The Spaceman of Solway Firth

Jim Templeton was an interesting man. Not only was he a firefighter in Carlisle, England, but also a historian and photographer. He took countless pictures throughout his life, and most were only ever seen by his friends, family and coworkers. But the photograph that he took exactly 61 years ago today has traveled around the world, and remains an enduring mystery.

Jim, his wife Annie, and their two daughters Frances (9), and Elizabeth (5), went for a walk in the Burgh Marsh, which is part of the Solway Firth, a large inlet that serves as a barrier between England and Scotland. Elizabeth had a new dress, and Jim wanted to take pictures of her wearing it. They picked the Marsh because it was a nice background for the images. As the Templetons trekked in, Annie spotted only two other people enjoying the spring weather in the wide open expanse, both some distance away from them.

As the family set up their studio, Jim noticed something odd. The cows and sheep that normally grazed on their own, were instead all huddled in herds, as far away from the area as they could get.

But Jim wasn't there for livestock. Dismissing the oddity from his mind, he raised his Pentacon F to his eye, and took three photos of his daughter in different poses, with Frances and Annie appearing in the last (I couldn't find a free version, but if you go to the first link under sources, you can see it for yourselves). The family then continued their hike. Jim dropped the photos off to be developed.

When he picked them up, the chemist complained about the middle shot, featuring Elizabeth holding a bouquet of wildflowers. She felt this one was the best of the group, but ""some idiot"" had photobombed Elizabeth. Jim was confused. Again, no one in the family had seen another person nearby, nor had he seen anyone behind his daughter before taking the shot.

Frances was out of frame, and Annie had been behind him for picture 2. In addition, the camera's viewfinder would go black every time a photographer took a picture. This meant that Jim had to check that Elizabeth was holding her pose immediately, and should have seen the other person in the image.

Jim would only end up more perplexed once he laid eyes on the picture. Rather then an average passerby, the uninvited guest looked like, well, this:

Unsurprisingly, most people's first thought upon seeing the image is an astronaut. Confused, and wanting answers, Jim both reported the strange picture to the police, and reached out to Kodak. While the chief superintendent of police, Oldcorn, chalked the whole thing up to some glitch in the camera, the experts were confounded as well. Their tests ruled out any tampering, problems with the film or a hoax. In fact, they offered a year of free film to anyone who could tell them how someone might have managed the trick, and this reward was never claimed.

Locals had often spotted UFOs hovering around the Marsh. They believed this was because of the nearby Chapel Cross nuclear plant. You can actually somewhat make out the towers of the building in the background, and the spacemen seems to be looking in their direction.

Three weeks after the papers began running the story, Jim was at work when two men pulled up to the firehouse. They claimed to be from the government, and asked Jim to return to the Marsh. As the group drove to the spot, Mr. Templeton was peppered with all sorts of questions about any bizarre animal behavior, and the weather on the 24th.

When they finally got there, the duo then tried to cajole Jim into admitting that his photograph was nothing out of the ordinary. When he refused, they finally gave up, forcing poor Jim to walk five miles back to his job. Although the pair may have claimed to be from Her Majesty's Secret Service, I believe that they were far more likely to have been our old "friends," the Men in Black.

An unrelated roll of film Jim later sent in for processing would have some of its' negatives removed. This would make him wonder if he had seen something he wasn't supposed to, and the government had taken those images to conceal the secret his family had stumbled onto.

In an additional bizarre twist, the same day that Jim took his picture, a planned launch in Woomera, Australia had to be delayed. A pair of figures in white spacesuits were spotted wandering around the rocket's launchpad. The resulting search failed to locate the intruders. Interestingly, some of the components for the rocket had come from Spadeadam, England, which isn't that far from the Burgh Marsh.

The footage of these white figures would go missing as well, and they would manage to shut down another launch, before the Woomera rocket finally made it off the ground. Any connection beside that of the date and the parts is unknown, but it is an interesting set of coincidences nonetheless.

Over the years, many people have proposed overexposure as an explanation for the image. They argue that the figure is simply Annie, and the camera both bleached and expanded her size, with a hat accounting for the dark patches.

But again, Jim states that his wife was behind him, and she isn't wearing a hat in photo 3. I also find it hard to believe that Kodak's experts would not have realized this was the case, and that only one part of the image was overexposed. In the end, regardless of the truth of the case, the Solway Firth Spaceman endures as one of history's most baffling images.

Sources:

https://jamesaconrad.com/media/Solway-Spaceman-photo.html

https://www.cryptopia.us/site/2010/08/cumberland-spaceman-england/

Images:

By Ansgar Koreng / CC BY-SA 3.0 (DE), CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67220976

By [1]., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24908802