In August 1990, two hikers sent photos of a strange diamond-shaped aircraft to the press – but the story never appeared. Was it a prank, a hoax, an optical illusion or something else entirely?

Craig Lindsay was a press officer at the RAF base in Pitreavie Castle in Dunfermline, 50 miles away, when the Daily Record got in touch a few days later. The hikers, who worked as chefs at Fisher’s Hotel in Pitlochry, had sent six photos of the diamond to the newspaper and told their story. The Record’s picture editor, Andy Allen, sent Lindsay the best of the bunch.

Lindsay had never seen such a clear photograph of a supposed UFO, so he forwarded the picture to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which told him to ask the Record to send the other five photographs and their negatives. The MoD also instructed him to phone the hikers, which he did. One of them told Lindsay the whole story: the diamond, the jet, how it levitated eerily with no sound and accelerated with no obvious propellant.

The MoD told Lindsay to leave the case with them. He pushed the diamond to the back of his mind.

We don’t know if the Record was handed a D notice, but Pope has confirmed that the MoD prevented the release of the photographs. He told a 2024 UFO documentary, The Program, that if the Record had run the story “it would have blown our standard line out of the water. Therefore, we wanted to bury this – and we did. All the photographs and all the negatives were acquired by the Ministry of Defence and they were never seen again.”