Nick Pope is a British journalist and former employee of the British Government’s Ministry of Defence (MoD). During his time as a civil servant, his duties included the investigation of UAP and related phenomena that were viewed as having possible impacts on national defense. Since 2012 he has lived in the United States and is a frequent media commentator on UAP issues related to government. 

Ministry of Defence 

Pope began his work as a civil servant for the Ministry of Defence in 1985. At the time he joined, he was one of nearly 170,000 civilians employed under the ministry. ¹

On September 17, 1990, he joined the Secretariat (Air Staff) division, located in the Ministry of Defence headquarters in Whitehall, London. Employees within this division focused primarily on Parliamentary and public issues, performing roles that included working in advisory capacities with senior air force officers and other personnel on policy-related matters. The Secretariat (Air Staff) division also carried out UAP investigations on behalf of the Ministry of Defence.²

Secretariat (Air Staff) Sec (AS) 2a and UAP Investigations

Pope recalls that he first came across references to UAP investigations performed by the British Government in the Ministry of Defence telephone directory shortly after beginning his tenure as a civil servant. A job description alongside one of the names of the executive officers listed in the publication had simply been the word “UFOs.”

“I think I chuckled when I read this,” Pope wrote in 1996. “It hadn’t dawned on me that the department would deal with unidentified flying objects at all and I found myself wondering what the job entailed.” 

On Wednesday, July 17, 1991, Pope was approached about taking a position within Sec (AS) 2a, a previously held position by Owen Hartop. On Monday, July 29 he began the new position, which he has informally called the “UFO Desk” since leaving government, also referring to it as “the most interesting job in the country.” Between 1991 and 1994, Pope says his range of duties included investigations into sightings of UAP and related phenomena in the United Kingdom. 

Three different individuals oversaw the office while Pope worked there. “Their opinions on UFOs ranged from complete skepticism to a more open-minded position,” Pope recalled in 1996, describing his daily job as primarily being “a department of one.” 

“At any time, the report of a UFO in our skies might turn out to be a foreign fighter, missile, reconnaissance device or remotely piloted vehicle,” Pope wrote of his position. Initially, the only reports he came across from his work within the division that alluded to anything potentially more exotic “revealed nothing more than a handful of reports of vague lights or shapes in the sky,” which Pope admits “were likely to have been terrestrial aircraft.” Nonetheless, Pope began to familiarize himself with popular books on the subject of UAP, citing what he describes as “a sense of professional integrity” regarding his self-education on the topic. 

Pope says that during his time with Sec (AS) 2a he only briefed one politician on the UAP subject. This occurred during a visit to the division by Lord Cranborne (Robert Michael James Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury, Baron Gascoyne-Cecil) on August 3, 1992. 

While Pope says he was never prevented from carrying out UAP investigations during his time working at Sec (AS) 2a, he recalls there being times when things were “made difficult,” which included assignments that occasionally appeared to be aimed at distracting him or otherwise limiting his involvement in an investigation. To those in government who had expressed criticism of his pro-UFO stances, Pope stated in 1996 that his farewell message would have been, “Minds are like parachutes; they only work properly when they are open.”³ 

Although Pope’s work as a UAP investigator concluded in 1994, he continued to work for the Ministry of Defence until 2006, a period during which he authored two books, Open Skies, Closed Minds: For The First Time A Government UFO Expert Speaks Out (1996) and The Uninvited: An Expose of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon (1997). His final posting was as an acting deputy director in the Directorate of Defence Security. ⁴

Of his experience working for the Ministry of Defence as a UFO investigator, Pope said in 1999 that he “had come into the job as a skeptic, but emerged believing that a small percentage of UFO sightings did involve extraterrestrial craft.” ⁵

Media Commentator 

Pope’s involvement as a media commentator began early in his tenure with Sec (AS) 2a. “I was keen to make use of the media whenever I could,” Pope wrote in 1996, noting that he was granted special dispensation to liaison directly with the media. “I spoke to journalists at every opportunity, patiently spelling out the ministry’s role and views or discussing particular sightings.”⁶

On December 1st, 2009, the Ministry of Defence officially closed its UAP investigations. Writing for The Guardian, Pope expressed that he was “very sorry to see the MoD disengage in this way,” expressing his view that sightings of unidentified flying objects “must automatically be of defence interest and should be investigated properly.”⁷

Both during and after leaving his employment as a civil servant, Pope has continued to write for a wide range of publications, that include The New York Times and many others.⁸ He has also relied on his experience as a UAP investigator for the British government in work promoting science fiction films and related media, most notably the 2011 movie Battle: Los Angeles.⁹ Pope has made frequent appearances on radio and television news shows as a subject matter expert on the United States government’s investigations into UAP, on programs like Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight.¹⁰ Pope has also made frequent appearances alongside American journalist and documentary filmmaker Steven Greenstreet in his New York Post video series, The Basement Office.¹¹

Encounter in Rendlesham Forest 

Following the semi-autobiographical Open Skies, Closed Minds (1996) and its follow-up, Uninvited (1997), both written while Pope was still employed by the Ministry of Defence, in April 2014 Pope released Encounter in Rendlesham Forest: The Inside Story of the World's Best-Documented UFO Incident, which presented an investigative analysis of the widely discussed 1980 Rendlesham Forest UAP incident, coauthored with John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, two of the primary witnesses.¹² 

The book details a series of events that occurred in December 1980 involving UAP that was tracked on military radar in and around Rendlesham Forest, England. The object appeared to have landed near RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge, a pair of military bases of strategic significance to NATO. Military personnel who investigated the purported landing in Rendlesham Forest also said they observed the object at close range, with some claiming to have touched the landed craft. The book supplements the narratives of witnesses like Burroughs and Penniston with information obtained from documents released through the Freedom of Information Act. ¹³

Following the publication of Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, some earlier published works on the 1980 incident began to be scrutinized. This included the version of events conveyed in the 1997 book Left at East Gate: A First-Hand Account of the Bentwaters/Woodbridge UFO Incident, Its Cover-up and Investigation by U.S. researcher Peter Robbins and coauthor Larry Warren, also one of the alleged witnesses. 

Robbins, who initially defended the version of the story he and Warren co-authored, eventually came forward in May 2017 and accused Warren of deception, saying that “highly specific information has been brought to my attention that has disturbed me tremendously.” Pope praised Robbins in a public statement for “having the courage and integrity to make what was clearly a difficult and painful admission that he'd been taken in by Warren's lies.” ¹⁴

Controversies and Accusations of Exaggeration

While his employment with the British government has never been disputed, Pope has been accused of exaggerating aspects of his job while working for the Ministry of Defence. A Directorate of Air Staff document released through the Freedom of Information Act described Pope’s self-description as the former head of the Ministry of Defence UFO project as “a term entirely of [Pope’s] own invention,” noting that he “constantly puts himself forward in various parts of the media” as a UFO expert, resulting in “considerable workload for the staff currently employed in responding to queries on this topic.”  ¹⁵

A DAS 4a(Sec4) News Brief document dated 9 November 2000, also obtained through FOIA, further emphasized that Pope was not "the Government advisor on UFOs” in any official capacity. However, the document affirms that “DAS4a(Sec) (formerly Sec(AS)2a) is the focal point for handling queries sent to MOD about alleged 'UFO' sightings,” though adding that its work “represents a small part of the overall duties of the section,” and that “Mr Pope left his post in Sec(AS) in 1994,” confirming Pope’s assertions that his former position with the MOD did involve investigations of UAP sightings the Ministry of Defence recieved. ¹⁶

In 2009, Col. Arnold Moulder alleged that Pope, along with such exaggerations, had actively worked to block the release of documentation related to his work with Sec (AS) 2a by citing Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, which Moulder called “a favourite resort of celebrities who delight in self-publicity, but then turn to the law when the press starts probing too deeply into their ‘private’ affairs.” Moulder speculated that the content of such documents, originally sought through FOIA requests by British folklorist and journalist Dr. David Clarke, “may not support [Pope’s] various long-iterated lines on the MoD’s response to UFOs.” ¹⁷

Personal Life

Nick Pope has lived in the United States since 2012 and divides his time between San Jose, California, and Tucson, Arizona. ¹⁸ He is married to San Jose State Anthropology Professor Elizabeth Weiss. ¹⁹ Along with his nonfiction books on UAP, Pope has also authored three fiction books, Operation Thunder Child (1999), Operation Lightning Strike (2015), and a political thriller entitled Blood Brothers (2018). ²⁰

“Nick Pope Biography.” Andrew Lownie Literary Agency. http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/nick-pope.