A Ministry of Defence (MoD) insider has addressed claims of a “deep state assassination” after Brits reportedly took the best UFO photo ever before they “vanished.”
Chefs were out walking in the Cairngorms mountains, in the Scottish Highlands, in August 1990, when they took photos of a diamond-like object in the sky as what appeared to be a military jet flew by. But after sending the image to now-Mirror affiliate the Daily Record, the pair vanished without a trace and the image did not emerge until it was published by the Mail in 2022.
A former MoD insider who worked on the department’s UFO desk shared his view about what he believes happened with the chefs. Nick Pope said he believed a “fairly robust” conversation happened with the pair in a bid to keep them from sharing more information.
But he told The Guardian: “The idea that these people were assassinated by the deep state – that’s just nonsense.” He made the comments after a former colleague of the chefs at Fisher’s Hotel, in Pitlockry, told the Mail it was as thought the pair had “vanished off the face of the Earth.”
Richard Grieve claimed the duo had been left “visibly shaken” after they were approached by two people dressed in black during a shift. He said the pair then vanished for four weeks.
It is also not known why the Daily Record did not run the photos. Mr Pope, who worked on the UFO desk for three years from 1991 and previously claimed the ministry “buried” the photo. He told the 2024 UFO documentary The Program that the Daily Record’s article would have “blown our standard line out of the water.”
He said: “Therefore, we wanted to bury this – and we did. All the photographs and all the negatives were acquired by the Ministry of Defence and they were never seen again.”
Investigative journalist and lecturer Professor David Clarke attempted to find the chef who too the photograph and does not believe they snapped an image of an alien ship. He wrote in the Mail: “Sadly, I do not think that mysterious aircraft arrived from another galaxy. I believe it was man-made somewhere in a secret hangar – and whatever it was remains on the secret list and highly sensitive.”
A spokesperson for the MOD told MailOnline: “The MOD has no opinion on the existence of extra-terrestrial life and no longer investigates reports of sightings of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or Unidentified Flying Objects.
“This is because, in over 50 years no such reporting to the Department indicated the existence of any military threat to the UK, and it was deemed more valuable to prioritise MOD staff resources toward other defence-related activities.”
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