Solway's Spaceman

"We took a normal walk and went to our place," recalled Jim Templeton, a Carlisle firefighter in northwest England, in a BBC interview before his death in 2011.

He was talking about that sunny summer day in 1964, when he left with his daughter without suspecting that something out of the ordinary could happen.

"We sat down and said, 'Now I'm going to take some pictures of you with the new dress,' without waiting for that to happen."

With "that" he was referring to media attention from around the world and decades of debate about the mysterious figure that appears behind his daughter, Elizabeth.

For ufologists, it was clear.

A white suit. A helmet. A dark viewer. Templeton, they believed, had photographed an astronaut.

However, in addition to his wife, Annie and two pensioners sitting in a car, he maintained that he had not seen anyone else that day at Burgh Marsh, overlooking the Solway estuary in Cumbria.

It was only when the chemist who processed the images pointed out that a figure had spoiled the photo that he realized there had been someone, or something else, present.

Someone or something else was present.

Templeton took her to the police in Carlisle, where they declared that there was nothing out of the ordinary.

The Kodak film company said the same and even offered a reward to anyone who could prove that the photo had been faked. The reward was never claimed.

But soon there was a media frenzy.

"It came to the attention of the local newspaper, The Cumberland News, from which it was fired, picked up by (the British newspapers) Daily Mail and Express," said Dr. David Clarke, author of "The UFO Files: The internal history of real life sightings. "

Templeton began receiving letters from around the world.

"Some people claimed that it was a spirit, others believed that Jim or his daughter had psychic powers that they did not know," Clarke explained.

"Everything became more and more strange."

Then came the visit of two "Men in Black", who identified themselves only as Number 9 and Number 11, and asked to be taken to the place where they had taken the image.

Jim Templeton kept his version of events when he was interviewed by BBC Look North in 2008.

Perhaps the strangest turn of events was a link to the planned launch of a Blue Streak missile in Woomera, in southern Australia.

A few days after Templeton took his picture, the test of missiles on the other side of the world was aborted by the technicians who reported that they had seen two men in the shooting range.

After seeing the photo of Solway Spaceman on the cover of an Australian newspaper, it was said that they were stunned since the figure was the same as the ones they saw near the missile.

The plot was complicated because the Blue Streak had been built in RAF Spadeadam in Cumbria, a few kilometers from where Templeton photographed Elizabeth, and when the story gained momentum it was also said that a UFO had been seen in Woomera.

Could those incidents have been linked to the event in Cumbria?

No, said Clarke, who could see the black and white film of the aborted release.

"I discovered all the paperwork in the Ministry of Defense archives a few years ago, the film was in the Imperial War Museum in London," he said.

"It looked like a triangle of light: it was clearly a lens flare."

As for the technicians' claim to see two men at the shooting range, he said there is no photographic record of that sighting.

The US space race and USSR fed the imagination of many at that time.

In any case, the image of Templeton appeared when the public interest in those subjects had skyrocketed due to the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

"There was a series of photos, usually taken with Box Brownie cameras, showing flying saucers like you would see in 'Dr. Who', 'War of the Worlds' and 'B-Movies'," recalls Clarke.

"If you see them today, some seem naive."

"But Jim's image is so distinctive, the image behind the girl is as obviously a NASA astronaut."

Sarah Spellman, president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (Assap), agrees that it was a product of her time.

"It's an interesting curiosity - once you see it and make the connection to the astronaut, it's a pretty striking photograph," he said.

"It touched the fiber of the themes of the time and some of the popular wisdom about the UFOs of the 50s and 60s."

For Clarke, who has a Ph.D. in folklore, stories like Solway Spaceman's follow a well-worn tradition.

Sometimes even the lenticular clouds have made people believe that visitors from other worlds arrived.

"Since the invention of photography, there have been images of angels, fairies and spirits."

"Many were [explained by] flashes of glasses or were manipulated, but they were nourished by spiritualism in the 19th century."

"If Jim had taken his picture in 1864 instead of 1964, he would have taken it to the spiritualist church and said it showed a ghost."

Assap, which has been investigating the anomalous and the paranormal for more than 30 years, still receives "a steady stream" of new cases a year, although most now focus on sightings of ghosts instead of UFOs.

"Our ability to analyze has advanced, but also the ability to falsify things," says Spellman.

"People now have access to Photoshop and CGI, and if someone wants to fake something, they do not have to hang a cardboard figure in the garden with yarn."

According to Clarke, the men in black who visited Templeton were not from the government.

But what could explain the photo of Solway Spaceman? Could it be simply a hoax?

Clarke, who met with Templeton in 2002, thinks it's unlikely.

"I came away absolutely convinced that he was telling the truth and could not explain it himself, although I was not so convinced by his story of 'Men in Black.' Whoever went to visit him, I doubt he was outside the government."

However, the astronaut, Clarke points out, surely is not.

"One of the other frames [taken that day] shows Jim's wife who, according to him, was standing behind him when he took the picture of Elizabeth," he said.

"I think for some reason his wife got into the shot and he did not see it because with that particular camera you could only see 70% of what was in the shot through the viewfinder."

Annie, Clarke argues, possibly had her back to the camera and the photograph was overexposed, causing her blue dress to look white. That would explain "the astronaut."

This image was one of the few taken by Templeton on the day and is believed to show his wife, Annie, on the right, along with Elizabeth.

Whatever the truth, for Clarke it is a reminder of a "more innocent time" and he has no doubts about its importance.

"People are now much more cynical about this type of images," he said.

"In the 50s and 60s there were some grainy images that showed extraordinary things." People were much more surprised and more willing to suspend disbelief.

"For me, it's one of the most impressive anomalous images of supernatural research and people will continue to talk about it for another 50 years."