The Solway Firth Spaceman

Burgh Marsh lies near the village of Burgh by Sands, overlooking the Solway Firth. The nearest town is Carlisle. A large concrete arrow was set into the ground there as a guide for RAF pilots on wartime practice bombing runs. Jim Templeton was 44, a Carlisle fireman and a keen photographer. The date usually given is 23 May 1964. David Clarke gives 24 May. Either way, it was a bright afternoon, and Templeton had driven out to the marsh with his wife Annie and their daughters.

He had a Pentacon F loaded with Kodacolor-X film. He took three pictures of five-year-old Elizabeth, each in a similar pose. The only other people he remembered were two old ladies sitting in a car knitting, 300 to 400 yards away. "No, we didn't see anybody," he said later. "I never saw anybody."

Then the film came back. At the chemist's, the shop assistant remarked: "That's a marvellous colour film, but who's the big fellow." In the middle frame, behind Elizabeth, stood a white figure with a stout build. It seemed to wear a helmet with dark areas on the back. Its right hand appeared to be on its hip. It was looking out across the Firth.

"The rest of the shots on the reel are perfect," Templeton told Reuters, "and one taken in the same spot just before the mystery photograph shows my daughter alone."

The Cumberland News ran the picture on 12 June 1964. The Daily Mail, the Express and the news wires followed. Carlisle police examined the negative in their forensic laboratory and found nothing suspicious. Kodak examined it too. It found no tampering and no double exposure.

That summer, two men in dark suits arrived in a new black Jaguar. They showed a card with an official crest and the word "Security." They called each other "nine" and "eleven." They drove Templeton out to the marsh and asked: "This is where you saw the large man, the alien?" He told them he had seen nobody. They drove off without him, and he had to walk about a mile to the nearest garage. Detective Chief Inspector Stanley Armstrong said he knew nothing about the meeting. Templeton told the Cumberland News: "It all looks like a leg-pull to me."

Later, Templeton linked his photograph to a Blue Streak rocket countdown at Woomera, South Australia. He said the countdown was stopped because technicians saw two large figures on the range. He said they later saw his picture and found the figures identical. The records tell a different story. The countdown was halted on 25 May because of bad weather and on 2 June because of a systems fault. The rocket launched successfully on 5 June 1964. Keith Basterfield concluded that the "object" in the Pathé newsreel was "clearly a classic internal lens flare."

In 2013, David Clarke and Andy Roberts offered a simpler answer in Fortean Times. Other frames on the same roll show Annie in a pale blue dress. Clarke argued that she walked into the shot with her back to the camera, and that her dress was overexposed to white. With that camera, he noted, "you could only see 70% of what was in the shot through the viewfinder." This is now the most widely accepted explanation.

Not everyone agreed. In 1997, Roger Green of Bradford University concluded that the picture was a composite, but he could not show how it had been made. In 2017, The One Show recreated the shot at the same location with the same camera settings. The best result was a washed-out sky and a blurry figure in the background.

Templeton never accepted the Annie theory. "The picture is certainly not a fake, and I am as bemused as anyone else as to how this image appeared in the background," he wrote to the Daily Mail in 2002. He died in November 2011, still insisting the figure was real. Jenny Randles made the photograph a key British Men in Black case. In 2023, James A. Conrad concluded that it remains unsolved. As The One Show put it: "Proof enough? You decide."