DARK FORCES’ I’ve seen the top secret photos showing ‘Britain’s most significant UFO sighting’ – they left us shell-shocked

In the cult sci-fi series The X-Files, Fox Mulder has a poster of a UFO on the wall of his basement office. Underneath are the words “I want to believe”.

In the Ministry of Defence office, which served as the nerve centre of the UK’s UFO project, we had something very similar. But our picture was real.

Most UFO photos are either obvious fakes, or blurry and indistinct – a vague light in the night sky, or a fuzzy dot in the distance.

Not this one. It was up-close-and-personal, had been taken in broad daylight, and showed a large diamond-shaped craft.

I soon got the story out of my predecessor and read the file myself. It was an extraordinary tale: two men had been out hiking near Calvine in Scotland.

Suddenly, they’d seen a massive UFO hanging in the sky above their heads, silent, motionless and menacing. Awestruck, they shot off six photographs before the object accelerated away at immense speed – vertically!

The shell-shocked witnesses sent the photos to a Scottish newspaper and a journalist contacted the MoD press office, looking for a comment.

Somehow – perhaps using a D-Notice or perhaps using some real-life Men-in-Black trickery – someone at the MoD managed to extract all the photos and the negatives from the newspaper, who never got them back.

The MoD’s technical wizards leapt into action. The images were enlarged and analyzed, using the full resources and capabilities of intelligence community specialists.

Even now, years after these events, I can’t discuss the details of this process, as so much of the information is top secret.

‘Unlike any conventional aircraft & nearly 100 feet in diameter’

The analysis was nothing short of sensational. The photos hadn’t been faked.

They showed a structured craft of unknown origin, unlike any conventional aircraft. There was no fuselage, no wings, no tail, no engines and no markings of any sort.

Because the photos had been taken in daylight with the surrounding countryside visible, MoD boffins could make some calculations about the mystery object’s size. It turned out to be nearly 100 feet in diameter.

An enlargement of the photos revealed two military jets in the background. It wasn’t clear if they were escorting the UFO, trying to intercept it, or whether their presence was coincidental and the pilots had been too far away to see it.