Nick Pope

Nick Pope is a former Ministry of Defence (UK) official who headed the British government's UFO desk from 1991 to 1994, subsequently becoming a prominent public author and broadcaster on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), alien abductions, and related subjects.

Early career

Pope joined the Ministry of Defence in 1985 and worked across several MoD departments covering defence intelligence, defence policy, and security, before being assigned in 1991 to Secretariat (Air Staff) 2a — the desk responsible for investigating UAP reports submitted by military personnel and civilians. The unit, informally known as the British UFO project, had existed in various forms since the early 1950s and was tasked with assessing whether reported UAP incidents represented foreign military reconnaissance or posed any threat to the United Kingdom's airspace. During his three-year tenure, Pope reviewed thousands of sighting reports, conducted witness interviews, and liaised with RAF and civilian aviation authorities on unresolved cases. The desk closed in 2009 after the MoD concluded that UAP incidents investigated over more than fifty years had not been demonstrated to constitute a defence threat — though Pope has argued the closure was premature.

Disclosure and public activities

Key cases

The most notable case investigated by Pope during his MoD tenure was the Cosford Incident of March 30–31, 1993, which he has described as the case that most convinced him that UAP represented a genuine phenomenon meriting serious government attention. The programme's scope, cases, and 2009 closure are documented in UK Ministry of Defence UFO programme.

Pope has also cited the Rendlesham Forest incident of December 1980 as one of the most notable cases in British UFO history, having documented radiation readings at the landing site during his MoD investigation.

UK Government UAP File Releases (2008-2013)

Pope advocated for the public release of the MoD's historical UAP files. Between 2008 and 2013, the National Archives released fourteen sets of previously classified MoD UAP files covering thousands of cases from the 1950s through the early 2000s. Pope served as a public commentator and interpreter of the released files. The released files stated that the MoD had taken the UAP subject seriously at an operational level while maintaining a public posture of scepticism.

Public role and media work

Steven Greer recounted meeting Pope while he was still serving at the MoD, after the Alton Barnes CE-5 event in which an interstellar vehicle allegedly materialized in a field. According to Greer, the MoD contacted researcher Colin Andrews about the incident, and Pope — then working the UFO desk — arranged a meeting in London; Pope reportedly stated that he "just gathered intelligence and kicked it upstairs and it went into a black hole" and had no idea where the information ultimately went.

Steven Greer has characterized Pope as practicing a "studied agnosticism" in his media appearances — publicly framing UAP as an unsolved mystery and potential national security threat rather than disclosing what Greer alleges Pope and others in the intelligence community already know about the phenomenon's nature and origin.

After leaving the MoD, Pope became a regular commentator in UFO and ancient astronaut documentary programming. He has discussed global government responses to UAP, including Chile's 1997 establishment of the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena, which he described as placing South America ahead of most nations in official UAP research. Pope has also discussed claims that high numbers of UFO sightings have been reported near nuclear missile silos, and has commented on testimony from US Air Force officers alleging their missile systems were disabled during UAP encounters.

Pope has described the pattern of UAP activity near nuclear installations as consistent with NHI concern about human nuclear weapons capability: "It has also been noted that a high number of UFO sightings have been reported in the vicinity of nuclear missile silos. Admiral Byrd's story is congruent with the stories that we hear from numerous accounts of angelic or extraterrestrial type beings that are very concerned about what humanity is doing with nuclear weapons."

Pope has also addressed remote viewing as a tool for UAP investigation, noting that some serious scientific institutions are exploring concepts such as other dimensions. In 2019 he visited the ECETI Ranch in Washington State, where organisations combining sky-watching and remote viewing have documented unexplained aerial phenomena.

International UAP transparency advocacy

Pope has documented the shift in Japan's UAP policy as evidence of a coordinated international move toward transparency. Japan issued a press release in 2018 denying the existence of UAP; in September 2020, Defence Minister Taro Ko reversed course, tasking the Japanese Self Defence Forces to record any encounter with an unexplained craft — a policy shift Pope linked to a meeting between Ko and U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper one month earlier. Former Japanese Self Defence Force wing commander Mau Santo described routinely hearing accounts from pilots of unusual encounters that were shared only among colleagues and never publicly reported — testimony Pope has cited as illustrative of the global pattern of military UAP suppression that predated the 2017 disclosure arc.

The Calvine Photograph (1990)

One of the most notable suppressed cases Pope documented during his MoD tenure — and one he discussed openly after leaving — was the Calvine photograph incident of August 1990, in which two hikers near Calvine, Scotland photographed a large diamond-shaped object hovering silently near a military jet. The prints were forwarded to the MoD, where Pope became aware of them; the story was then killed at official level. Filmmaker James Fox, who interviewed Pope repeatedly over two decades, described what Pope said: "I pulled Nick Pope aside... he talked about this case in a book he wrote called Open Skies, Closed Minds. And to this day, Nick Pope... certain things he can say and certain things he can't say. But you read between the lines of what he is saying. He's like, we shut this down, we shut it down." Fox also recounted that Pope had told him directly: "they did everything they could to squash it because I think they probably have it filed away somewhere." The photograph was not publicly released until 2022, when it resurfaced through a retired RAF press officer who had kept a print for thirty years. Pope had discussed the case in his 1996 book Open Skies, Closed Minds without identifying the location.

See also

• UAP disclosure

References