
Speaker
photographer went to Glasgow back after all this happened went back to Glasgow to live with his mother and now this person didn't say he went and lived off the of an island on the coast but he did say he went to Glasgow to live with his mother and it's just strange little details that tally and not exact um but again this person the uh the the source that we're talking about here said that the the photographer was age 24 or 25
00:33:31
Speaker
And that's almost exactly the same age that the other person who said that he was from Glasgow said he was. So again, it wasn't like he was 18. It was definitely older, middle 20s, Glasgow's linked and living with his mother. Yeah, and one person did mention as well that he was a keen bird watcher.
00:33:58
Speaker
which initially was one of the reasons that we had for believing that he'd gone up into, up to Calvin. But this person said he was a bird watcher and he had a distinctive coat and
00:34:12
Speaker
He just liked going up around the Pitlockery Dam and watching the birds up there as well. So that was just another little bit. But I had a look and unfortunately, again, armed only with first names. I did actually find someone of the right name. I thought, you know, how many of these can there be on islands off the west coast of Scotland? But lo and behold, when we did find him attracting Dad, it wasn't him.
00:34:39
Speaker
But we don't know whether this is Kevin Russell. Kevin Russell could be someone else entirely. Indeed. Whose name has ended up on the back of the print. But we have been able to establish and Giles did some work, Giles going to the local, is it Perth, the electoral roll? Yeah. And you were able to confirm that there was a person of that name residing at one of the hotels at the relevant time.
00:35:05
Speaker
Yeah, I popped to the library in Perth and checked the electoral register for that period. There was no Kevin Russell in the 1990 version of the electoral register. But that was, you had to basically submit to where you were living by October 89. So there was no Kevin Russell in the Pitlockery area late 1989.
00:35:32
Speaker
He was however in the 1991 and 1992 edition, so that means he had to register as living in Pitlockree, he was registered as living in the Hydro Hotel. So that would have been between October 1990 and
00:35:55
Speaker
Sorry, yeah. Yeah, sure. October 1990 to October 1991. So he was only in the area, this Kevin Russell, if it was him, he was only in the area for a year or a year and a bit at most, which is quite normal. I mean, like Dave said, it's a seasonal town at Loughry. You sometimes come in and just work for the summer.
00:36:16
Speaker
and then and then you go and then if and often it's young members of staff you'll maybe just do one season and go so it's it's no surprise that that he didn't appear anywhere else i said i did check a wider area i checked other towns locally
00:36:33
Speaker
Aberfeldy and then further down to Perth and there's no other Kevin Russell in Persia as far as I could tell around that time. The only one mentioned was Kevin Russell that lived at Hydro Hotel because you often staff would live in
00:36:51
Speaker
because there was enough accommodation, so that the hotels would provide accommodation. So he lived in that hotel, was registered at that hotel anyway, just for those two years. And that was it. I think you weren't counting the odds, didn't you Matthew, on it being the wrong one? Yeah, the odds were staggering, given the number of people in Scotland, you know, five million or so, and there being
00:37:19
Speaker
just over a dozen possible Kevin Russell's of the right age, you know, the chance that this Kevin Russell's definitely the name on the back of the photograph. Craig Lindsay said that that text in red was there when he got it from the record. And this man working for this one resident for this one year
00:37:41
Speaker
of the right name in a small town like Pitlockry, it's just tens of hundreds of thousands to one against. And like playing Sherlock Holmes here, let's think about this. So you've got the print written on the back of it, copyright Kevin Russell. We've got a Kevin Russell who is on the electoral roll at the right time, living in a hotel or resident in a hotel in Pitlockry.
00:38:11
Speaker
We've got Craig Lindsay being given the number of the person whose name is on the back, presumably Kevin Russell, to ring, and the guy who answers the phone, answering the phone in a hotel in Pitlockery. What are the chances of it not being this Kevin Russell?
00:38:31
Speaker
So I throw that over to you, dear reader, to make your own conclusions. But this hasn't found Kevin Russell for us. Another bizarre twist for us was, of course, I mean, there were three large hotels in Pitlockry. There's the Hydro, the Athol Palace and Fishers. And at some stage, this guy's been linked to each one.
00:38:55
Speaker
which has sort of made this trying to track him down even harder you know there's someone said oh he was at this hotel he was at that one so yeah which is just made you know we were totally thrown by the hydro hydro wasn't actually in the equation until i went and checked checked the electoral register in Perth we thought it was either fishers well first of all we thought it was the Athol palace
00:39:18
Speaker
which is what Craig said he remembered it as being. And Dave, you spoke to the manager there, didn't you, last year. And then we tried the fishes and then you contacted the former owners of the fishes. We did, the padfields, yeah. And then suddenly it's turned up, it was actually the hydro. But I think, like we said before, the staff, I think all often knew each other and they probably socialized with each other. So that's probably where some of the confusion came.
00:39:45
Speaker
I've had it confirmed to me by several people that the staff from the hydro drank at the fishes. That was their quote unquote watering hole, their local. So the, you know, there isn't an issue with Kevin Russell working at the hydro and not being potentially linked with the events and the people at fishes. It was an easy, and it's an easy link. Nobody I've spoken to
00:40:14
Speaker
is questioned that that's a possibility. Yeah absolutely. I mean going through, we're in December of 2022 by this point where we've got names you know all through December into early January you're going through all of these potentials. David writes to a few in Glasgow, you know actually sends them letters.
00:40:37
Speaker
And then we get into January with this and we're not getting anywhere. But Matthew, do you want to talk about this tribunal that you actually got going on?
Legal Challenges and Privacy Laws
00:40:46
Speaker
Yeah, this is my attempt because once we'd got the name, we sat on this name for 10 months. We didn't just blur it out because we
00:40:58
Speaker
were conscious that there was a chance that the man didn't want to be found initially. And we weren't clear on the reasons for that, but we have tried our absolute utmost privately to try and locate it.
00:41:14
Speaker
And one way in which we did that was to go to the National Archives, which has these formerly, uh, former MOD files, um, and ask them for the name. And then the, the name of Craig Lindsay and presumably Kevin Russell are both present in this, this DEFE file, but it's being withheld until 2076 on the grounds of privacy.
00:41:41
Speaker
personal privacy with the alleged fear that to name these people will cause them substantial harm and distress. And I asked the National Archives to let me have the name.
00:41:57
Speaker
And they refused. I appealed and they refused. I went to the information commissioner and they issued a preliminary ruling refusing. I asked for a formal ruling and they refused. They said no. And then I took it to the first tier tribunal, which is like the fifth stage. There are more beyond that, but it's clear that
00:42:25
Speaker
this is not going to be resolved in that manner. And it became clear to me, it isn't possible to argue by means of evidence and logic, it can only be argued on the point of law and the law is the law, disagree with it as we may. My case was essentially that
00:42:48
Speaker
in all the years that the Ministry of Defence and the National Archives had been releasing UFO files, which was from 1998 to 2007, as it turned out, involving tens of thousands of pieces of personal information
00:43:04
Speaker
including details of children who'd witnessed UFOs, Ministry of Defense Personnel, civil servants, telephone numbers, addresses, ages, you name it. There's information about people who were clearly mentally ill, who were writing in saying, aliens are contacting me through my television. There were people in sheltered housing. And all of this is there in the clear. In all that time, there hasn't been a single recorded complaint
00:43:34
Speaker
to anyone about that information being released into the public domain. But ironically, when the Freedom of Information Act 2005 came into force, despite its title, it was used to actually conceal information. And come 1st of January 2008, the shutters went down at the National Archives. Prior to that, every piece of personal information is there for anyone to see.
00:44:02
Speaker
and the Press Complaints Commission, the National Archives themselves and Ipso have confirmed to me that there has been not one complaint zero. But after that the great fear apparently was that these people would be approached by the press and people like ourselves and they'd be traumatized by these interactions despite there being literally no evidence to substantiate that belief.
00:44:32
Speaker
no one is allowed to see this information now for 84 years from the date, the last date in the file. Because the assumption is if someone is an adult, they were assumed to be 16 at the time, which again is a low age, especially when you're dealing with civil servants and people like that. And the 100 year rule applies. So you have to wait until essentially they are guaranteed to be dead before you can know their names.
00:45:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's worth reiterating that this is the file that you're going after you were going after. This is the file that was misreported. I think it was in the Scottish sun that the photographs had been reclassified until 2076. And that's when the whole UFO community blew up with saying these photos being reclassified again. But this is we just need to reiterate this, which I continue to do often. It's not a file. No, it's just a
00:45:27
Speaker
it's one sheet of paper that you can actually read. It's just that the two names have been... Now, what we've got to be clear about here is that earlier on we were saying there must be a file on this case, which is the one that has been probably being moved out of the whole system given to something like BAE Systems or some private contractor, you know,
00:45:52
Speaker
somewhere, there is a file on this, got to be, but it's not in the public record system. The one we're talking about is simply the two names on a sheet of paper that is in the file that's been released. Yeah, all the pieces of evidence that are referenced. Yeah, but that's far too complex to explain to your average reader of The Sun or The Daily Mail.
00:46:16
Speaker
But the absurdity of it is, even like, say, Craig Lindsay's name was redacted, along with the telephone number, the 1990 telephone number for RAF Pitt Reavy. Now, I imagine that that isn't even, if you were to dial it, I doubt you'd still get through, given that the dialing codes presumably changed. And we, you know, even when we had a statement, a signed statement from Craig to say, I was contacted by a David Clark,
00:46:44
Speaker
in 2021, I think it was the first time, 22-32 years had passed, no one else had contacted me, I happily spoke to him, handed the photograph over, was photographed, appeared in the Daily Mail and subsequent to that, no one contacted me, literally no one, this great allegation, this great supposed fear that these people will be harassed and doorstep and
00:47:13
Speaker
be phoned at all all times of the day and night and no one no one and that's that's that's an assigned statement from Craig Lindsay and yet that's that's the justification used to to keep these these details secret yeah that's the thing absolutely and this is leading us right up until the end of uh
00:47:33
Speaker
Well, I was just going to say to Matthew, I mean, can you explain Matthew, you know, all the different Kevin Russell's that you've contacted, you know, because I mean, you've been in touch with literally hundreds of you're all across the world.
00:47:48
Speaker
you're not harassing them it's a simple this is what investigative journalists do every single day it's like someone's in the news you contact them and you say um could you add i'd like to ask you about something would you be willing to talk about it or are you so and so that i'm writing a story on and if you do it politely and you know if they tell you i don't want to talk to you please go away you you don't bother them again
00:48:13
Speaker
this is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. And the National Archives and the Ministry of Defense are just using the law to prevent legitimate investigative journalism. I've made this point before, and I may sound really boring to keep banging on about it, but it really is central to having a democracy actually being able to do things like
Global Search for Kevin Russell
00:48:36
Speaker
this. And Matthew, you just summarized what you did to try and track him down.
00:48:41
Speaker
Yeah, so as we got when we got the name that was like, you know a fantastic moment We thought we know we're almost cracked this little did we know? Because it was there was sort of the the implicit fear. It was like oh, we've got the name fantastic Oh, it's Kevin Russell and it was it was clear. It was very apparent that that's a very common name even in a you know, a country with a relatively small population like Scotland and
00:49:10
Speaker
Just at first search, there were 24, 25. In England and Wales, there were over 200. And then we tracked them down. And I remember, like, Vinny, you found the first man on Twitter. And he was a fell walker. And he was Scottish. And he was posting photographs. And it's like, it's got to be him. No, it isn't. Are you named after an uncle or anything like that? No, no, I'm not. And so, OK, thank you for your time.
00:49:36
Speaker
And lo and behold, we just went through every Scottish person with the surname Russell in Perthshire. Every person, every Scottish person called Kevin Russell that I could locate. And we wrote them, we emailed them, we found them on Facebook and on Twitter.
00:49:54
Speaker
and we called them. No one has been rude in the slightest. The worst reaction of anyone was a gentleman who, I simply said, you know, my name's Matthew Hillsley, I'm calling on behalf of Dr. David Clark from Sheffield, Harlem University. And he said, no, thank you. I put the phone down. That's literally the worst reaction. And that is so atypical.
00:50:19
Speaker
But also, Matthew, there was the one of the ones I wrote to, one of them came back and said, oh, I'd loved I am Kevin Russell. I'd love to be the Kevin Russell. I've read about the story and I wish it was me, but it isn't.
00:50:35
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. People are just intrigued. I spoke to a vicar, a vicar, Mr Russell in Perth, the Perth area, and he had me on the phone for 20 minutes talking to me about the extended family now who's going to talk to these various Russells to see if they knew Kevin.
00:50:56
Speaker
And I've been around the world. I found people who worked at the Pitlocky Hydro who now live in Australia and I found them and I was very certain to make sure that I phoned them at a decent time. I didn't want to ring anyone in the middle of the night. And they were perfectly polite. Yeah, you know, I've got various memories and
00:51:18
Speaker
I can't recall very much. You can understand this that long ago, but I wish you well. And then we were advised at one point that Kevin Russell's mum might have worked at the Pitlockery Festival Theatre and a lady on Facebook was incredibly kind. She found me
00:51:36
Speaker
sent me messages back and forth over a great number of months and she too had worked at the theatre and had kept the programmes and these programmes were incredibly detailed and listed literally everyone from the managing director
00:51:52
Speaker
to the principal cast, to the car park attendants and the people who wash the pots. Everyone's listed and this lady, Mrs Russell was listed there and I went and found her and long story short, one son lives in New Zealand, one son lives in Utah, I found them and found them and I found her in France and unfortunately it wasn't her but again she was amazed. When I phoned I was very careful to say
00:52:21
Speaker
I know you don't know who I am and I'm asking you to confirm information about your life but this is the reason why we're doing it and once I'd done so and you know in a polite friendly manner she was absolutely fine she was just oh yes I'm you know again like with the the other person it's like you know I'm sorry I'm not the person you're looking for
00:52:42
Speaker
And yes, so all in all, about 300 Russells, unfortunately a very common name in Scotland, and about 150 Kevin Russells and no hits, unfortunately. A lot of non-responses, it has to be said, fair number of denials, but no one definitive.
00:53:08
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And what's bizarre now is that now his photograph and the name has appeared on in The Daily Record, one of the largest circulation newspapers in Scotland. It's very, very odd that no one has recognised that photograph and no one has said, oh, I was at school with Kevin Russell, or, oh, I know that name, or it's very strange. You know, it's almost as if he has been abducted to another dimension or something.
00:53:35
Speaker
Yeah, we were really I mean, I know, I'm sure I speak for everyone here. At the very least, I think we were hoping someone would say I was at catering college, or I was secondary school with Kevin Russell. Because he, yes, he was working at this hotel for this one season in 1990. But he has to have had a history somewhere. And we had to
00:53:59
Speaker
two particularly conflicting accounts. One gentleman who again I found thanks to Giles' work, he too is named on the Hydro Hotel electoral register list. He was just adamant. He'd known Kevin Russell, he'd worked at the Hydro for a very long time and Kevin Russell was from Falkirk and was a Falkirk football fan.
00:54:25
Speaker
And yet another person who also worked at the Hydro Hotel, again for a reasonable length of time, informed us he was equally adamant Kevin Russell was from Glasgow. He had helped him unload his car when he'd first arrived from England. This was the man speaking. Kevin Russell had helped him unload his car. And then when this had happened, Kevin Russell had gone back to live with his mother in Glasgow.
00:54:54
Speaker
So we had, you know, they're not a million miles away. I think they're about 20 miles away from one another, Falkirk and Glasgow. So it was unclear, you know, which account was accurate. And so we were just unsure how to proceed. According to various sort of public source websites, the Kevin Russells in Falkirk
00:55:25
Speaker
who are of the right age are not the right man. There seem to be two who are particularly matched, but both of those, one has denied being the man and the other one appeared to be married in the year before in 1989. And everyone we'd spoken to said Kevin Russell was single in 1990 at the hotel. That left us with four men in Glasgow
00:55:54
Speaker
well, two in Glasgow in particular, who were born in Glasgow, one in Airdrie and one in Bayleston. The two from Glasgow were both born in 1967 and they seem to be the prime matches and we haven't been able to definitively locate either of them and that's where things stand.
00:56:17
Speaker
Yeah. And that's the thing. And then going back to the ones that you have contacted, spoken to, we still have the possibility that we could have found him. And he said, no, it's not me. We could have... Let me think what else there is. Yeah. I mean, it just, this is the thing. We just, we've done what we can. You could have emigrated. You could have emigrated. There are still so many little things that lead off the work that we've kind of done and feel we've kind of done all we can.
00:56:46
Speaker
you may have missed him somewhere in there and not through the fault of lack of trying but just by just not being given that that final step. Yeah there was one who one Kevin Russell unfortunately was deceased in Scotland a gentleman who was born and died in Dundee
00:57:05
Speaker
Um, no one had mentioned that city. Uh, so we didn't think it was him. Um, we hadn't had any luck in tracing his family. Um, there had been four Kevin Russell's that I'd found who had passed away in England as well. So there were over 200 in England. So the chances it, it wasn't him. None of them are him. Um, but yeah, so there's been five deaths. Um, but the odds are, you know, 220.
00:57:36
Speaker
Kevin Russell still extant. He could be living in England, and if he is in England, then the Scottish daily record doesn't reach England, does it? The thing about his name isn't necessarily going to reach people who may know him in England, or assuming he's still living in Scotland.
Community Assistance and the Quest for Evidence
00:57:57
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, like you said, this is where we're at and it was the right time to put the name out there with the photograph and, you know, like a call to arms for the general public to get involved and people in the UFO community that, you know, want to help out if they can. We know the guys over at Metabunk have been following the case very closely since the photo came out. And, you know, so we appreciate any help that anybody watching this can give us and
00:58:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's ongoing. Our investigation is still ongoing. We still have other small leads relating to the case, I would say. Yeah, we've got no preconceived conclusions. With David, when the evidence changes, we change our minds. And we acknowledge as well that
00:58:47
Speaker
Um, he's not, Kevin Russell is not going to be able to furnish us with a set of the blueprints for this thing, assuming it was, um, but it would be, it would just be lovely. It would just be really nice to have a chat and just. Did you see what is recounted in the file? You know, the hovering, the silence, the vertical ascent.
00:59:08
Speaker
those kinds of things. It would just be lovely to see him about that. There's no recriminations, no matter what he was up to up that mountain, you know, poaching mushrooms, going for a walk. It does not matter. You know, it's 33 years later. Yeah, just a chat. And also, you know, reuniting with his copyright, his photograph, it belongs to him and it's a legitimate
00:59:33
Speaker
it's a legitimate sort of thing to try and find him and reunite him with his with the photograph that he took you know and we wanted it to be interesting to know did he ever get those images back from the ministry of defense because they say don't they in the material that they release that they return those images to the daily record well did they and did the daily record return the images to him if not why not you know there's all these answers
00:59:59
Speaker
that we're still trying to find the answers to those questions. Yeah that's it. So like you know it may not be the video update that people would really like to hear from but we thought it is valid to kind of give this update that shows just how much work that has been going on since it hasn't stopped basically and as a four
01:00:23
Speaker
four-man team, there's only so much you can do with our everyday lives and jobs and families and stuff. So, you know, any help is appreciated going forward. And we'll give more updates as and when we get anything, if anything, down the line. So before we finish this, though, yeah, I was going to say, is there anything that we need to mention before we do end?
01:00:45
Speaker
Well, I'd just like to say that, you know, what people will probably have noticed is that we haven't spent the hour banging on about, we've got this theory and that theory about, you know, what's shown on them photographs. Because, you know, you go on the Twitter sphere and you just read all this stuff about it being a rock in a lake and now the Watch the Lake theory that it's some kind of, what is it, BAE systems who borrowed a couple of areas and sent them up to do some test or something.
01:01:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's a theory. What annoys me about it is that these things are presented as if that's it. We've solved the mystery and it's not solved the mystery at all. It's just a theory. Where's the evidence? What we're doing is actually doing the investigative work to try and find the person involved.
01:01:35
Speaker
you know anyone come up with theories that you know it's actually doing some legwork to actually reach the actual people involved on the spot who might be able to confirm what actually happened it's very easy to theorize but you know that isn't real research it's just speculation yeah yeah
01:01:56
Speaker
I mean, there is a time and a place for theories and I'm all for it, but it's a case that needs conclusions. It needs moving further down the line. It needs evidence. It needs data. It needs more. We're not going to get it from the MOD.
01:02:11
Speaker
So we have to go and do it ourselves. So again, I will reiterate to anybody watching this, please get in touch. If you have any information, if you wish to remain anonymous, that's absolutely fine as well. We will respect your, your wishes, but you know, it would just be great to be able to put this case to bed once and for all. So we can all get on with our lives and move on to something else.
01:02:37
Speaker
So yeah, gentlemen, thank you so much again. I mean, it's a pleasure working with you guys. And now we've been at this for so long. Yeah, it's just great. So thank you for that. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, everyone watching. Like I said, please get in touch. Take care. Goodbye.