“We went on a normal walk and went to our favorite place,” recalls firefighter Jim Templeton, from Carlisle, in northwest England, in an interview with the BBC before his death in 2011.
He was talking about a sunny day in the summer of 1964 when he went out with his daughter without suspecting anything would happen.
“We sat down and said to Elizabeth, ‘Now, I’m going to take pictures of you in the new dress,’ without waiting for that to happen.”
He refers to the mysterious figure that appears behind the girl in the image, which caught the attention of the press around the world and generated decades of debate about what it was about.
For ufologists, it was clear. A white suit. A dark visor. Templeton, it was said, had photographed an astronaut.
But apart from his wife Annie and two people who were sitting in a car, he said he saw no one else that day at Burgh Marsh, overlooking the Solway Estuary in Cumbria.
It wasn’t until the chemist who developed the photos said that a strange figure had ruined the photo that Templeton realized there was someone, or something, in the scene.
Frenzy
Templeton took the photograph to the police, where they said there was nothing out of the ordinary. Photo film manufacturer Kodak said the same — and even offered a reward to anyone who could prove that the photo had been faked. No one has ever received the award. But there was a media frenzy.
“It caught the attention of the local newspaper, The Cumberland News. From there, it exploded. The story was published by the Daily Mail and Express newspapers,” said David Clarke, author of “The UFO Files: The Story Behind Real-Life Sightings.”
Templeton began to receive letters from all over the world. “Some people claimed it was a spirit, others believed that Jim or his daughter had unknown psychic powers. Everything got weirder and weirder,” Clarke said.
Soon, he received a visit from the “men in black”, who identified themselves only as Number 9 and Number 11, asking him to take them to the place where the photo had been taken.
Perhaps strangest of all was a connection to the planned launch of a Blue Streak missile at Woomera in South Australia. A few days after Templeton took his photo, it was aborted after technicians reported seeing two men at the testing ground.
Upon seeing the photo of the Solway astronaut on the cover of an Australian newspaper, technicians were astonished because it was the same figure they had seen near the missile. The plot was further complicated because the Blue Streak had been manufactured at RAD Spadeadam in Cumbria, a few miles from where Templeton photographed Elizabeth.
When the story became famous, it was also said that UFOs had been sighted in the Australian town of Woomera. Could these incidents be linked to what had happened to Templeton?
No, said Clarke, who saw the black-and-white footage of the aborted launch. “I discovered all the paperwork in the files of the Ministry of Defense a few years ago. The footage was at the Imperial War Museum in London. And there is no photographic record of the two men who would have been spotted by the technicians,” Clarke explains.
Space Race
Templeton’s image came at a time when public interest in these topics had skyrocketed because of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. “A series of photos emerged showing flying saucers like what was seen in movies and on TV. If you see that today, they seem naïve,” Clarke recalls.
“But Jim’s image was striking. The image behind the girl obviously looks like a NASA astronaut.”
Sarah Spellman, president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (Assap), agrees that it was a product of its time. “It’s an interesting curiosity. Once you see it and make the connection with the image of an astronaut, it’s a photograph that draws a lot of attention,” he said.
For Clarke, who has a doctorate in folklore, stories like the Solway astronaut follow a fairly common tradition.
“Since the invention of photography, there have been images of angels, fairies and spirits. Many were explained by flashes of light in the lenses or were manipulated, but they fed on spiritualism in the 19th century. If Jim had taken the photo in 1864 instead of 1964, they would have said it was a ghost.”
Assap, which has been investigating paranormal events for more than 30 years, still “constantly” receives new cases of this type, although most are alleged sightings of ghosts rather than UFOs. “Our capacity for analysis has advanced, but so has the ability to falsify things,” Spellman points out.
“People have access to computer programs. If someone wants to fake something, they no longer need to create a cardboard figure and hang it with wires in the garden.”
Most innocent time
But what could explain the Solway astronaut? Was it simply a mistake? Clarke, who met with Templeton in 2002, believes it is unlikely.
“I left the meeting absolutely convinced that he was telling the truth and could not explain it himself, even though I did not believe so much in his story of the ‘men in black’. Whoever came to visit him, I doubt it was from the government.”
However, an astronaut, Clarke says, is certainly not. “One of the other photographs taken that day shows Jim’s wife, who, according to him, was standing behind him when he took the picture of Elizabeth. I believe that, for some reason, his wife got into the picture and he didn’t see it because he had a camera that could only see through the viewfinder only 70% of what was in the scene.”
Clarke argues that Annie possibly had her back to the camera, and the photograph was overexposed, causing her blue dress to be seen as if it were white. This would explain the “astronaut”.
Whatever the truth, for Clarke, this is a reminder of a “more innocent time” and he has no doubts about its importance. “Today, we are much more cynical in the face of this type of image,” he said.
“In the 1950s and 1960s, there were some grainy images that showed extraordinary things. We were much more surprised and more willing to suspend our unbelief. To me, it’s one of the most impressive anomalous images in supernatural research, and we’ll keep talking about it for another 50 years.”
