Solway Firth Spaceman

Solway Firth Spaceman

Type	Case (anomalous photograph)
Also known as	Solway Spaceman; Cumberland Spaceman
Date	23 May 1964 (Clarke and Roberts give 24 May)
Place	Burgh Marsh, near Burgh by Sands, overlooking the Solway Firth, Cumberland (now Cumbria), England
Photographer	Jim Templeton (13 February 1920 – 27 November 2011), Carlisle fireman
Subject	His daughter Elizabeth, aged five
Related claims	"Men in Black" visit; aborted Blue Streak launch at Woomera
Likely explanation	Templeton's wife, Annie, seen from behind and overexposed (David Clarke, 2014)

The Solway Firth Spaceman, also known as the Solway Spaceman or the Cumberland Spaceman, is a figure in the background of a photograph taken on 23 May 1964 by Jim Templeton, a Carlisle fireman, photographer and local historian. It shows his five-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, on Burgh Marsh near Burgh by Sands, overlooking the Solway Firth in what was then Cumberland, England. Behind her stands a white figure that looks like a person in a spacesuit, with a helmet and dark visor. Templeton insisted he saw no one there when he took the picture. The photograph was reproduced around the world and drew the interest of ufologists and paranormal investigators. In 2014 the folklorist David Clarke concluded that the figure was most likely Templeton's wife, who had walked into the shot unseen.^[1][2]

The photograph

Templeton, who had a passion for photography, took his family on an ordinary outing to the marsh. "We sat down and I said, 'Now I'll get some photos of you with the new dress on'," he later recalled. He took three pictures of Elizabeth in a similar pose. Clarke and Andy Roberts, writing in Fortean Times in 2012, date the outing to 24 May. Templeton said that apart from his wife, Annie, the only other people nearby were two elderly women sitting in a car at the far end of the marsh.^[1][2][3]

When he collected the processed film, the shop assistant said it was a marvellous colour film, but asked "who's the big fellow". In a 2002 letter to the Daily Mail, Templeton wrote that he was shocked when the middle picture came back from Kodak showing "what looks like a spaceman in the background". He took it to the police in Carlisle, who examined it after many doubts and found nothing suspicious. Kodak also found the image untampered with, and even offered a reward to anyone who could prove it was faked. The reward was never claimed.^[1][2][3]

Publicity

The local paper, the Cumberland News, coined the name "Solway Spaceman" and put the picture on its front page. "Within hours it was all over the world," Templeton said. The Daily Mail and Express picked it up, and Templeton received many thousands of letters with theories that, he said, mostly made little sense to him. Some correspondents thought it showed a spirit, and others that Templeton or his daughter had unknown psychic powers. "It got weirder and weirder and weirder," Clarke said. The fame came at a cost. Elizabeth was taunted and bullied, and her father took her out of school for a while because her nerves were suffering. Templeton always said the picture was not a fake and that he was as bemused as anyone by the figure.^[1][2][3]

The Ministry of Defence showed no interest until the Cumberland News asked its opinion. It then offered to analyse the photograph, but Templeton refused when he learned it wanted the original film and camera, and no official file shows it pursued the matter. When ufologists later asked whether the photograph interested the authorities, an MoD official said it did not.^[1][3]

The "Men in Black"

Later that summer, Templeton said, two men dressed entirely in black, driving a new black Jaguar, visited him at the fire station. They showed a card with an official crest and the word "Security". They said they were "from the Ministry" and went by numbers, calling each other "nine" and "eleven". They seemed unfamiliar with the area and could not pronounce local place names. They asked to be taken to the exact spot where the photograph was taken. There, they asked whether this was where he had seen "the large man, the alien". When Templeton said he had never seen anybody, they thanked him, walked off and drove away, leaving him to walk a mile to a garage for a lift back to Carlisle. In 2001 he told Clarke and Roberts he firmly believed the government had sent them.^[1][2][3]

Contemporary newspapers tell a different story. In September 1964, when the visit reached the national press, Detective Chief Inspector Stanley Armstrong told the Cumberland News he knew nothing of the meeting. He said he had told Templeton he should have taken the car's number and reported it. Templeton then played the visit down. "It all looks like a leg-pull to me. I'm sure the men were not security agents," he said. Clarke later said he was convinced Templeton was telling the truth about the photograph but was less convinced by the Men in Black story. Whoever the visitors were, Clarke did not think they were from the government. The former MoD UFO desk officer Nick Pope has suggested that "Walter Mitty" types impersonating officials to question UFO witnesses are well documented in MoD files.^[1][2][3]

The Woomera connection

In a BBC Look North interview and a letter to the Daily Mail, Templeton said he had heard that a Blue Streak missile launch at the Woomera range in South Australia had been aborted. According to the story, technicians had seen two large men on the firing range. When they later saw his photograph on the front page of an Australian newspaper, they found the figures exactly the same. Blue Streak was built and tested at RAF Spadeadam in Cumbria, a few miles from Burgh Marsh, and the story grew to include a UFO at Woomera. Templeton repeated it for a 1996 BBC2 documentary presented by Jenny Randles. She found 1964 letters in the National Archives referring to both the "Cumberland spaceman" and a "mysterious object" filmed at a rocket launch, but no trace of the film itself. The MP James Fraser then asked the MoD what had become of the "missing" film.^[1][2][3]

Files released in 2010 showed that the film was neither secret nor missing. It was part of a British Pathé newsreel, Blue Streak – Two, One, Zero!, held at the Imperial War Museum. It shows a rocket test on 5 June 1964, and the "mysterious object" beside the launch pad is a lens reflection. "It looked like a triangle of light – it was clearly lens flare," Clarke said. Research by a local enthusiast found two earlier aborted launches at Woomera. The first, on 25 May, was halted by bad weather. The second, on 2 June, was stopped by a fault in the safety systems. No contemporary newspaper or official record mentions a "spaceman", and no photographic record of the two men exists. Clarke and Roberts conclude that two separate events merged into an urban legend. The Australian ufologist Bill Chalker likewise found no link between the photograph and the Woomera footage.^[2][3]

Explanation

Skeptics have often called the photograph a hoax, but no one has shown how it could have been faked. A 1997 analysis by Roger Green of Bradford University concluded the image was "a composite made using some superimposition technique", but could not show how. Clarke and Roberts noted that Templeton enjoyed practical jokes. A few weeks earlier he had made a fake five-pound note to show off his photographic skill, and everyone in the developing department knew him. They suggested he might have created the image while experimenting, or a lab worker might have played a joke on him. Once it became world-famous and upset his daughter, a confession would have been difficult.^[3]

In 2014, on the photograph's 50th anniversary, Clarke gave the BBC a simpler explanation. Another photograph from that day shows Annie Templeton, who Templeton said was standing behind him when he photographed Elizabeth. "I think for some reason his wife walked into the shot and he didn't see her because with that particular make of camera you could only see 70% of what was in the shot through the viewfinder," Clarke said. Annie was wearing a pale blue dress that appears white where overexposed in another photo, and her dark bobbed hair could match the dark area around the figure's head. Clarke believes she was standing with her back to the camera. It has been argued that when the image is darkened and the horizon straightened with photo software, the figure looks increasingly like an ordinary person seen from behind.^[1][2]

Clarke, who met Templeton in 2002, thought a deliberate hoax unlikely and came away convinced he was telling the truth and could not explain the picture. Templeton always maintained he did not know how the figure got there.^[1][2]

Legacy

Sarah Spellman, chair of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP), called the photograph an interesting curiosity and a product of its time. She said it struck a chord with the themes of the day, and UFO lore of the 1950s and 1960s attached itself to it. Clarke, who has a PhD in folklore, places it in a long tradition of photographs of angels, fairies and spirits. Had Templeton taken it in 1864, he said, the spiritualist church would have called it a ghost. Clarke and Roberts note that in 1964 British ufology was in the doldrums, and the picture kept flying saucers in the public eye until the Warminster phenomenon began in 1966. Clarke called it one of the most impressive anomalous images in supernatural investigation, and predicted people would still be talking about it in another 50 years.^[1][2][3]

In 1996 the Dumfries Courier interviewed Templeton and his adult daughter, Elizabeth Dobson. She said she had been too young to remember much, but thought it was "somebody from another planet". She added that it would be selfish to assume humans were the only intelligent life. In 2011, shortly before his death at 91, Templeton told the paper that Elizabeth and his grandson Thomas would take over his historical library of 20,000 images. He died on 27 November 2011.^[1]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Solway Firth Spaceman”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.