SOLWAY SPACEMAN

Opening

On 23 May 1964 Jim Templeton, a Carlisle fireman and keen amateur photographer, took his wife Annie and their five-year-old daughter Elizabeth out to Burgh Marsh, near Burgh by Sands on the Solway Firth, to photograph the girl in her new dress. He said the only other people on the marsh were two elderly women sitting in a car at the far end.

When the film came back, the middle of three near-identical frames showed a tall white figure standing behind Elizabeth, apparently in a helmet with a dark visor. Templeton said he had seen nobody there. The Cumberland News called it the Solway Spaceman, the national papers followed, and the picture has been argued over for sixty years.

Timeline

23 May 1964Templeton takes three pictures of Elizabeth in a similar pose on a bright day. (Clarke and Roberts, in Fortean Times in 2012, give 24 May; Templeton and most other sources say the 23rd.)

Late May 1964Collecting the prints, Templeton is asked by the shop assistant, as Clarke and Roberts tell it, "who's the big fellow". He takes the frame to Carlisle police, who find nothing suspicious, and to Kodak, whose people say it has not been tampered with.

Summer 1964The Cumberland News runs the picture and the Daily Mail and Express follow. The Ministry of Defence offers to analyse it if it can have the original film and camera. Templeton refuses, and no file shows the ministry went further.

Later that summerIn Templeton's account, two men dressed in black arrive at his fire station in a new black Jaguar, show a card with a crest and the word "Security", and say they go by numbers, calling each other nine and eleven. At the marsh, when he says he never saw anybody, they drive off and leave him to walk about a mile to a garage.

4 September 1964The visit reaches the press. Detective Chief Inspector Stanley Armstrong tells the Cumberland News he knows nothing about it and that Templeton should have taken the car's number. Templeton tells the same paper he thinks it was a joke (quoted below).

1996 to 2002Templeton links his picture to an aborted Blue Streak launch at Woomera, South Australia, first for Jenny Randles's BBC2 series Tales of the Paranormal and later in a December 2002 letter to the Daily Mail. In 2001 he tells Clarke and Roberts he firmly believes the visitors were sent by the government.

27 November 2011Templeton dies, aged 91.

2013 and 2014Roberts and Clarke publish "Solway Spaceman Solved?" in Fortean Times in September 2013. On the fiftieth anniversary, 23 May 2014, Clarke tells BBC News the figure is most likely Annie, seen from behind.

Key figures

Jim Templeton (1920 to 2011), firefighter, photographer and local historian, never changed his account of an empty marsh.

Elizabeth, later Elizabeth Dobson, is the girl in the dress. She has said she was too young to remember much.

Annie Templeton was on the marsh and appears in another frame from the day. I have not found any statement from her about the figure.

David Clarke and Andy Roberts interviewed Templeton, traced the Woomera film through MoD files and proposed the Annie explanation. Clarke told the BBC he came away "absolutely convinced he was telling the truth and couldn't explain it himself."

Physical and documentary trail

The core object is the photograph, alongside other frames from the day, one showing Annie in a pale blue dress that partly overexposes to white. Templeton's 1964 statements survive in the Cumberland News, his later version in the 2002 Daily Mail letter and a 2008 BBC Look North interview. Kodak's verdict survives only as reported; no examination report has been published.

The Woomera story is the best-documented thread, and it points away from the spaceman. Templeton said technicians stopped a countdown after seeing two large men on the range, "exactly the same type of man: same dress, same figure, same size as in the original photograph." Launch attempts were in fact halted on 25 May for weather and on 2 June for a safety-system fault before the rocket flew on 5 June.

After Randles's programme an MP asked the MoD about a "missing" film of the launch; files released in 2010 (DEFE 24/1983/1) show it was a British Pathé newsreel held by the Imperial War Museum. Clarke, who has seen it, said the object beside the pad "looked like a triangle of light" and that "it was clearly lens flare." No 1964 newspaper or official record mentions figures on the range.

It all looks like a leg-pull to me. I'm sure the men were not security agents and I have no idea why they should want to pass themselves off as such.

Things you might not know

• Kodak put up a reward. The company offered money to anyone who could prove the photograph was faked. Nobody ever claimed it.
• He had just made a fake fiver. Templeton told Clarke and Roberts that weeks before the marsh trip he had made a counterfeit five-pound note for fun, to show off his darkroom skills.
• Elizabeth paid for the fame. She was taunted at school, and her father kept her home for a while because her nerves were suffering.
• Her own verdict was the spaceman. In 1996 she told the Dumfries Courier: "I think it was somebody from another planet. It is pretty selfish of us to think that we are the only intelligent form of life."
• He left 20,000 pictures. Shortly before his death Templeton said Elizabeth and his grandson Thomas would look after his local history library of about 20,000 images.
• A century earlier it would have been a ghost. Clarke's view is that had the picture been taken in 1864, a spiritualist church would have called it a spirit photograph.

Competing explanations

A figure present and unseen. Templeton told the same story for nearly fifty years and the researcher who pushed hardest believed him sincere, but there is no second witness and no second frame with the figure.

Annie walked into the shot. Clarke argues she stood with her back to the camera, overexposure turned her pale blue dress white, and her dark bobbed hair reads as a visor. He says the camera's viewfinder showed only about 70 per cent of the frame, so Templeton, focused on Elizabeth, could have missed her. The weak point: neither parent is on record recognising her, and no side-by-side study of the original negatives has been published.

A composite or a prank. In 1997 Roger Green of Bradford University judged it "a composite made using some superimposition technique", and Clarke and Roberts raise Templeton's taste for practical jokes and the chance that someone at the processing lab played one on him. Nobody has shown how it was done, and Kodak said the image was untouched.

Later life of the case

The picture became a fixture of UFO books and television. In 2011 the News & Star quoted an MoD official saying it was of no interest to the ministry. Since 2013 the Annie identification has become the most repeated explanation; the family has not endorsed it.

Finding

The photograph is genuine in the narrow sense: Kodak and the police, as reported, found no darkroom work. The strongest reading of the figure is Annie Templeton seen from behind in an overexposed pale dress, outside what the viewfinder showed. That fits the other frames, the camera and the light, but it is an identification from pictures, not a confirmed fact. The men in black rest on Templeton's word, and he called them a leg-pull at the time. The Woomera figures have no contemporary record.

What still will not resolve: a published comparison of the original negatives, and a word from Annie or Elizabeth on whether the figure is Annie. Until then the case rests on one man's account of an empty marsh.