Word has gotten around through social media that Nick Pope passed away yesterday in his home of Tucson, Arizona, in the company of his wife. He was just sixty years old, and had only recently revealed in February the news that he had been diagnosed with terminal esophageal cancer, which he was taking with great aplomb.
After working for the British government as a civil servant for 21 years, Pope irrupted into the public UFO scene in the 1990s with the publication of his book ‘Open Skies, Closed Minds’, where he related his experience after being in charge of the Ministry of Defence so-called ‘UFO desk’ from 1991 to 1994.
Young, sober-sounding, and with an eloquent British accent, Pope turned into an instant sensation with the media at a time when TV shows like ‘The X-Files’ and movies like Fire in the Sky kept interest in UFOs at an all-time high (only surpassed by our current post-2017 era). Pope made good use of his nickname ‘the British Fox Mulder’ and was a favorite speaker at conferences, as well as a common guest when news segments tried (and often failed) to take the phenomenon seriously. He also wrote numerous op-eds for newspapers all across the world, and in more recent years became one of the regular celebrities in the History channel’s Ancient Aliens—along with all the spinoff live events of that franchise.
Pope helped popularize several UFO cases outside of the UK; such as the recently-resurfaced Calvine UFO photo—which he said to have kept a copy of hung on his office wall—and the controversial Rendlesham UFO incident, which he claimed to have personally investigated at an official capacity while still attached to the Air Staff Secretariat.
Other investigators, however (namely David Clarke and Philip Mantle) have publicly questioned those claims, and accused Pope of embellishing his actual position in the British government. In 1994, for example, author Nick Redfern received a letter from Pope in response to an enquiry he had filed with regards to his job, where he explained that along with other official duties, he devoted around 20% of his time to UFO-related investigations: checking the reports submitted to his Department to determine which might have any Defense significance.
Other official documents seem to show the British government weren’t particularly thrilled by Pope’s self-description as ‘Head of the UFO Project’ (“a term entirely of his own invention”) or that he had any credit for the release of MoD files that had remained classified for decades. By December 1st of 2009, the UK officially closed the MoD ‘UFO unit’.
Still, the multiple expressions of condolences shared on social platforms show that Nick Pope was widely well-regarded by his peers. Long before TTSA and the more recent batch of ‘insiders’ and whistleblowers, he was doing the legwork of reminding the public that (a) UFOs are more than flashy gimmicks for popular consumption, and (b) they should be taken seriously by world governments. And for that, we should thank him.
Descanse en Paz.
