UK government UFO investigator who was ‘just like X-Files character’ dies

Nick Pope, the ‘real life Fox Mulder’ who was in charge of the Ministry of Defence’s UFO hotline in the 1990s, has died. He was 60.

Pope died yesterday afternoon after being diagnosed with Stage 4 oesophageal cancer, his wife Professor Elizabeth Weiss said on X.

‘I was so lucky to have met and to have married Nick. He was a wonderful husband. I loved him dearly,’ she wrote.

Those who knew Pope described him as being at the forefront of UFOlogy, the study of objects thought to be of alien origin.

Filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee told Metro that he first met Pope in 2006, when he was working at a music magazine.

‘Dig This Real were keen for me, being a fellow Brit, to talk to someone who was being called the UK’s real-life Fox Mulder!’ Lee said. ‘The X-Files TV series was massive at the time and it was amazing to learn that we here in the UK had our own X-Files.’

‘He always had time for those interested in the subject, no matter at what level, and that is a sign of a great man,’ Lee added.

John Greenewald, who created The Black Vault, an archive of records that includes Pope’s own logs, said the journalist was a ‘truth seeker’.

‘He was so knowledgeable. One of the very few I could call upon for trusted advice,’ Greenewald posted on X.

Discovering alien life would ‘change everything’, Nick Pope told Metro

Pope joined the MoD in 1985, hopping between desks every couple of years until he took charge of UFO investigations from 1991 to 1994.

His office, SEC(AS)2a, but popularly called the ‘UFO desk’, supported the Royal Air Force while also offering a phone hotline for strange sightings.

Among the some 1,200 calls, he heard stories of silver discs and glowing orbs zip over the heads of people at high or eerily slow speeds.

Once a report was logged, Pope would call forecasters (was it a weather balloon?), the RAF (was it a fighter jet or a drone?), observatories (was it a meteor?) and entertainment venues, in case it was a laser lightshow.

Some, he told Metro in 2024, were one of the above. But most were Chinese paper lanterns.

Others, however, he couldn’t explain.

‘Almost all of them came from people who were utterly sincere in their belief,’ he said. ‘People are less likely to hoax the MoD, probably because they were worried about the men in black.

‘In the end, we found about 80% or so of these sightings were misidentifications, 15% had insufficient data and 5% were unknown.

‘That 5% doesn’t mean extraterrestrial, but as I always remind people, neither did we rule that out. It means unknown, no more, no less.’

Throughout his time figuring out the cosmos, it was that 5% that kept Pope up at night.

‘If just a single one of those cases was of something not of this Earth, it would impact everything – politics, religion, science, the economy and just about everything,’ he said.

When Pope first sat down behind the UFO desk, tall tales of little green men were far from his mind. (He was, though, keen to get away from his old job.)

But as he investigated, he had dozens of what he called ‘hmm, interesting’ moments that helped him become fascinated with extraterrestrials.

One moment was in March 1993. The MoD’s UFO switchboard could have rivalled a constellation, Pope recalled, as the department received calls about a craft that looked like two Concord jets stuck together.

The sightings, made by police officers across the UK, could be explained away by saying it was a Russian rocket smashing into the atmosphere.

As Pope wrote to his bosses, according to records, ‘until the present unknown object(s) reported upon are identified, then they should, without question, be classified for what they are – UFOs.’

Pope almost became the face of the government’s otherworldly investigations, appearing on the front pages of magazines or drafting statements for politicians to be read aloud in Parliament.

He even addressed a pressure group, called Operation Right to Know, which was protesting outside Parliament in 1994.

He had to stress to them, as he wrote to MPs at the time, according to files, that there was no ‘government cover-up’.

‘The UK government are as in the dark as anyone else is about this,’ Pope told Metro, ‘though they are better placed to do a proper investigation.’

Following his departure from the MoD some 20 years ago, Pope sought to declassify and release more than 60,000 pages of government UFO files.

He also wrote six books, including Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, one of the world’s most-recorded UFO incidents, which he personally investigated.

On this, Lee said: ‘The words I will always remember him by are his cryptic comments about Rendlesham: “When you understand the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident, you will understand the true nature of UAPs.” – I’m still trying to figure that one out.’

Pope spoke to Metro many times, expressing his excitement that the Pentagon is being held accountable by Congress or how King Charles has his own UFO hotline.

When Donald Trump vowed in February to release sealed UFO files, Pope wondered if it was just a ‘distraction’ from his controversial US-Iran war.

How Pope helped explain away sightings over his career was in much the same way as people once did a millennium ago, he said. Furious gods streaking the skies neon red and green, or rocks falling from the heavens.

None of this thinking ever stopped Pope from believing, as UFOlogists often say, that the truth is out there.

‘I 100% believe, unless we thought there was something literally magical, in a Harry Potter sense, about what we’ve seen,’ Pope told Metro.

‘The more we look out into the universe, the more ordinary we look. The less special.

‘Is there life out there? Yes. Life visiting us down here? I don’t know. I hope so. Life would be a lot more interesting if we had aliens interacting with us.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

Comments Add as preferred source