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Nick Pope

The "UFO project" was always a minor sideshow to something else, even in the glory days of the phenomenon. Again, returning to Ralph Noyes, who in a sense did "run" the UFO project, as he was head of Defence Secretariat 8:

. As what I regarded at the time as a minor and tiresome part of the job DS 8 also took on the job of responding to the public on the reports they sent us of UFOs seen in the sky. And DS 8 also naturally became the first place to which reports of things seen by our own people were initially directed. So during the period when I ran DS 8 I saw a number of the UFO reports. It has since been renamed AS 2 (Air Staff 2). It's just a change of name. It's doing virtually the same job.
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The thing is I think Pope probably fills a useful niche for the media when they need a bit of 'pro-UFO' comment. As he actually worked for the government he has enough of a veneer of the plausibility that the average ufologist lacks. Similarly Dave Clarke, who as an academic and writer has verifiable credentials (and is also a far more capable ufologist than Pope, though that's another matter).

Having said all that, credentials haven't always meant much. Creighton and some of the rest of the Flying Saucer Review bunch had very respectable careers, establishment connections etc but some of their ideas were frankly batshit crazy (cf the current situation in the US).
 
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Perhaps it just shows the level of antagonism that the man generates? The only episode of "Uncanny" I didn't listen to was Rebdelsham. 100% because of this guy.
 
On News National news media Nick Pope in a friendly discussion tells Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at SETI, that it is possible that the whistleblowers could be telling the truth.

Seth on the other side of the discussion said he did not believe there are E.T.s or UFOs because no government could keep a 70 year old secret.
 
DrPaulLee said:
Perhaps it just shows the level of antagonism that the man generates?
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Agreed - pretty much all of the other serious Ufologists (in the UK at least) are sick to death of pointing out Pope's mendacities, yet there he is grifting away and doing very well out of it. However, I also agree with Yith in that the juvenile name-calling cheapens their point considerably, making justifiable irritation look more like jealousy.
 
Juvenile name-calling has been part of the furniture in ufology for a long time, regrettably.
 
If people are jealous, it's justified. Many hard working researchers are ignored and forgotten in favour of this self aggrandising grifter who seems to be "the No 1 go-to guy in UFOlogy" for doing very little.
 
DrPaulLee said:
If people are jealous, it's justified. Many hard working researchers are ignored and forgotten in favour of this self aggrandising grifter who seems to be "the No 1 go-to guy in UFOlogy" for doing very little.
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It was ever thus, I'm afraid @DrPaulLee Some people just seem to attract attention, the media, etc. even when it's obvious to many that they know very little. I think it may be the confidence to state something as a fact when people who know more may be more aware of the nuances. Or in some cases just being thick skinned ****s who don't care what their peers think of them.

I've noticed a trend in UFO programmes to include some perfectly reasonable questions about the possibility of life elsewhere in the Universe to respected figures like Seth Shostak and when they answer that they believe that there is, to cut to a story about a light in the sky with the inference that a respected astronomer supports the ET UFO hypothesis.
 
Well, as I said, the two things that would generally cause the media to come knocking are either a veneer of credibility, which means a genuine scientific or other academic qualification, or a former government or military post; or a decently sellable (or these days, clickable) story. Pope fits neatly into the "former government" category, so the fact he hasn't served the long, tedious ufological apprenticeship of trudging the streets 'investigating' cases doesn't really matter.

Otherwise I doubt there is that much interest in the researches of the average ufologist, or even the unusually able ufologist (the Hendrys, Clarkes or Kottmeyers of this world). A few like Keel were essentially journalists themselves, so knew how to find an audience. Vallee is seriously well-connected, which is probably why he gets so much airtime even now.

In the US you tended to get a few more scientific types involving themselves, or at least former scientists like Friedman, but ufology was always a different beast over there. There *was* money in being a Hynek sort of figure, though Hynek attracted some pretty strong words from both sides of the fence he was sitting on.
 
Can't keep.a good grifter down...
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This Christmas, many self-proclaimed former heads of Britain's UFO investigation squad called Nick Pope are in danger of not getting enough attention. Please give them the gift of your attention, to allow self-proclaimed former heads of Britain's UFO investigation squad called Nick Pope to live their best lives, to get money by peddling unverifiable opinions, to get money by making frequent appearances in such august journals of record such as the Daily Mail and to appear on GB News alongside Uri Geller to tell their truth (and get money). Please give self-proclaimed former heads of Britain's UFO investigation squad called Nick Pope as much attention as you can this Christmas, and any money (but it's the truth he's in it for).

PayPal accepted.
 
When you make money off your name is it not called being an entrepreneur ?

Last July, Nick told Sky News that the MP’s should insist on a new approach to UAP/UFOs after the MoD closed the UFO program in 2009 saying UFOs are harmless and no threat to national security.
 
Well for me in his History Cable TV programs he describes, but he “sits on the fence” being careful not to take a side.

I don’t think he has come out with an actual “ position “.
 
charliebrown said:
Well for me in his History Cable TV programs he describes, but he “sits on the fence” being careful not to take a side.

I don’t think he has come out with an actual “ position “.
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But again, it's not about the position he takes, it's the position he claims to have held. If on said History Channel he was presenting an actual history series, and billed himself as a Professor of History, when in fact he'd only studied it to college level it would lessen his authority, yes?
 
I've followed the UFO stuff since early 90s read a fair few books on it and believed there was something to it. I lost interest but sometimes see footage of US military aircraft that I would have seen as a UFO in the early 90s. Then the stuff seen at air bases seems to me to be testing of advanced military craft. I was surprised recently with those hearings in the US but the politics in the US is pretty crazy these days. I sometimes think the "aliens" are the us coming from the distant future to check in on their distant ancestors. "You put the aliens in the middle of this stuff and you have all the answers" as per the old Eat Static track back in the day. As for Mr. Pope I am a Major myself and privy to feck all secrets of any kind.
 
Feech23 said:
As for Mr. Pope I am a Major myself and privy to feck all secrets of any kind.
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When I was growing up, my next door neighbour had been a Wing Commander, in charge of aircraft engineering during WWII. He told us one day that he and his wife had been buzzed at low altitude by an unidentified craft while out driving (a few years after the war). He stopped the car and had a look. Even though he was familiar with most of the secret projects under development, he was unable to identify this craft.
So... even a high-level officer who was 'on the inside' could not identify something.
 
Yes, if there are any such secret craft access and knowledge to that information would be very limited I would imagine.
 
Mythopoeika said:
When I was growing up, my next door neighbour had been a Wing Commander, in charge of aircraft engineering during WWII. He told us one day that he and his wife had been buzzed at low altitude by an unidentified craft while out driving (a few years after the war). He stopped the car and had a look. Even though he was familiar with most of the secret projects under development, he was unable to identify this craft.
So... even a high-level officer who was 'on the inside' could not identify something.
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Reminds me of the later sighting from a North Sea oil rig of an unknown triangular craft refuelling from a tanker and flanked by US jets. Unfortunately for the US he had been in the Royal Observer Corps and was trained in aircraft recognition so I expect someone got a bollocking...
 
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One thing about Pope, as a former civil servant with some UFO involvement, is that by his very existence he does at least expose the dubiousness of some of these current narratives about secret 'crash retrieval' and reverse engineering programmes. Keeping such things genuinely secret would be very difficult and would have to involve thousands of people over many years. By contrast the few proven UFO-related 'secrets' we know about seem to have got out quite easily through people like Pope.

For example despite it apparently being a closely guarded secret, the existence of the Calvine photo was well-known (including a low quality copy of the photo itself) before it was actually found, and the likes of Pope could point to actually seeing the evidence themselves. The same with Noyes' 1950s gun camera films that I mentioned earlier; he'd seen them himself so we know they existed. You'll note with both of these there's none of the usual second-hand tales that characterise most of these stories.

Similarly military witnesses like Stan Hubbard, mentioned above, Michael Swiney and David Crofts, Freddy Wimbledon, Ian Fraser-Kerr and Ivan Logan (involved in Lakenheath-Bentwaters etc) were happy to be interviewed by David Clarke and Andy Roberts years after their sightings, and their stories were backed up by official records from the time. There's no particular evidence of any great secrets being concealed and particularly of the more lurid claims presently going around that people have in the past been done away with to stop them 'talking'.

More to the point if there had really been multinational 'crash retrieval' programmes going back to the 1930s (if you believe Grusch et al) then surely Noyes, perhaps even the less-senior Pope, would have known about them; Noyes certainly had no difficulty accessing the 'evidence' he did find. Yet despite believing in the reality of the phenomenon Noyes concluded it was elusive and unclassifiable, which was hardly what you'd expect if physical craft had been recovered.
 
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I suppose the above leads onto the point that the current 'cover-up' narratives seem very much focused on private corporations (Lockheed Martin is being mentioned a lot at present). I wonder if this is simply a sign that the idea of a military or government cover up is getting harder to maintain given the existence of so many military or government people who were interested in UFOs but still unable to prove anything about them.

Peter Hill-Norton is a case in point; he was First Sea Lord, Chief of the Defence Staff, and Chairman of the NATO Military Committee - a man who would probably have been able to get his hands on any 'file' he needed. Yet there's no sign that despite being genuinely interested in UFOs he was ever made party to any earth-shattering secrets about them.

Come to think of it, mistrust of large private companies, as opposed to mistrust of government, is a very contemporary-feeling narrative, so perhaps it also reflects our culture generally.
 
On the U.S. History Channel that airs UFO programs, Nick Pope expressed his opinion that the Calvin’s, Scotland UFO photo on August 4, 1990 was the best of any film or photos of UFOs.

Nick said he briefly saw the original UFO photo, and it was in beautiful color with the landscape that helped with perspective.

Unfortunately, the original owners gave the photos and negatives to the Scotland Daily Record and the newspaper turned this information over to the MoD, and then the photos and negatives never resurfaced.

About 30 years later a RAF Press Officer Craig Lindsay produced a grainy black and white copy of this UFO, the one we have now.
 
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