The Solway Firth spaceman-SOLVED!!!!!!

Ok I know this has been covered quite a few times before on here,but no one has yet offered a satisfactory answer as to what actually happened that day that created what is almost certainly one of the most famous mysterious photos of all time.
For those who don't know the story,here's what happened.Jim Templeton who worked as a fireman in Carlisle was out walking with his wife and 5 year old daughter Elizabeth on May 23rd 1964 at Burgh marsh,an area of outstanding natural beauty which overlooks the Solway Firth on the north west coast of England.THIS is as close as we can guess as to where it happened,if you zoom in you can see a large stone arrow used by bomber pilots for practice in WW2 in case they didn't know the land from the sea.

Jim was a keen amateur photographer and bought with him his Kodak SLR and took three photos amongst others of his daughter in relatively quick succession of her sitting on the ground.He took the film to his local chemist to have it developed and when he returned a few days later to pick it up,the chemist remarked before handing Jim the photos that it was a shame about the figure wearing what appeared to be a spacesuit in one of them spoiling a nice photo.This is the photo he was talking about.......



Before seeing the photo Jim remarked that this was impossible because he was absolutely certain that he and his family were alone on the marsh that day.This was the middle one of the three photos,and the strange figure didn't appear on any of the others.Jim looked at the photos and still couldn't recall seeing any other people on the marsh that day.

Word soon got around about this,and the film was given first to the Carlisle Police who then sent it and the camera to Kodak to be analysed and they confirmed that neither had been tampered with in any way. Kodak even offered a reward of free film for life if anyone could find definitive proof that the photo was a fake,a reward that to this day is still unclaimed.

The story spread like wildfire across the world,and a short time later Jim was contacted by an Australian newspaper who asked for a copy of the negative of the photo.Not long after this,a technician who worked at the Woomera rocket launch site where they were testing the Blue Streak missiles contacted Jim personally.He had seen the photo and told Jim that him and some colleagues had seen two identical figures on security cameras on the launch pad,meaning the launch had to be aborted.All this happened only a couple of hours after Jim took his photo in England.Maybe a coincidence,but the Blue Streak missiles were manufactured at an RAF site just 25 miles from Burgh Marsh.

Not long after all this happened,Jim was at work and received a visit from a couple of MIBs driving a dark coloured Jaguar.They wouldn't show him any ID,and only referred to each other as numbers.They insisted he take them to the exact spot where the photo was taken,and when there asked very specific questions about the weather that day or any unusual animals he'd seen. When they'd seen enough,they insisted Jim had to claim it was all a big hoax,and when he wouldn't they left him alone on the marsh with a 5 mile walk back to work.

A year or so later Jim want back to the marsh to take some more photos,and when he picked them up from the same chemist they had a note attached to them saying they couldn't be processed.This carried on and the only way to get his films and photos back properly processed was to give his neighbours name.

To this day it still can't be proven to be a fake,and Jim has never tried to make any money from it.

So what do you reckon it is? It certainly looks like a person wearing a spacesuit,but you'd have thought something that blatantly obvious would have been visible to Jim even when intent on composing the photo of his daughter?

I'm pretty sure I know the answer with about 95% certainty,but before I reveal what I believe the answer to be I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has any other theories other than the normal spaceman or jogger theories.

Chris.

A guy in a beekeeper suit standing behind the girl, in the background.

Don't like this game. Why don't you just say it

I think its an interdimensional being who thought he was invisible (and was but for some reason was captured in the picture).

I agree, I was quite interested to hear your theory, and was really disappointed when it wasn't there. Anyway, I have read about people appearing to children who claim they are from the future. They are very interesting, and I have always thought about it for this photo

You should change the title of your thread... Throwing out a theory (that you haven't yet given, yaeh you need some stars i guess...) doesn't mean that the case is solved !! Your guess is as good as anybody elses, and will not make this case "solved" ! Unless you have really good proof! Hate threads like this...

Thanks for the misleading headline. We all have things to do and try to slip a little ATS in when we can. Not to be lead down a path to nowhere... Thanks for nothing.

reply to post by Imagewerx


Whats the point, just reveal your theory,members will give their opinions anyway.ATS has enough "tell you later" trolls already.Not that I am calling you a troll.

OP,

Crap or get off the pot.

Always a nice story but ultimately it's hardly 'solved' in capitals if you're only 95% sure yourself.

Always thought this was fake. looks to me like a toy, action figure of some kind.
the way its posed with its arm bent, looks like an action figure.
also the fact you only see a portion of it....is suspect...and the way its leaning to one side...like they couldn't fix it to stand up straight.

The only other thing is it looks like its in the distance... so if its not a toy...Id say its some kind of promotional statue...like i say its listing to the side...probably whatever was used to stick it to the ground would have made it obviously a hoax...so its been photographed so you cant see where it meets the ground.

100 percent hoax

Just because some people make hoaxes for financial gain..does not mean there are not people who will hoax just for the hell of it...because there are plenty of folks who just get a kick out of doing this stuff...I mean most people who make crop circles get no money or recognition...they just do it.

Disappointed!

I thought the case had really been solved.

If for argument's sake the picture is not hoaxed, then it is likely the camera was quick enough
to see past the spaceman's invisibility cloak. In other words, the refresh rate at which his cloak
operated was a tad slow. Security cameras would have also seen through the spaceman's
cloaking device. Think about a modern video camera picking up the raster line of an old CRT
screen. Most people can't see it, but the camera can, and it will show it to you as well. That
would be the only explanation of why they didn't see him but the camera caught him. If this was all real of course. A raster refresh that slow would've gotten him noticed by cats for sure, but they'll never say anything.

Ok sorry guys,I was genuinely going to put the answer up after about 10 minutes but got called away unexpectedly.One thing I must say though is that I don't give a flying fig leaf about stars and flags,which you can believe or not the choice is up to you.

Right,a bit more background to this whole thing.I'm now in my early 50s and have never seen anything in my whole life I can't explain,crop circles I don't have a rational explanation for but I have yet to see one in real life.I first saw this photo in an unexplained mysteries type of magazine about 20 years ago,and it REALLY spooked me out more than any other photo I'd ever seen before that.This was more down to seeing the title first and having this seed planted in my mind that this really WAS a spaceman and not some more mundane down-to-earth explanation.Ever since then despite the fact that I'm cynical as hell about almost everything,I still believed this photo to show a spaceman as I couldn't explain it any other way.
I showed the photos (including the one showing part of his wife) to someone a short time ago without telling him the whole story about the spaceman and obviously without this seed planted in his mind.When asked what he saw in THE original photo he replied "I can see his wife with her back to the camera walking away,why do you ask?" "Don't you see a spaceman wearing a spacesuit?" I asked. "No sorry mate,was I supposed to? Look there's the sleeves on her dress,there's the little collar thing they used to have on the back of dresses in those days etc etc...."
Suddenly the spaceman had disappeared for good and had been replaced by nothing more fantastic than Jim's wife who had every reason to be in the photo.

So I went back to the photos and came up with this lot.

This is Jim's wife Annie.......


And this is Jim with his new Kodak SLR camera,and at this time SLR cameras were still something of a novelty.....

(The above isn't really relevant to the mystery,but is included for completeness).

This photo again shows the photos were taken from a low down viewpoint looking up a slight incline with Jim's wife Annie to the right.Notice the dress Annie is wearing,how short the arms are (like a capped sleeve t-shirt) and the just visible collar right at the edge of the photo......


This image is how the scene looks from the road (this is as good a guess as I can make as to where exactly this happened,but will be within about 50 metres in either direction).....

They would have been quite some way across the grassy bit and probably at the bottom of the dyke that was made to keep the sea out during very high tides.

Now take a look at this close up of the alleged space suit wearing intruder.......

Red outline #1 looks to be the same as the collar in the earlier photo and #2 is exactly the right position for the sleeve of her dress to finish.She has dark (almost black hair) as shown in the photo of her and Jim which matches up with what we see in the original photo.Although not shown in any other photos taken that day,she appears to be wearing some kind of hat or headscarf.

As suggested earlier it appears white purely because that portion of the image is overexposed,from the shadows on the girls face the sun was probably about overhead at the time and film in those days was less tolerant to light and dark (dynamic range) than what we use today is.

The camera was an SLR which means the viewfinder actually shows the view through the lens.Modern SLRs normally show about 90% of the available scene and crop the outside edges,but in those days the viewfinder was a LOT more restricted and wouldn't have shown much more than about 50-60% of the available scene.These cameras were of course manual focus and needed a lot of concentration on the very middle of the viewfinder to match up the halves of the split screen EXACTLY to assure perfect focus.All of this along with them being a lot darker than todays viewfinders are would have meant that any activity in the background of the scene being photographed could well pass unnoticed.

The greatest mystery here is how has this remained a mystery for so long? Of all the reports of this I've read,not one of them has ever mentioned the possibility that the mysterious figure was nothing more than the very un-mysterious Annie Templeton.

Some of the other parts of the story seem to have been given the normal urban myth treatment.The mysterious white suited figures on the launchpad at Woomera were most likely the technicians who inspect the launchpad just before a launch wearing their standard protective clothing.
The rest of the story,well that's for you to decide if he really was visited by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.

Chris.

Sorry but I have no idea why it won't show the closeup photo at all.

Edit....fixed it!!!!

i think thats a really good explaination.
i didnt see it until you pointed it out but it does look like it.
you can see how white her skin shows up on the pic where we know its her

SandF for you.

reply to post by Imagewerx

so are you gonna claim your lifetime supply of kodak film?

Originally posted by Rikku
reply to post by Imagewerx

 

so are you gonna claim your lifetime supply of kodak film?

I'm not sure if this actually counts as proving it as a fake? The photo wasn't actually faked,they just misinterpreted what they saw in it.Anyway I think I'd have fun trying to get old fashioned roll film into my Canon EOS20D.

I've always thought this was a weird picture and the story that goes with it.

To me it looks like the figure is faced away from the camera, the shading on the right side of his torso looks like it outlines a shoulder-blade and the way his arm seems to bend away from the viewer. If we are indeed looking at the figures' back then he might not be wearing a 'space' helmet at all, just a cap, this may be more of a 'ghost' picture than a spaceman photo.

edit: aha! I see it's been explained by the author, and a satisfactory explanation it is too