What Planet Am I On? (18 page)

At the time, the MOD stated in public that it ‘remains totally open-minded about the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life forms’, but the staff reckoned there was no evidence to suggest that any UFO sightings posed any threat to the UK or that they were extraterrestrial. Nick clearly didn’t agree that all the UFO sightings he came across could be explained away that easily. He resigned from the MOD in 2006, saying the government’s ‘X-Files have been closed down’, and in 2009 the MOD announced that UFO sightings would no longer be investigated. By then Nick had already started giving interviews to the press about it all and speaking pretty openly about it. From starting out as a sceptic, he had become a firm believer in UFOs.

For instance, on 9 November 2006 the
Evening Standard
newspaper ran an article under the headline ‘“Aliens could attack at any time” warns former MOD chief’. Nick Pope is quoted as saying that ‘highly credible’ sightings of UFO activity were just being dismissed by the MOD
and the effective closure of the UFO desk was leaving the county wide open for extraterrestrial interference. ‘The consequences of getting this one wrong could be huge,’ he said, even though he believed that as yet there was no evidence of a hostile threat.

In the article he acknowledges that reports such as a 1993 sighting of a ‘vast, triangular-shaped craft’ over Air Force bases in the West Midlands had convinced him that there was something out there that needed investigating. He also mentioned the Rendlesham incident in 1980.

Since leaving the MOD, Nick Pope has continued to investigate UFO sightings and has become one of the world’s leading experts. He’s also published a bestselling book called
Open Skies, Open Minds – For the first time a government UFO expert speaks out
.

Nick has agreed to meet up with me and suggests taking me to the National Archives to go over some of the most interesting UFO files there. I’ve seen the National Archives before on documentaries and I’ve always fancied having a poke around in there. Who wouldn’t? So it sounds like a great plan to me.

We meet first for a brew in a posh little café in Kew, in West London, which is a bit fancy. I like Nick straightaway. I think he is a totally straight-up dude. You can tell that common sense had just prevailed with him. I find it hard to believe that some ufologists wouldn’t deal with him because they thought he was some shady
Men in Black
dude. He’s just a normal guy, he’s hardly Tommy Lee Smith, you know what I mean? The first thing I
want to ask Nick is what his feelings were about UFOs before he got the job.

‘When I started that job I was broadly sceptical,’ he explains. ‘I really didn’t know much about the subject. When I came out of the job after three years I had changed my mind. While I’m not a total believer, I certainly know that there’s more to this than misidentification or hoaxes, there’s something weird going on in our skies.’

I ask him if he thinks governments take UFOs seriously.

‘Yes, they do. This is a serious issue. If there is anything unknown in your airspace, particularly if it’s been seen by pilots and tracked on radar, then the military and governments want to know what it is, so it doesn’t surprise me that governments all over the world have UFO departments.’

I tell him about my first encounters that I had when I was a kid back in the seventies, and he says there was a huge spike in the amount of reports of UFOs to the MOD during that decade. I’m also intrigued to find out what was the most interesting case he came across while he was in the job on the UFO desk.

‘The most fascinating case I came across when I was running the UFO desk was the Cosford incident in 1993, when there was a wave of incidents over a few hours, including sightings at two military bases. There were lots of reports from military personnel and police. I spoke to the Met Officer at RAF Shawbury, the morning after,
and his voice was shaking as he told me about a huge diamond-shaped UFO.’

The Met Officer described to Nick how it had moved slowly across the countryside towards the base at a speed of no more than 30 or 40 mph. He saw the UFO fire a narrow beam of light, a bit like a laser, at the ground and then saw the light sweeping backwards and forwards across the field, as if it were looking for something. It sounds like a searchlight that you see on prison watchtowers in the movies. He heard an unpleasant low-frequency humming sound coming from the craft and said he could feel as well as hear it – rather like standing in front of a bass speaker. I’m not sure if the ‘bass speaker’ part of the story was the Met Officer or Nick Pope’s description. It made me wonder if one of them was an old raver. I couldn’t really picture Nick on the dancefloor at the Hacienda, but you never know! He might have thrown some shapes in his time.

I’d heard about the Cosford case before and I am keen to know more about it. Nick had made a programme about it for Channel 5 in 2006, which was based on the original MOD files and was a pretty decent show for that channel, to be fair. Obviously the fact that a lot of the witnesses were officials and police made it a lot more credible in some people’s eyes. Nick says there’s a lot of info on the case in the National Archives, which holds copies of all the UFO reports ever filed and he says he’ll take me there now and show me, which is music to my
ears. I can’t wait to get my mitts on some proper official reports. I feel like a proper investigator.

Shaun’s X-Files

The National Archives is the archive of the UK government and it holds over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use. The National Archives’ collection of over eleven million historical government and public records is one of the largest in the world. It includes everything from the Domesday Book to modern government papers and digital files, electronic records, photographs, posters, maps, drawings and paintings.

When we get to the National Archives, Nick clearly knows his way round the place, which is great. It’s like having my own private expert guide to the nation’s UFO files, which is ace. It’s kind of pretty much what you’d imagine the National Archives to be like, just rows and rows of shelves full of files, like a massive, fuck-off library. When we get to the UFO section it makes me laugh that a load of the files have a big ‘X’ on the side. ‘Are these the real life X-Files, then?’ I joke with Nick.

A lot of the stuff here is open to the general public for viewing, but not everything. Nick explains that some files that are now a hundred years old are still closed. What secrets are so dangerous that you can’t let the
public know about them a century later? ‘What’s in those files?’ I joke with Nick. ‘Was Jack the Ripper actually a member of the Royal Family or something?’

When we’re looking at the files and handling them, we have to wear little white gloves. I feel like Minnie bloody Mouse or one of those mime artists.

The first files we look at are those on the Cosford incident, which happened on the night of 30 March 1993 and involved hundreds of witnesses. The episode began with two reported sightings in Somerset. The first witness was a copper who described seeing a craft that looked like two Concordes flying side by side. A group of Scouts had also seen the same thing. Later that same night, 200 miles north of the Somerset sightings, officers at RAF Cosford and RAF Shawbury reported seeing similar craft flying over their military bases. The fact that loads of military officers reported it obviously made people sit up and pay attention.

Nick was in his job at the time at the MOD so all the reports of such incidents landed on his desk. By the time he got to work in the morning there was a bunch of reports already waiting for him.

Shaun’s X-Files

The 1993 Cosford incident is one of the UK’s biggest unexplained UFO cases to date.

Unlike many UFO stories, the core collection of sightings – timed between 1.10 a.m. and 1.15 a.m. – tallied to a remarkable degree. Most described two
bright white lights speeding towards the south-east horizon, leaving trails of luminous vapour in their wake.

Nick pulls out a map that he drew at the time, plotting all the various sightings connected to the Cosford incident. There was a whole bunch of reports from various witnesses. Nick showed me one from the Met Officer at RAF Cosford and his description of the way the craft crossed the sky reminds me of my own encounter back in the seventies.

Checks that were done at the time ruled out the possibility that it could have been military or civilian aircraft. Radar records were carefully scrutinized but they all drew a blank. As a result Pope cited this case as the turning point on his tour of duty – the ‘big case’ that led him to believe that extraterrestrials really were able to penetrate Britain’s defences at will.

RAF Fylingdales – an early warning station in North Yorkshire that tracks satellites and ballistic missiles – told Nick that a Russian rocket had re-entered the atmosphere around the same time. But Nick didn’t accept that and wrote to DI55, the branch of the defence intelligence staff who handle this sort of sighting, telling them: ‘Whilst the decay . . . might explain some of the high altitude sightings, it does not explain the low level sightings. It also fails to explain [the] report of a low hum, or the report from Mr Elliott, the Met Officer at RAF Shawbury. The spread of timings and bearings of
the sightings also argues against this decay explaining all of them.’

I ask Nick what he reckoned happened that night.

‘I don’t know. To this day the whole incident is completely unexplained.’

He’s a clever bloke Nick, so although he’s very open-minded, he’s not going to come out and say it was definitely a UFO or make wild suggestions without proper proof. He then shows me what he calls the ‘killer document’ on the case. It’s from the Ministry of Defence and says, ‘in summary, there would seem to be some evidence on this occasion that an unidentified object or objects of unknown origin, was operating above the UK’.

That is an official report from the MOD almost admitting that they reckon there was an UFO in our skies that night. Nick agrees with me. ‘That’s an absolute fantastic line. It’s the nearest the MOD has ever come to saying UFOs are real, they’re in our airspace, but we don’t know what they are.’

Bloody hell. I don’t think that line has been reported as much as it should have been. I’d never heard that from the MOD before. It was well worth coming to the National Archives just to have that one line from the MOD.

I read it again to myself: ‘there would seem to be some evidence on this occasion that an unidentified object or objects of unknown origin, was operating above the UK’.

You’re not going to get more than that from the bloody
MOD are you? That’s only one step away from saying, ‘Guess what, folks? UFOs are real and they’re here.’

Shaun’s X-Files

In 2012, nearly 7,000 previously secret documents detailing UFO sightings were released by the MOD. Access to these official papers is encouraging for people who believe they’ve encountered or even communicated with extraterrestrials. The documents were released after a campaign by Dr David Clarke, who had been asking the Ministry of Defence to release the files since 2003.

Among the 7,000 files were documents detailing that:

• Tony Blair was briefed on UFO and alien defence policy as he was so concerned about the disclosure of classified information on extraterrestrials when he was Prime Minister;

• a Whitehall civil servant was paid to investigate UFO reports;

• government officials believed aliens might be space tourists and suggested harnessing UFO technology for British defences.

One of the most interesting files that the MOD released in 2003 related to an MOD officer. It doesn’t give his name in the file, but the officer claims that aliens might ‘come here for holidays’. Which made me laugh.
Earth can’t be all that bad, can it, if aliens who have the ability to travel through space and visit different planets were choosing to come here for the holidays? Can you imagine an alien couple on their spaceship, debating where they’re going to go this year? He’s saying, ‘What about that new moon that’s just been discovered in Andromeda II galaxy? That looks pretty interesting.’ And she’s giving it, ‘Can we just go back to Earth again, it’s really pretty.’ He’d probably warn her that they were in danger of getting spotted if they kept coming back, but she’d still get her own way.

In the file, which dates from 1995, the desk officer said he thought we really needed to work out why UFOs were coming here and it was ‘essential that we start with open minds . . . what is scientific “fact” today may not be true tomorrow’.

While he made it clear he didn’t ‘talk to little green men every night’, he also said, ‘We have a remit that we have never satisfied. That is, we do not know if UFOs exist . . . If they do exist, we do not know what they are, their purpose or if they pose a threat to the UK . . . if the sightings are of devices not of the Earth then their purpose needs to be established as a matter of priority. There has been no apparent hostile intent and other possibilities are: 1) Military reconnaissance; 2) Scientific; 3) Tourism.’

There was another file from 1979, but the author found it a bit harder to believe aliens would come here by choice for their holidays. The document, which had
been prepared for a House of Lords debate into UFOs, wondered why aliens would want to visit ‘an insignificant planet (the Earth) of an uninteresting star (the sun)’. But you can’t prejudge where people might go for their holidays, can you? I wonder why people would go on holiday to an ‘insignificant’ place like Bognor Regis, but they still do.

A separate file released at the same time by the MOD revealed that Tony Blair had requested information about UFOs after he came into office in 1998. The MOD sent him a long reply, explaining that the ministry ‘has only a limited interest in UFO matters’ but that they ‘remain open minded’ about the existence of ‘extraterrestrial life forms’.

But Tony Blair was not the only British Prime Minister who wanted to find out more about UFOs. Nick pulls out another file to show me, which includes a note from Winston Churchill asking the MOD to tell him more.