Nick Pope investigated UFOs for the Ministry of Defence

It was neither a project nor a programme, though sometimes, in his enthusiasm, Nick Pope said it was. Under Winston Churchill it was known as the Flying Saucer Working Party. When he arrived there in 1991 it was fundamentally a one-man band, himself, sitting at a desk in the Secretariat (Air Staff) Department 2A in the bowels of Britain’s Ministry of Defence. Colleagues called him “Spooky”, and in passing would sometimes whistle the theme from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. He didn’t mind, and positively liked being known as the British equivalent of Fox Mulder, the FBI paranormal-expert of “The X Files”.

His job, though, was rather less dramatic: examining the messages the public sent to the UFO “hotline”, in case some suggested a threat to security. Two or three hundred sightings of strange events or objects arrived each year, reported in excited emails and blurry, bouncing videos. Here, strange lights played over Manchester; there, a triangular craft dodged among the clouds; a shining orb crossed a road in Wiltshire, and a shape like a giant black manta ray hovered over heads in Scunthorpe.

Some 80% of these sightings were false. He had suspected as much when he started the job (with no particular interest in matters extraterrestrial, just a father who worked in aeronautics). Most of his correspondents, he assumed, were ordinary folk out later than usual, perhaps taking the dog for a walk after a trip to the pub, who looked up at the night sky and were surprised by something. That often turned out to be aircraft lights, red, white and green: sometimes meteors, or effects of weather; closer to the ground, methane flares. Over cities (where UFOs were spotted just as often as in remote rural places), they might be large-scale CGI effects devised by film companies. Increasingly, too, they came from people playing with spacey home software. The intelligence behind them was not extraterrestrial, but Jim or Charlie in an attic with a pack of Stella.

Around 20% of the sightings, though, were not so easily dismissed. Perhaps 15% were too hard to be sure of. And the last 5% defied explanation, either by himself or by the physicists, astronomers and imagery-experts he could call in to help. To him, any unexplained invasion of Britain’s airspace was well worth worrying about, but the Mod had quite enough explicable threats to cope with. Besides, it was becoming suspicious that this mild-mannered civilian was going native, and so he was, up to a point.

Looking back through the office archive he found a hard core of sightings, especially about the craft. At first they were spherical, later triangular. They liked to play cat-and-mouse, going from a virtual standstill to high Mach speeds in a second. At Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk in 1980 a metallic or glass craft had landed, accompanied by a glowing orange ball that bounded away through the trees. One witness dared to touch the craft; it gave him a massive shock, then a download of binary information.

At that juncture, Mr Pope began to laugh. But he believed the basic facts, because they were related by military pilots in retirement who had no interest in making up tales. It was frustrating that not even this convinced the mod. In 1994 he was shuffled over to the finance-policy department, but stayed at the ministry for 12 more years to indulge his main preoccupation. The top brass even allowed him to publish two science-fiction thrillers and “Open Skies, Closed Minds”, a rebuke to world leaders for ignoring UFOs, which they judged safe because it was nonsense. In 2009 the UFO desk was shut down, the MoD declaring that not a single plausible threat had been identified from his scrutiny, nor anyone else’s.

Yet, with the utmost seriousness, he carried on. He would no longer be brushed aside by pop-culture baggage and talk of little green men. Even the term “UFO” (Unidentified Flying Objects) was a put-down, soon officially replaced by UAP (Unidentified Aerial/Anomalous Phenomena). In a field of wild speculation and fantasy he set himself up as a man of calm appraisals.

In both Britain and America, to which he moved in 2012, he was soon the go-to TV commentator for any “alien” occurrence. With an unblinking stare and a Home Counties voice of authority he debunked at will, but did not deny that something was going on which humans should take note of. Interest in UAPs had vacillated since the second world war, peaking in the 1950s after the “alien crash landing” at Roswell in New Mexico, and reaching another high plateau at the start of the 21st century. Then NASA seemed to get more interested; incredible craft-manoeuvring was recorded not only on radar but with infrared cameras on CF-18 Super-Hornets; satellites picked it up. Congress in 2023 even held hearings at which military men, in medals and under oath, told the world what they had seen and what they thought it meant.

What was it, exactly? Earlier in his career he thought that some distant civilisation intended to attack the Earth. Why else should so much information be kept secret by the authorities, as if it was too dark for the public to bear? If this was so, Earth’s governments should order them to stop, following the usual paths of diplomacy. Dialling back from that, he thought these interlopers might be monitoring humanity’s swift technical progress, even with concern. Yet it was also possible that these were not creatures at all, but something from other and hidden dimensions, the sort theoretical physicists had to posit to make their equations work. The universe itself might be playing tricks.

To all those who besieged him for the truth at his conferences and on his tours, he had to confess he did not know. It was all so changeable. A sighting or encounter of his own might have helped, but he had never had one. Like his dog-walking “witnesses”, entranced and a little unsteady under the night sky, he was still essentially wondering, “Are we alone?” But that was one of the most profound, and most urgent, questions humans could ask. ■