On April 6 this year, Nick Pope, often described as “the UK’s top UFO expert”, died at his home in Tucson, Arizona. A few weeks earlier, he had shared the news via X that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 oesophageal cancer and that it had metastasised to his liver. According to his wife, Professor Elizabeth Weiss, he was still conducting interviews right up until his final few days.
As many readers will be aware, Nick was one of the most prominent figures in the world of ufology largely as a result of being in the right place at the right time. He worked as a civil servant for the Ministry of Defence from 1985 to 2006. From 1991 to 1994, he had a job in the Secretariat (Air Staff) Sec AS 2a – in other words, he worked on the “UFO desk”. He was the man responsible for investigating reports of UFOs, primarily with the aim of assessing any possible implications for national security.
The hugely successful series The X-Files first aired in 1993 so it was inevitable that Nick was often referred to as “the real-life Fox Mulder” when promoting his first book, Open Skies, Closed Minds (Pope, 1996). The subtitle of the book was, “For the First Time a Government UFO Expert Speaks Out”. I reviewed Nick’s first book for the Skeptical Inquirer (French, 1997). His second book, The Uninvited (Pope, 1997), dealt with the phenomenon of alien abduction. In 2012, he moved to America where he continued his successful media career including regular appearances on the History Channel’s series, Ancient Aliens. His third and final book, co-authored with John Burroughs and Jim Penniston (Pope, Burroughs, & Penniston, 2014) claimed to present “the inside story” of the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident. I confess I never got around to reading that one.
It is worth remembering that investigating UFOs was only one small part of Nick’s job during his time at the MoD. And he was the only person with that responsibility. Furthermore, although Nick himself was open to the possible validity of the so-called ET-hypothesis (that is, the idea that at least some close encounters involve extraterrestrials), none of his superiors, who all had access to the same evidence that Nick did, took the idea seriously. Of course, his bestselling book, Open Skies, Closed Minds, could only be published with approval of the MoD but that should not be taken as an endorsement of the arguments presented.
Once Nick moved to the States, I did not really follow his career that closely, so I will limit myself in the rest of this piece to my memories of some of our “close encounters” prior to his move across the pond. Back in those early days, our paths crossed many times, usually in the green room of various daytime TV shows. At the time, Nick was arguing for the possibility that an alien race was secretly engaged in hostile acts directed against the human race. He subsequently distanced himself somewhat from such views but continued to argue that at least some sightings of UFOs might be indicative of extraterrestrial origins. As you might assume, my role in our shared TV experiences was to present the skeptical case against UFOs but on a personal level Nick and I got along well enough.
One of our most memorable encounters took place in 1997 in a live one-and-a-half hour debate on ITV’s Strange But True? to mark the 50th anniversary of both the Roswell incident and the term “flying saucer” entering the English language. The programme was presented by Michael Aspel and featured Nick Pope, Timothy Good, and Stanton Friedman on the pro-UFO panel pitted against me, physicist Frank Close, and astronomer David Hughes on the skeptical panel. I found the full debate on YouTube and rewatched it before writing this piece – OMG, I looked young!
The format of the programme was a mix of actual live debate and interviews along with pre-recorded interviews and dramatic reconstructions. One of the cases featured was the Rendlesham Forest incident. My wife kindly recorded the programme so that I could watch it the next morning. I did so relaxing on the sofa, next to one of my daughters who was almost four years old at the time. As the programme presented a dramatic reconstruction of a UFO landing amongst the trees, watched by frightened US airmen, my daughter turned to me with an earnest look on her face as she informed me, “I think that is a UFO, Dad”. That was pretty cute but there is a serious point here. Such programmes are very fond of dramatic reconstructions – but they are always dramatic reconstructions of the paranormal version, never of the alternative skeptical version.
I may be biased (okay, I am biased!) but I thought our side made some good points. For example, Nick had always made a big deal of the radiation readings taken by the airmen at the alleged landing site of the UFO in Rendlesham Forest, stating that the radiation levels were “ten times normal”. Frank Close had gone to the trouble of checking with the makers of the radiation meter used by the airmen as to whether or not the radiation levels reported were of any significance. He was able to quote from their reply: “This measurement was the bottom reading of the machine and was of little or no significance at all.”
For my part, I had anticipated that the programme-makers might pick up on any UFO-related stories that had appeared in the media in the few days preceding the programme. They did. This section of the programme was introduced with the words, “Coming up, the conversation that NASA doesn’t want you to hear between two astronauts who’ve just spotted a UFO”. Wow! So there really is a massive cover-up!
To be fair, Michael Aspel did say that this particular episode had “an unexpected conclusion”. The video footage shown was supplied to the programme-makers by “an aerospace communications consultant who was monitoring NASA transmissions”. It showed NASA’s control centre at Houston. The following conversation between two experienced astronauts, Mark Lee and Steven Smith, can be heard just after they had returned to the Space Shuttle’s airlock having made some repairs to the Hubble Telescope:
Smith: What a flash…?
Lee: What’d you say Mark?
Smith: I saw a light flash … (unintelligible) … there it is again.
Lee: I thought it must have been me…
Smith: What?
Lee: I said I thought it was my imagination…
Smith: I saw it too so it’s not… There’s two of them. (Pause) There’s another one. What are they?
Lee: I think I saw lights flickering in here…
Smith: Who’d be taking pictures? (Pause) What is this? (Pause) It’s just gone past in front of us… (Pause) Further lights…
Lee: Which ones?
Smith: I lost surveillance for a second… but had ’veillance the whole time… (unintelligible) (Pause) Gone up…
At this point, an official in NASA control centre walked over to the communications console. Shortly after this, the communication is terminated.
Michael Aspel turned to Stanton Friedman to ask what he made of the video. To be fair to Stanton, he said he did not know what to make of it. I did, because I had anticipated that this might come up and had contacted renowned UFO skeptic James Oberg to ask for an explanation which he had kindly supplied. I proudly announced that I was about to solve a mystery live on air – with full acknowledgment to James Oberg of course. The astronauts were in the airlock at the time that the conversation took place. They were dozing when they noticed some LEDs on a piece of diagnostic hardware that they had brought in with them. They started musing about the lights on that box and it was those lights that they were talking about. There was only a 3-inch window in the airlock and that only offered a view of the payload bay. It would have been impossible for them to see anything at all in outer space.
At this point, Nick Pope pointed out that there are lots of videos from NASA of objects moving around outside space capsules. Nick opined that not all of these objects could be explained away as being ice crystals because some of them show objects that move, stop, and change direction. As far as Nick was concerned, they were clearly “under some sort of intelligent control”. I pointed out that astronaut Captain Ed Mitchell, who is himself a strongly pro-UFO individual, had described all alleged reports from astronauts as – and I performatively looked at my watch at this point to make sure that we were after the 9 pm watershed – “bullshit”.
Throughout the programme, viewers were invited to call in to indicate their responses to the question, “Have aliens already visited the Earth?” Over 100,000 did so. It turned out that the viewers had not found the skeptics’ arguments convincing as 92% of the viewers voted “Yes”. Or is it just possible that the sample of viewers who were prepared to devote one-and-a-half hours to watching a live debate about UFOs as their primetime Friday night viewing and to then go to the trouble of actually phoning in their responses might just have been a slightly unrepresentative sample in the first place? I guess we’ll never know.
Obviously, Nick and I knew each other’s arguments back to front. Also, Nick was unfortunate enough to look a bit like me. On more than one occasion, a TV researcher would come into the green room just prior to us going on camera and get us confused. We used to joke that he should go on as me and I should go on as him. We never actually did that on TV but we did once both take part in a Skeptics in the Pub event in London where, just for the hell of it, Nick presented the skeptical point of view and I presented the believers’ arguments. Of course, everyone in the audience was fully aware of who was who. Prior to the event I asked Nick whether he thought we should play it for laughs or play it straight. He recommended playing it straight – so I was a bit miffed when he went on after me and essentially did ten minutes of stand-up! I got my own back to some extent during the right-to-reply part of the event – not least by honestly pointing out that I had found the arguments he had presented much more convincing than those I had presented.
References
- French, C. C. (1997). An encounter with the man from the ministry: Essay review of Open Skies, Closed Minds by Nick Pope. Skeptical Inquirer, 21(1), 50-53.
- Pope, N. (1996). Open Skies, Closed Minds: For the First Time a Government UFO Expert Speaks Out. London: Simon & Schuster.
- Pope, N. (1997). The Uninvited: An Exposé of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon. London: Simon & Schuster.
- Pope, N., Burroughs, J., & Penniston, J. (2014). Encounter in Rendlesham Forest: The Inside Story of the World’s Best-Documented UFO Incident. New York: Dunne.
