麻豆社

In the late 80s Nick Pope was a civil servant for the Ministry of Defence - certainly not a boring job, but one unlikely to shake the foundations of your entire life. Except, in 1991, Nick secured a new job posting did exactly that.

Nick was to work in Secretariat (Air Staff) Sec (AS) 2a - a name buried under so many layers of bureaucracy its true nature is entirely hidden. Secretariat (Air Staff) was an official government position hunting for UFOs.

For his new 麻豆社 5 Live series, Different, Nicky Campbell is sitting down with people who are, one way or another just that - different. Whether that’s what they believe, what they do, or their life experiences - episode 7 interviewee Nick Pope is the hat-trick; a man whose fascinating work changed the fundamentals of what he believed - and the entire course of his career.

The idea of a government department Mulder and Scullying around to find the little green men seems implausible, but it has existed in some form or another since the 60s. In 1950, Ministry of Defence Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Henry Tizard began to follow reports in the newspaper of UFO sightings. He urged officials to begin a study - and so the Flying Saucer Working Party was founded. The study ended after a year but was resurrected when Royal Air Force pilots reported further sightings.

I was just almost randomly assigned to the UFO programme."

The office Nick arrived at in the 90s had come a long way from flying saucers: they briefed ministers with the necessary lines on UFO stories and, most importantly, fielded reports of alleged UFO sightings - manning a hotline number that allowed civilians to quickly report UFO encounters.

For Nick the job came out of nowhere. “I was just almost randomly assigned to the UFO programme and I had no prior knowledge or interest or belief in any of this. It was just a standard three-year civil service posting”.

The scope of Nick’s department was broader than just extra-terrestrial life, encompassing all unidentified flying objects. So potential secret weapons and stealth technology that might be in our airspace was included: “we were obviously configured towards ‘is any of this a threat?’, whether it's from Russia or China or whoever.”

Government and UFO in the same sentence is usually a precursor to the words ‘cover up’ but Nick is emphatic that there wasn’t one. There’s no alien wreckage tucked away in an airbase. However, he does say that of the thousands of sightings his team fielded in his time in the Secretariat there were a core of 5% which have “seemed to defy explanation”. Of those reports, “sometimes we had photos, videos that intelligence analysts couldn’t debunk or explain, and we never got to the bottom of the mystery”.

In 2009, Nick’s UFO hunters were disbanded amidst sweeping budget cuts at the MoD, labelling them an “inappropriate use of defence resources”. But, in the US, UFOs are back in vogue and on the Pentagon’s desk. There’s a push to rebrand UFOs as UAPs - Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon - perhaps to loosen the spectre of the X Files, which lurks so close to the phrase UFO.

When it comes to UAPs, the US government is taking action. In 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said there had been 144 reports of UAPs, and in June of 2022 the Director of Naval Intelligence, Scott Bray, said that the number of UAP incidents reported by pilots and service members had grown to about 400. It was these numbers that led to the first UFO subcommittee meeting in 50 years to discuss and destigmatise the UAP/UFO conversation.

In Tennessee, Senator Tim Burchett added fuel to the fire with claims that UFO wreckage has been recovered and that “multiple sources” have informed him of the fact - though he felt the subcommittee meeting didn’t go nearly far enough, labelling it a “total joke”.

As for Nick, he doesn’t believe the US government is engineering a cover up - rather scrabbling to catch up: “I think the situation is more that there is a genuine phenomenon or several different phenomena, but that the US government doesn't know what it's dealing with [...] so I think far from knowing all about this and covering it up and having some of these things hidden away in Air Force hangars somewhere, the situation is equally egregious, and it's that the government does not know enough about something that it ought to know a lot more about”.

He does say it’s a conversation gathering momentum, and some of the reports are hard to justify away. “We've had those very well-known US Navy videos taken from F 18 Super Hornets with the forward-looking infrared cameras, simultaneously witnessed by some of the pilots, simultaneously tracked on radar, performing apparently extraordinary speeds, manoeuvres, accelerations, able to operate seamlessly in the atmosphere and under the ocean”.

It’s also worth noting that unexplainable does not mean extra-terrestrial and government tech that’s being kept under wraps is arguably a more likely explanation. “Some of it could be adversary technology - drones launched from ships or submarines - spying on sensitive US military facilities”.

So where does Nick stand? He started his journey as a sceptic civil servant in the 90s. Now he’s a journalist and author living in Arizona. At the very least it profoundly affected him, but what does he believe? “Well, let me put my cards on the table. I am convinced there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe [...] and it would be crazy to think that there was just one other civilisation. So, chances are, we're dealing with a very complex and crowded Cosmos”.

You can Nick Pope’s full conversation on the 麻豆社 Sounds' podcast 'Different with Nicky Campbell'.