- Joined
- Jul 30, 2001
- Messages
- 633
http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk/abwatch/aw12.html
By Kevin McClure:
By Kevin McClure:
"...But I have reason to doubt that, much as Pope may genuinely believe in the reality of an alien/RAF encounter and the rest of the alien presence/abduction construct, any significant proportion of what he says he knows arises directly from within the MoD.
In an early article - as in his first book and repeatedly since - Pope claimed that, "I held the rank of Executive Officer when in Sec(AS)2a; this civil service rank equates to that of an Army Captain. I am now a Higher Executive officer, which equates to the rank of Major." I have little doubt that this comparison has assisted Pope to give an impression of authority and access to inside knowledge that a clearer explanation of his position in the MoD - and the precise limits of his job in Sec(AS)2a - would not. In 1996 I wrote -
"It appears that while Mr Pope was collecting the apparently vital and significant information that he is now presenting to the public in various different formats, he was an Executive Officer in the civil service, a rank he says, "equates to that of an Army Captain". As an Executive Officer (EO) myself, in the HQ of another department, I found this an intriguing proposition.
After more than twenty years in the EO grade, on the maximum of the ordinary pay scale, and with some additions for good performance, I earn less than £16,000 a year (all figures are as of April 1996). When I joined the civil service, the entry qualifications for the EO grade were two 'A' levels of any description, and I don't think that has changed much since. I currently have no responsibilities for staff, and have never been responsible for more than seven. Occasionally, an EO might supervise up to a dozen staff, but he would rarely have personal responsibility for significant decisions involving their deployment. If you get fed up at your local social security office, or Jobcentre, and demand to see the supervisor, that will be an EO. It's a job where you need to be honest, accurate, and technically sound, but it's nothing special in the great scheme of things. Higher Executive Officer (HEO) is the next step up, and is a standard civil service 'middle management' grade.
The comparison with the Army ranks suggested by Mr Pope did not seem to ring true to me. I had this impression that a Captain could well, in combat, be responsible for the lives and deaths of a substantial number of men. A Major even more so. Using the straightforward investigative technique of finding out the facts, I compared the pay scales of the two civil service jobs with their supposed Army counterparts. This was enlightening.
Executive Officer between £11,433 and £16,826
Army Captain between £23,668 and £27,521
Higher Executive Officer between £15,363 and £21,491
Army Major between £30,054 and £36,010
In addition, Army officers receive subsidies for food and accommodation, and various allowances. Civil servants seldom receive any addition except London Weighting. The differences in income are actually greater than the figures suggest. The differences in responsibility are as great.
Continuing my investigation - actually, having a chat with the Sergeant in the local Forces Information office - I found that probably the only way in which civil service grades equate with Army ranks as Mr Pope has suggested is in the privileges given to civil servants if they visit an Army base. Where they eat - the Officer's Mess - and where they sleep. Otherwise, I suspect that they do not equate at all, and that Mr Pope's comments might possibly be regarded as misleading.
If the Government has entrusted responsibility for the conduct of its information-gathering, assessment and public relations regarding UFOs to a mere EO, then you can be pretty sure of one of two things. Either it has secrets to protect, and placed in the job someone who has no idea what they are, and whose ignorance is useful in protecting those secrets. Or - and this is far more likely - the Government has long since decided that UFOs have no defence or other significance, and decided to fill its 'UFO liaison' job as cheaply, and as at low a grade, as would be consistent with the rudiments of providing a service to its customers."
Later, as Pope's star continued to rise in the firmament of ufology, I wrote a couple of letters to the MoD asking about the nature of his job, his responsibilities, and the time he spent on it, as well as querying the sense of referring callers to the dubious skills of Quest International - which in a second letter they informed me they no longer did. Kerry Philpott's replies were consistent with my view that an EO would have been responsible only for dealing with incoming phone-calls, logging them, and sifting them for anything that would be of interest further up the line before issuing standard replies. It seems that this was far from a full-time job: Pope's 'Meeting the Ministry' interview, "There is no specific 'UFO budget', excepting the staff costs, ie around 20% of my salary", suggests it only occupied one day a week.
The caption to Pope's photo in Covert Agenda says "Nick Pope, who for three years (1991-4) investigated UFO sightings for the Ministry of Defence." If he had the Sec(AS)2a job for three years, then if he spent only one day a week on it, the maximum number of days he could have spent on the UFO issue in work time was around 156. An average civil servant, even without sickness, will have around 7 weeks a year off, which would bring that down to around 135 days on the UFO task. In the Introduction to The Uninvited (p.xiii) he states of his time with the MoD "My conversion was not a blind leap of faith, but was based upon numerous instances where my rigorous official investigations had failed to uncover any conventional explanation for what was seen." In Open Skies, Closed Minds (p.3) he refers to "The hundreds of cases I investigated each year . . . " Considering that he had to man the phone and answer letters as well, I wonder what Pope's "rigorous official investigations" amounted to. It scarcely seems credible that he could have conducted hundreds of rigorous investigations each year in around 45 days.
From Kerry Philpott's letter to me dated 4 November 1996, it seems likely that Pope's job didn't actually require him to "uncover any conventional explanation for what was seen". Instead, Philpott explains - and this seems to fit the available work time much better than Pope's version - that
"The MoD examines any reports of "UFO" sightings it receives solely to establish whether what was seen might have some defence significance; namely, whether there is any evidence that the UK Air Defence Region might have been compromised by a foreign hostile military aircraft. The reports are examined, with the assistance of the Department's air defence experts as required and, unless there is evidence of a potential military threat, and to date no "UFO" sighting has revealed such evidence, we do not attempt to identify the precise nature of each report."
In other words, Pope's task may have been different to what he has intimated. Was he really, in the course of his work, looking for unknowns? Or was he looking only for reports of "defence significance". Despite his claim that "my official status gave me an edge over other researchers" (Open Skies, Closed Minds, p.3), was research actually part of his job? The MoD's real level of interest in reports from the public may be summed up in a brief extract from Hansard, August 1998.
Lord Hill-Norton Why [has] the MoD installed an answering machine to report UFOs? Lord Gilbert It carries a message that explains that callers will be contacted only in the event that follow-up action is deemed appropriate.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to have asked Pope just how he obtained all the remarkable information he claims to know. Maybe people have assumed that he would have access to it, by virtue of his job, maybe convinced by his Captain/Major comparisons. But I can't think of a situation in which a lowly EO would be given that access. Are we to believe that Pope has been accessing information for which he does not have clearance? That he's a master of espionage? I think not. So, should we really accept that what Pope says about secret and sensitive information comes from within the MoD? Why should we believe it? What proof has Pope provided not only that it's true, but also that it comes first-hand from official sources?
Although the part-time occupant of the 'UFO desk' would have heard and read some interesting reports going up the line from the public, he wouldn't have been told any more about a matter of serious importance or secrecy. Why would the MoD bother to pass secret, sensitive information back down the line to a desk EO who wasn't even engaged full-time on the UFO task, and had management responsibility for only one shared, junior member of staff? He had no need to know. He couldn't do anything with the information. The proposition that he would have been included in the distribution of secret and sensitive information makes no sense at all.
That Pope is still churning out 'new' secrets is also a surprise. I understand that he was promoted to Higher Executive Officer (HEO, the grade I'm now working in too, by chance) in 1994. I gather that this took him away from the Air Secretariat into, if I remember correctly, some sort of Finance/Admin work. The MoD is a huge government department, and the chances of Pope continuing to have access to any sort of 'secret' material after his change of job - let alone material about a UFO/RAF confrontation - are pretty much nil. Even if a rumour went around the MoD to that effect, Pope would know no more than anyone else who heard it, and it's unlikely that any such rumour would be more than fragmental, tiny suggestions of strange events. Any significant leak of information would undoubtedly be reported, and the appropriate security action would be taken. The civil service has clear and well-used disciplinary procedures, and I'm not aware that Pope has been made subject to any of them. The MoD isn't MI5, Pope is no David Shayler, and I suggest that any supposedly 'secret' material he appears to have accessed since his change of job should be scrutinised with particular rigour to identify its source.
If Pope really were party to information about a UFO/RAF confrontation, if such a confrontation had ever actually taken place, then I am reasonably confident that he wouldn't be writing a book about it, let alone boasting about it in advance to acquaintances. For me, the fact that he is doing so, and so far in advance of publication, leads me to believe that what he has to say is of no concern to the government, however convinced he may be of its truth. I suggest that it may be wise to look at Pope's claims in the light of his unusual, possibly unsubstantiated, beliefs, rather than accepting an extraordinary access to state secrets - secrets which nobody else has dared to reveal. In Open Skies, Closed Minds he thanks, among others, Tim Good, Budd Hopkins, Tony Dodd and Colin Andrews. In The Uninvited he adds Peter Robbins, Betty Hill, Whitley and Anne Strieber, Philip Mantle and Harry Harris to that list. No doubt they would thank Pope, too, for carrying their beliefs to a wider public on the back of his employment with the MoD, but I suggest we should be more than cautious in assuming that Pope's information about alien reality - including an alien/RAF encounter - comes from the government, when it seems so much more likely that he heard it from his new-found friends. Who probably started him worrying about there being "er, a number of other agencies" interested in him, too!"
