Nick Pope became hardened to his Ministry of Defence colleagues calling him Spooky and whistling the haunting five-note motif from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind as they passed him in the corridor. The fact that he, a junior civil servant in his twenties, was virtually singlehandedly running the ministry’s oversight of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) suggested the topic was not being taken seriously at the highest level.
Ironically, he was later widely known as “the real-life Agent Mulder”, after the character in the television series The X-Files, because there was only a few months’ overlap between that show first airing and Pope being moved to examining the MoD’s more humdrum financial policy. However, by that time, his initial scepticism had been replaced by a conviction that UFOs, later known as UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), were a substantive issue with huge implications for the human race.
In 1996, when he was embroiled in government cash-flow matters, he wrote: “I believe that there is a war going on, so secret that we aren’t even aware that it is happening. If any of these incidents can be attributed to alien presence, then that presence is carrying out what can only be described as crimes against humanity.” Although Pope later retreated from that position, even his more moderate views were a long way from his first impression that UFOs were no more than “vague lights in the sky seen by people out late at night walking their dogs, perhaps on their way back from the pub”. The MoD said it let him publish his views in book form because he revealed no operational secrets, although the BBC science correspondent David Whitehouse claimed “it was nonsense”.
During his three years on the “UFO desk”, Pope investigated about 1,000 reports of unexplained sightings. While the overwhelming majority turned out to be street lights, weather balloons, experimental aircraft or atmospheric quirks, he decided that between 2 and 5 per cent defied conventional scientific explanation. Some were reported by experienced military pilots who saw mid-air objects performing hairpin turns and vertical climbs that would generate enough G-force to crush a human.
Pope fostered relations with the British UFO Research Association (Bufora) and secretly interviewed RAF pilots who feared public ridicule and career suicide. He made his name through rigorous analysis of famous UFO mysteries, notably the 1980 Rendlesham Forest case, often referred to as Britain’s Roswell after the New Mexico town where alien bodies were claimed to have been retrieved from a spacecraft in 1947.
At 3am on December 26, 1980 two US airmen, Sergeants Jim Penniston and John Burroughs, spotted unusual lights and a metallic object in Rendlesham, a woodland between RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters in Suffolk. At the site they found broken branches and marks on the ground. Penniston said he touched a craft, smooth and warm with hieroglyphic-style symbols and their colonel recorded heightened radiation readings. Sceptics asserted the cause was a meteor shower or a flashing lighthouse, but the trained witnesses, official documentation and radiation damage convinced Pope that something unusual had occurred. He also investigated the 1990 Calvine incident, where two hikers in Scotland took photographs of a massive, diamond-shaped craft hovering while circled by a military jet.
After leaving the MoD in 2006, Pope’s objective, cautious civil service manner opened the door to a career as a television commentator. In addition to Britain’s Closest Encounters and Danny Dyer: I Believe in UFOs, he relocated to the US and appeared regularly on the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens and The UnXplained with William Shatner. He moderated 94 editions of a touring production, Ancient Aliens Live, and was a consultant on the 2005 film War of the Worlds and the 2008 X-Files movie. He was a frequent speaker at the Roswell Daily Record’s annual Roswell Incident conference.
Pope at Alien Con 2016 in Santa Clara, CaliforniaRamin Talaie/Getty Images for History
He argued for more government transparency about UFOs, revealing that Prince Philip led the royal family’s fascination with the subject. To his immense frustration, Pope never had a close encounter himself: “It seems to happen to people with no previous interest in them — so maybe it’s too late for me.”
Nicholas George Pope was born in 1965, the son of George Pope and his wife Rosemary (née Harnden). His grandfather, Sir George Pope, was a director of Times Newspapers. Because Nick’s father was a director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, he felt that going into the Ministry of Defence was akin to joining the family firm.
After attending Lord Wandsworth College, a Hampshire private school, he went straight into the civil service in 1985, aged 19. He was involved in RAF training policy and Gulf War operations before being sent to the UFO desk, officially termed Secretariat (Air Staff) Department 2A, in 1991. He was there only three years before taking up several posts within the ministry. He left in 2006 as acting deputy director of the Directorate of Defence Security.
In the lobby bar of Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California, he met the redheaded Elizabeth Weiss, an American anthropologist. They married, both wearing jeans, three months later. They lived in Tucson, Arizona, punctuated by a year in New York City, minutes from Times Square and the Empire State Building. He called Elizabeth, a scientist and a sceptic, his real-life Agent Scully and they proofread each other’s books and articles.
He wrote three novels, Operation Thunder Child, Operation Lightning Strike and Blood Brothers, and three UFO books: The Uninvited, Encounter in Rendlesham Forest and Open Skies, Closed Minds.
He and Elizabeth enjoyed desert hikes, wildlife, film noir, true-crime stories and country music.
“I’ve sought to keep the UAP subject in the public eye,” Pope said, “and to frame it as a defence, national security and safety-of-flight issue, as well as a fascinating science problem. Some of this work has been public knowledge, but some such work, of necessity, has been done behind the scenes. I hope I’ve helped move the needle forward.”
Pressed about which investigation haunted him most, he admitted: “The file on the Rendlesham Forest incident still keeps me up at night.”
Nick Pope, civil servant and UFO investigator, was born on September 19, 1965. He died of cancer on April 6, 2026, aged 60