Nick Pope

Nick Pope Not to be confused with The Pope is a former UK government bureaucrat and a current "UFO expert". His main claim to fame is his three-year stint at the "UFO desk" of the UK Ministry of Defence, dealing with UFO reports and related inquiries. Apparently his work turned him into an UFO believer: after he was moved to another job in the Ministry, he wrote a book, Open Skies, Closed Minds, and rose to fame in the UFO-sphere, exploiting his status of a "government insider" and "Britain's Fox Mulder".

The woo is out there
UFOlogy
Aliens did it...
... and ran away
v - t - e

Position at the MoD

Pope worked at the Ministry of Defence from 1985 to 2006. Between 1991 and 1994, as a junior manager, Executive Officer (EO -The lowest civil service management grade), he worked at "Secretariat (Air Staff) 2a", the office that was, among other things, responsible for handling UFO reports and related inquiries received by the MoD from members of the public, etc. The section is sometimes described as "the real X-Files", but its actual work was far less glamorous. The nominal reason for collecting UFO sightings report was to determine whether any of them had a defence significance. Any reports of interest would have been referred upwards from Mr. Pope's desk to senior officers for investigation. Most (if not all) of its files have been declassified and digital copies are available for a small fee from the UK National Archives. (Though they can also be found on various UFO and conspiracy-theory-related websites, as the PDFs had been offered for free on the Archives' website for a brief period of time.) In 2009, Mr. Pope's successor mentioned the routine nature of the job. The MoD announced that it will no longer collect UFO reports.

Nowadays [2009] Pope calls himself the “former head of the MoD’s UFO project”, which is also a trifle inflated. Pope’s job description shows that he was supposed to spend maybe a day a week dealing with UFOs, sending out all those boilerplate letters saying that UFOs had never been a defence threat and that the Ministry did not investigate sightings.[1]

It is interesting and bemusing to see that Mr. Pope is portrayed in various UFO documentaries such as Ancient Aliens, et al, that he is either a former Director in the (UK) Ministry of Defence (MoD), Defence Expert, Analyst etc. Most of what Mr. Pope comments on is already 'open source' and known by other UFO researchers, or interested members of the public.

Bibliography
  • Open Skies, Closed Minds, 1999, ISBN 0-87951-916-9
gollark: There are lots of block-based "programming" things now.
gollark: I wrote about this on my blog last year, which obviously makes me an expert™. While these things maybe *can* help with the general skill of being able to translate your complex and underspecified intentions into actual code, they aren't really *marketed* that way and thus are probably not taught usefully that way, and they're bad at, well, teaching programming directly.
gollark: According to my IQ test, I have an IQ of 600.
gollark: That did happen. Quite often.
gollark: It seems to have been a working strategy so far (well, for some things). Blatantly passing ridiculously broad internet monitoring laws, for example.

See also

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References
  1. Col. Arnold Moulder, A Diet of Worms: What is Nick Pope trying to hide?, an article about Pope in SUNlite Vol.1 Num.3, September-October 2009
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