The Tintagel Holiday Photograph Disc
A holiday snapshot of three family members posing on a hedge-lined coastal path near Tintagel, Cornwall, shows a dark elliptical object hanging in the sky at upper left. The photo was emailed to UFOEvidence.org by a woman named Patricia and posted on February 21, 2005, with a simple question: could anyone tell them what the blob was? Nobody in the frame appears to have noticed anything at the time, and the family's own friends suggested a bird.
What did witnesses see at Coast path near Tintagel?
Nothing was reported seen at the time. The dark, lens-shaped object was apparently noticed only afterward in the image. In the photograph it reads as a flattened disc or ellipse against broken cloud, above a green coastal landscape with the sea behind. Two versions of the same single photograph (a full frame and an enlargement) circulated via UFOEvidence, which catalogued it as Photograph ID 355, Europe section.
What is the official explanation?
There is no official narrative of any kind. No UK authority, police force, or MoD desk ever logged this image, no press coverage was found in UK outlets, and no civilian research group published an investigation. The entire public record consists of the witness's two short emails to UFOEvidence.org and that site's catalog entry, later mirrored by The Black Vault.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The submitter gave her name as Patricia. Her full account, verbatim from the UFOEvidence page: This was taken a few short weeks ago at tintagel in cornwall united kingdom. Could you help us and tell us what the blob is? Friends think it may be a bird but we are not 100 percent convinced. A follow-up email added that the camera was a digital Olympus C-150 of 2.0 megapixels, and that this was all the help she could give. The three people in the frame were never named and the photographer is unidentified.
Is the Tintagel Holiday Photograph Disc real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, mundane candidates. The obvious candidate is a bird or large insect close to the camera, frozen by a fast shutter, the classic explanation for dark blobs discovered after the fact in 2 megapixel compact photos where nobody saw anything at the time. The witnesses' own circle proposed a bird first. However, no named analyst has ever published a method-based examination of this specific image, so under this archive's rules that explanation remains an untested claim rather than a finding. Pass two, if real: a dark lenticular object at unknown distance and size, with a single low-resolution frame, no EXIF in the public record, and no concurrent visual sighting to anchor distance. Verdict: Unknown. There is nothing decisive either way and probably never will be; one frame from a 2 MP camera with an after-the-fact discovery cannot be resolved further.
Sources
- www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/section/europe/Photo355.htm
- www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/tintagel-cornwall-united-kingdom-ufo/
- www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/photosmain/TintagelCornwallUK05v1.jpg
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in United Kingdom
