Craigluscar Reservoir disc photograph (Ian Macpherson)

Craigluscar Reservoir lies about 2½ miles north-west of Dunfermline, in Fife. It is a trout fishery, run by the Dunfermline Artisan Angling Club since 1893. Ian Macpherson was a member. He was also a keen amateur artist and an aircraft enthusiast, with no earlier interest in UFOs. On the afternoon of Saturday 19 February 1994 he was at the water with his camera, a Chinon CS SLR loaded with 200 ASA film. He was taking photographs to help with a painting.

He was facing away from the water when he noticed it. "A kind of humming noise, such as that from high voltage power lines." He felt very uneasy.

Over the reservoir, a disc-shaped craft was hovering, about 200 ft up. "The craft came close enough for me to see that it was definitely metallic and had several points of diffused light on its underside, inside a darker coloured 'rim'." One later account put its size at that of a jumbo jet.

He had his camera with him. He felt unable to use it. According to the account drawn from the Ministry of Defence file, a kind of compulsion held him, and his first fear gave way to "relaxed resignation." It lasted about 15 minutes.

Only as the craft began to leave did his normal feelings return. It moved away without a sound. He took two frames. Later he described it: "The craft's acceleration was phenomenal." By the time he had wound the film on between the two shots, it was "a mere dot in the sky to the west."

Later that day he telephoned RAF Pitreavie, near Dunfermline. There had been no unusual air activity. The RAF, airports and police all confirmed there was no known traffic. Macpherson sent the Ministry of Defence a report, his photographs and a colour drawing of the craft.

At the MoD's UFO desk, Nick Pope recorded the sighting. He felt the man was genuine. Pope noted in the file that the witness "appeared genuine, and rather disappointed at the way in which (the newspapers) eventually ran (his) story." When the Daily Record approached him, his verdict was blunt: "this case is either a hoax or something very interesting indeed." No formal conclusion was recorded beyond the absence of known air traffic. The material later went to The National Archives in the MoD UFO file releases, and The Scotsman revisited it in 2011.

No hoax was ever identified. No conventional explanation has been published. Yet questions remain. Only one frame has surfaced, so the scale of the object and its claimed acceleration cannot be checked. A 2021 retelling had the disc emerge from the water, a detail absent from every account drawn from the MoD file.

There is also a curious echo. A NICAP chronology entry for 26 February 1994 at Rosyth describes a witness who took two photographs of a saucer-shaped object, was temporarily paralyzed, and watched it hover close by for 15 minutes. It appears to be the same event, with the date and place garbled.

In 2022 the case featured in Craig Charles: UFO Conspiracies on Sky History, beside the Polmont case of 1991 and the Robert Taylor case, with Malcolm Robinson and Nick Pope on screen. It is often set beside Calvine, the other well-known Scottish MoD photograph case. One man, one camera, one frame. And a disc that left faster than he could wind the film.