AREA52 - DEBRIEFED With Chris Ramsay - Alien Encounters With The Real Life X-Files Agent - Nick Pope - DEBRIEFED ep. 34

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

In this episode of DEBRIEFED, I interview Nick Pope, former UK Ministry of Defence official and head of the British government’s UFO program. We dive deep into high-strangeness cases like the Cosford Incident, Rendlesham Forest, civilian encounters, alien abductions, government cover-ups, and the infamous Calvine UFO photo. Nick opens up about working inside the MOD, encountering Men in Black reports, secret programs, and his thoughts on the future of disclosure. This is a must-watch for anyone fascinated by UFOs, UAPs, and the real-life X-Files.NEW MERCH! : https://www.area52.shopPatreon Exclusive Content: https://www.patreon.com/Area52investigationsSecond Channel: @area52clipsJoin The Area52 Discord: https://discord.gg/C7ZB5M3qjv

What is one sort of fringe encounter that still kind of troubles you to this day? We had a case in 1993, well, actually a wave of sightings, collectively known as the Cossford incident. One guy was so stunned by this huge triangular shaped craft that he leapt into his car and started trying to chase it, with his family in the back screaming at him to. To stop, in this same encounter, there was a farmer who saw this craft very low, and he thought it's so low, he thought maybe it landed, and he went up to the field, and all the cows in the field were standing in a circle, like facing each other. Straight out of the ex-fires. Whoa. A whole bunch of normal-looking people.

walked into an art shop in central London, were there for like a long time, and she just felt there was something weird about these people. And then after a long time, they made a big show of coming up and buying a single pencil, like it was like a big thing. And then they handed over a very high denomination banknote. And when the woman went to give them their change, they looked confused, like they didn't understand the concept of getting their change bag. And she was so struck by this that she phoned somebody afterwards and said, there are aliens in my shop. So you said you got to know this woman quite well. Was that afterwards did she have any other encounters? One, that I would say was more of a time slip.

Missing time? seeing somebody that looked like herself from the future. At 52. Just a quick pause, our brand new, out-of-body, long sleeves are now live. Available in three colors, midnight black, analog sand, or signal blue. They're heavyweight with a clean design and built for the curious. If you know, you know. Check it out at area 52.shop.shop.

Limited stock only, and we will not be restocking these. So get them all you can. Welcome Nicholas Pope. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. For those not familiar with Nick Pope, he might be a familiar face to a lot of you on the history channels, ancient aliens. But prior to that, spent 21 years working for the Ministry of Defense and also subsequently worked for what is known as the UFO desk over at the ministry as well. Very, very interesting stuff.

Also, an author wrote multiple books. fiction and nonfiction, which is interesting. We'll get into that as well. But more famously, I think, you know, did a lot of work on the Rendlesham case as well. So a lot to talk about today, Nick Pope, first of all, I want to thank you for joining me in the skiff. Thank you. It's good to be here. Unlike David Grash, here we are in the skiff. That's hilarious. One day maybe. So as we get started, I'd like to just maybe cover some, you know, introductory grounds. And just for the audience that might not be familiar with you or your work, can you tell me a little bit about, and we'll keep this brief, but a little bit about how you got started coming in from the Ministry of Defense into euphology? Sure thing.

Well, the Ministry of Defense essentially is like a Department of State in the UK. I was there as a civilian employee, like you say, for 21 years. They move you around a lot. So I did lots of different things. But yeah, from 1991 through to 1994, I was posted to the so-called UFO desk. And the mission, basically, which I chose to accept, was to research and investigate the phenomenon and assess the potential defense, national security and safety of flight implications. Yeah. I mean, that is quite a hefty task.

Now, doing this back then, you know, like today, this might not seem so unheard of because of, you know, the recent task force that's been appointed, but also the other programs like ASAP and ATIP and all this stuff. But back in the 90s, like, I mean, this was X-Files time. Yes, it was. And that actually led to a few insider jokes, I guess. I mean, literally, I would be walking down the corridor in the Ministry of Defense and people would whistle the theme. tune to the X-Files as I went past and say, look, there he goes. It's Nick Spooky Pope. Wow. How many people were working in your department during that time at the UFO desk? Essentially, it was just me and admin support, but obviously we had a network of people that, whilst not

posted to that particular operation, could be called upon. So, for example, you know, we, we had instant access to radar specialists, and radar was obviously a big part of any investigation. We had instant access to intelligence community imagery analysis, resources and capabilities, the Met Office, the Royal Greenwich Observatory. It's all about trying to bring in experts, whether they're astronomers, meteorologists, radar experts, whatever they are, you know, whatever you need, It's like a toolkit that you have. Right. Very interesting.

Being like a one-man team for that, is that difficult? Would it not have been a lot easier to have several people on these cases? It would have been. And had we had more resources, absolutely. That's, well, you know, there is no manager or very few managers who don't want more resources, more people on the team. I would have loved to have had somebody full time, you know, like, a radar person, a psychologist, that would have been useful. But, but, you know, this was the time when this subject, even within government, was more fringe than it is now.

I mean, now, particularly in the US, of course, we have. As you mentioned, the recently established task force on the declassification of federal secrets. We've had UFO-related provisions in every National Defense Authorization Act for several years now. We've had classified briefings in Congress, public hearings, NASA doing a report. So if I was doing that job now, I'm sure I would have had more resources. But at the time, yeah, it was pretty much me and admin support. And it's, yeah, there's a lot on your shoulders. This, oh, I forgot to turn on my oscilloscopes. Very important for this, for this interview that these oscilloscopes are turned on.

I mean, you've probably looked at a lot of cases from 1991 to 94. And in the 90s, obviously, I mean, there was a rampant surge in especially mass sightings, you know, going from obviously, you know, 97, which we just celebrated the anniversary of the Phoenix Lights. but also you had, you know, Rua Zimbabwe, you had Virginia, these pretty big cases. Did you ever encounter or investigate any of the mass sightings that happened during that time or prior? Not outside of the UK. This was one of the very interesting things in a way. Our terms of reference were really tight. And because of the, I guess, political sensitivities about this. And I mean that in terms of some people would say,

you know, this is all nonsense, why are you wasting taxpayers' money on it? So we had to be very careful with this. Our terms of reference were tightly drawn to defending the UK. So it was like, if there's something in our airspace, we need to know what it is. That's legitimate business. Going and looking at something that's happened in Africa or even in the United States or elsewhere in Europe, that would have been like, well, why are we doing that? Sure, I see. I was aware of things like that going on, but it was not for me to actually. Right.

In an official capacity, you were kind of like restricting yourself to not, you know, delve into other people's business. Yes. Okay. Well, I mean, obviously there's a lot of cases in the UK as well that have happened. A little bit prior to that. And, you know, subsequently afterwards, even recently, the Lake and Heath, you know, Air Force Base is obviously famous for multiple sightings going back all the way, I think, to the 50s. Yes.

But, I mean, looking at all that, these are all sort of official radar and military personnel related. Did you investigate any sort of civilian witnesses or witnesses to, you? civilian events that have happened. Yes, we did. And in fact, we were a public facing program, rather like the old US Air Force Project Blue Book. We did do classified work, but most of what we did on a day-to-day basis was unclassified. I think it's like Avi Loeb says you can't classify the skies. And I would say, although we concentrated on military care, cases because they were often ones where you had access to the witnesses, you knew that those people were reliable when pilots tell you about encounters and when it's, particularly if it's corroborated by radar evidence, there's something in terms of evidence, data, you can get into that. That being said, 80, 85, 90 percent of the cases that I looked at, which are two or 300 each year probably came from. from the public. So as much as I'm interested in the military's perspective of UFOs, I find myself,

as you can see, all these books behind me here are all related to civilian encounters. What is one sort of fringe encounter that still kind of troubles you to this day that you might have, that you might have stuck with you after investigating it? We had a case in 1993, well, actually a wave of sightings, collectively, known as the Cosford incident. We get stories every week. Encounters, objects, beings. But most of it never makes it past a sketch or a shaky interview.

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that he leapt into his car and started trying to chase it, driving along the road, keeping it in view, with his family in the back screaming at him to stop because they saw it too and were scared, whereas he was excited. And in this same encounter, there was a farmer who saw this craft very low. And he thought it's so low, he thought maybe it landed in one of his fields. And he went up to the field. And I think all the cows in the field were standing in a circle, like facing each other, completely silent.

There was no UFO there, but they were all just doing that, like, straight out of the X-Files. And so you have things like that, and you're thinking, well, I don't know. Yeah, that is terrifying. I mean, I don't think there are very many unsettling things cows could do other than standing in a circle, like some type of weird ritual. You know, that reminds me actually of like the Belgian UFO wave a little bit. Well, very interesting you should say that because there was, talking of the X-Files and spooky coincidences, this wave of sightings, the Cosford incident, took place late on the night of March 30th and in the early hours of March 31st, 1993. And of course, as I was investigating this, something was kind of. of gnawing at the back of my mind and I couldn't quite put my finger on it until afterwards I

realized wait this is three years to the very night to the very night after those those Belgium sightings and there were absolutely similarities in the shape of the the craft sometimes the behavior this ability apparent ability of it to move from a very low speed to high max speeds in an incident with no sonic boom. Lou Elizondo would call this, you know, one of the five observables. And we didn't have that terminology at the time, but we knew what it was because it cropped up in cases like this. And I remember one of the Air Force witnesses telling me that this thing moved very slowly,

maybe 35, 40 miles an hour with a low frequency humming sound that he said was deeply unpleasant. You could feel it as well as hear it, rather like getting too close to a, like a generator or something. Generator, a bass speaker at a rock concert, something like that, where you feel the sound going through your body. He said it was like that. And this is an Air Force guy telling me this, like just a few hours after he saw it. And he said from that very slow speed, suddenly it just went away to the horizon in an instant. And he said, Nick, and this was maybe, I don't know, just five, six hours afterwards. We were on the phone. His voice was still shaking. And he said, Nick, I've been in the Air Force eight years. I see, obviously, fast attack helicopters,

military jets. Like, it's my job. I've never seen anything like this before in my life. Wow. I mean, that's incredible coming from such a credible witness. And then the corroborative evidence. Now, did you, you obviously picked up some of that on radar as well. We did have some radar data. It was inconclusive. There were some uncorrelated targets near, you know, some of the radar heads had picked

something up, but you couldn't hang your hat on it. I see. And it doesn't surprise me. I mean, we do stealth. So it can be done. Yeah. I mean, stealth has a large part of stealth as well is the altitude. Right.

So if these things are not too high in the skies, well, they would be harder to pick up by radar, wouldn't they? Yes. I mean, our radar systems, particularly our military ones, are configured for very specific threats. And so they are looking in certain directions at certain heights. It's not to say they can't do other things, but you have that. Then you have the fact that a lot of them use filter programs. This was a big problem for us because the mindset as much as anything else is that, you know, things don't come from straight up down. You know, you're looking, like I say, at very specific things, you know, most of which at the time were like Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact.

So your system isn't configured to look for things just coming in out of the atmosphere. And then you use these filter programs. And it's based on a mindset assumption. Well, if it isn't behaving like a conventional aircraft, then it's probably just a ghost return. I see. And you wonder, are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater here? Yeah. And that's, I think, what made your job so important.

is looking at those anomalies. And, you know, that this brings me to a really interesting point that I've pondered quite a bit as well. Being people who are interested in these fringe anomalies, we are a little bit more prone to, well, we have to be, to looking at all of the anomalies that are associated with it. So, for instance, a lot of people avoid the UFO spike on the chart. But for those of us focusing in on that, well, there are an infinite amount of spike. in that category. I mean, the anomalies don't just cease at a UFO. They go into beings and physical, metaphysical, all these other fringe sort of things. So was there ever a point during your time there where you had to pull your punches a little bit with what you thought was going on? 100%. Yes. You have to play the strongest hand that you have, particularly. if you are looking to get access to defense ministers, if you want more resources, you just have to focus in on the sorts of cases that you know will play well. So you talk about the pilot sightings, you talk about the cases where you have radar data. You don't tend to talk about the abduction

cases, even though you have them. So you kind of self-censor, which in a way, it was one of the most uncomfortable things of all because the phenomenon I soon realized was, you know, multifaceted and truly bizarre and sometimes almost abstract. But you had to kind of play it very straight and focus in on this sort of defense national security pilots radar kind of thing. And we still see that. I mean, ATIP and AORSAP that you mentioned. I mean, Orsat looked at some really weird stuff, but they had to kind of dress it up in a certain way to get congressional funding. And that relates to why we changed the language even from UFO to UAP. It was all about getting rid of that pop culture baggage and rebranding the conversation.

Yeah, but with that pop culture baggage, you'd mentioned throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You know, I would like to believe that all of these multifacisting, multifaceted sort of subjects that revolve around UAP are also, to some extent, well, should be a concern to national security. Because when we're talking about abductions, although might be fringe, when you have thousands of people who are reporting these things or reporting similar things, I mean, you would assume that these conversations should be happening behind closed doors

as well as invading our airspace. A hundred percent, yeah. And, you know, I know from more recent conversations with people like Lou Alizondo and Jay Stratton and that, obviously, the UAP task force in the United States, Atip and Orsat, they had those cases or they were certainly aware of those cases. But even they had to kind of play on, well, yeah, David Fravor, the Tick-Tac. again, it's playing your strongest suit. Yeah. I just find it so wild because, you know, these abduction cases specifically go back decades and decades and decades. It's not like they've gone away.

And there was a time where they were seemingly more rampant. But it is for me, you know, thinking about that stuff, if this is happening. I mean, that is a complete violation of human rights. that is just, you know, and obviously if they're non-human, then they can disregard that. But I take issue with it because I feel like it's such an invasive procedure that happens during these abductions versus just coming into our airspace. I understand the, you know, the military implications. But some of these cases that you visited where, you know, people were potentially abducted or had encountered. encounters with beings. What was one of the cases that really left you, I mean, struck by the

information that you were, that you were uncovering? Well, this is another area where there is kind of self-censorship, but interestingly, you even find it in euphology. I guess, I suppose if you talk to abduction researchers, and back in the day, I suppose the big three, you know, were Bud Hopkins, John Mac, and David Jacobs. And I met all three of them. I knew Bud and John Mack quite well. I mean, you know, we talked about, you know, some of the cases and things like that. But even within uphology, you often find this self-censorship.

And it's only when you talk to the actual experiences. people like Whitley Streber, that you realize how truly bizarre and abstract the phenomenon can be. Because you have, just as I talked about playing the strongest suit in government UAP work, you even find it with the UFO researchers.

And it's like, yeah, I have a case. It's the little grays on a table. Some of the cases that I got were not like that. Can you go into them? Yeah, that would be great. Well, one. One, to answer your question about, that left an impression on me, was it wasn't really an abduction, but it was an encounter with, I guess, beings. A particular woman who I got to know quite well had this experience that a whole bunch of apparently, you know, normal looking people all walked into an art shop in central London.

started looking at all the produce, were there for like a long time, and she just felt there was something weird about these people. And then after a long time, they made a big show of coming up and buying a single pencil, like it was like a big thing. And then they handed over a very high denomination banknote. And when the woman went to give them their change,

they looked confused, like they didn't understand the concept of getting their change bag. And she was so struck by this that she phoned somebody afterwards. And in fact, during this whole thing and said, there are aliens in my shop. And that's the kind of surreal nature of these encounters that sometimes doesn't even come out in the literature. because I think sometimes euphologists self-sensor because they say, look, everyone knows what an alien looks like, everyone knows what an abduction is. It's a very structured thing. The beam, the table, the medical exam. When you get something like this that doesn't fit the model, euphologist self-sensor and throw it out. But me being a kind of, I don't know, a sort of even-handed, like disinterested kind of observer. this, I take all the cases that I can get. And so that was one that really struck me. So you said you got to know this woman quite well. Was that afterwards did she have any other encounters? One that I would say was more of a time slip, a kind of phenomenon.

Missing time? Seeing somebody that looked like herself from the future. Whoa. And it's, again, I often find that the high strangeness of these cases is underreported. Yeah. I mean, some of it, I use the word surreal quite deliberately. The true phenomenon, I think, is much more surreal. I mean, we, of course, look, we can only look at all of this in a very anthropocentric way.

if we are dealing with something truly alien, then it doesn't surprise me in a way that it is alien. Yeah, good point. You know, all of that is, I mean, it's so interesting because obviously, like you said, we are sort of accustomed to hearing about the small grays, the tall grays, maybe the mantis folk, some reptilians here and there, even Nordic folk.

But more rarely and probably possibly harder to detect are what seem to be these hybrids. In this case, of course, if you're aware of the work of David Jacobs, you know, he's written books like The Threat and the other one was like Among Us or they're Among Us really highlighted sort of these tales or these stories by abductees who were led to train a lot of these later stage hybrids that have been interacting with, you know, human society and train them in the most mundane ways, which I thought was really. really a fascinating read. And this strikes me as like one of those things, especially they were, they would do this in groups. And for them to go out alone, uh, and not guided by an abductee or human to help them, you know, understand what is happening. Um, it's just really strange as well. Um, but that type of behavior, the monetary exchange with a large denomination, not knowing what to do

with the change, uh, these things all sound like what David Jacobs, uh, what the witnesses in the books that David Jacobs wrote described, which is really fascinating. Had you ever encountered more of these sort of human-looking, quote-unquote, aliens? Yes. You know, quite a few instances over the years, and it doesn't surprise me. I mean, again, if what we are dealing with here is extraterrestrial visitation, and I'm conscious that there are competing theories out there, you know, time travelers from the future, something from other dimensions.

If we are dealing with something that is extraterrestrial, then absolutely this is going to be sort of multifaceted. And why would we think that any civilization with the technology to travel between the stars couldn't figure out a way of walking among us? Yeah, it's unsettling to say the least. I mean, you know, David Jacobs in those books, he'd also, you know, hinted at the idea of like if there was some type of takeover, you know, hypothetically. by these extraterrestrials, it wouldn't be so hostile. They'd be smart enough to sort of introduce themselves into our society without us knowing and sort of, that seems like a much more favorable way to take over the resources that we have here rather than destroy everything or enslave everyone. It's this like slow sort of integration into, you know, into our society. And it points to a lot of

these experiments done on board with these abductees, you know, the genetic experiments and like what Whitley Streeper gone through and similar things to that. So, I mean, those things, potentially the fringe cases, I think fascinate me a lot more than, you know, hearing about these other type of aliens, although equally fascinating, was there ever, was there ever any witnesses that you encountered that had seen your typical alien? Sure, yeah, I had cases like that and people would talk about the so-called grays. But a lot of this was under hypnosis, and obviously there are some issues with that in terms of false memory syndrome and just kind of cultural contamination. The image of a gray is now so

firmly embedded in people's minds that it's, it's maybe sort of almost like a default go-to thing. It's like if somebody's abducted, oh yeah, it was the grays. And you wonder, again, any civilization with that technology probably can appear to us however they like, or can make us see things that are not there. And it almost becomes, I'll use this analogy with you deliberately, but like the magician's trick, you know, you're looking at the hand that the magicianist is saying, but what you should really be looking at is what the other hand is doing. Masters of subterfuge are these entities potentially, you know, and that's interesting because, you know, we as humans also deal in subterfuge towards, you know, our own kind, especially

in these government positions. You know, there's often national security. security risks that we have to hide. There's often these cases that we can't let the public know about, was did you ever feel like during your time that there was actively information being suppressed at some level that you were denied access to? It's difficult because you can't prove a negative. I actually felt that I had access to everything I needed. Certainly in the UK, I didn't feel that there was, I don't know, another organization in the shadows because they would have needed access to the data. And also I had both the security clearance and the need to know. When, for example, the Secretary of State for Defense answered questions in Parliament about

this, I was the person that would have to draft the replies. So as the subject matter expert, I believe that I had total access. Of course, you know, you can never say never. What I felt that was an issue was the United States. Because even myself doing that job in government, I could not get access to what the US knew and was doing about this. And I was told, frankly, the same as everyone else was told. No, no, there's no program.

Nobody's doing anything. we haven't done anything since Blue Book was shut down at the end of 69. Now we know that that obviously was not true. And clearly you wouldn't, you know, you have ATIP and Orsat before that. Obviously there were other things. You wouldn't have a gap where this wasn't being done. So I felt that if anything was being hidden from me, it was what the United States was up to. It's the one area where the so-called special relationship didn't really work.

And there was never a time where you thought that perhaps there was some other foreign government sort of impeding or involving themselves in your work? No. We knew through intelligence sources that Russia and China had a program, had separate programs looking at this. but we didn't really know the details of that. And we didn't feel that there was any active interference from them in our program. Had you heard of any crash retrievals done in the UK? Some rumors, but nothing you could hang your hat on. And I was not convinced by any of those cases. We had a case from the early 1970s where something was alleged to have crashed.

in Wales on Berwyn Mountain. There was another rumor about a crash in the Peak District in the north of England. But I looked at that. And of course, I had access to all the historical files on all this. Nothing convinced me that there had been any UK crashes. I see. Very interesting. Thank you so much for answering those questions.

I'm going to move on to pass the UFO desk, as much as I could probably spend the entire podcast discussing a lot of what went on there. But I'd like to move perhaps back in time a little bit to December 26, 1980, the famous Rendlesham case. Coming on board, even at the UFO desk or from the Ministry of Defense, had you prior to this, had you heard about Rendlesham and the incident that happened there? No, I hadn't. I think the only UFO case that I had heard of before I got this job. I mean, when I was put on that position, I had no knowledge or interest in this phenomenon,

which is probably the way they wanted it, but also the best way to be. You don't want to come into a job like that, encumbered with baggage, whether it's, it's as a true believer or as a diehard debunker. The only case I'd ever heard of was probably Roswell. So, Randlesham, no. Almost literally on day one in that job, one of the things I started to do was go back through the files that we had in our office. Obviously, there were files dating back to the Second World War that I looked at later. But there was one, you know, sat there and I pulled it out and it said, Rendlesham Forest. December 1980. And I was like, wait, what's this? And my predecessor, when I was taking the job,

you know, you have a handover. And he said, well, that's, I guess, the kind of crown jewels that it's the case nobody could explain. And so I'm leafing through. And I'm like, wait, what? The deputy base commander saw this as well. Wait, what's this in, you know, what's this document on US Air Force? you know, let ahead saying that something landed. And wait, what's this about radioactivity levels at the landing site? And yeah, so the more I looked into it, the more bizarre it got. And obviously looking, was this, was this early, this was probably earlier in your time at the UFO desk then that you were looking into Rendell Shum, correct? Yeah.

I mean, I was aware of it almost from day one. Right. Because it was part of the hand. over brief that I got from my predecessor. But as I went on in that job, we were still, for example, getting media inquiries about it. We were still getting members of parliament, occasionally raising questions about it. And at a certain point, I thought, right, I need to do what cops would call a cold case review, go through the data that we have, see what we missed, you know, And that's what I did.

A real X-File. Yes, a real-life, real-life X-file. And I use this analogy of police. And actually, it's quite a good one, I think, because a UFO investigation has a lot of similarities with a police investigation. Because the two strands of it are you identify and interview witnesses and you secure and analyze evidence. And then it's almost like you've got a list of suspects. You know intellectually that most UFOs have conventional explanations. And so you try and think, well, what could it have been?

And you check for aircraft, military exercises, satellites, meteors. And one by one, you eliminate those. Or most times, of course, you don't. Most time you find a match. And you're like, okay, this is the. explanation or the likely explanation, whatever it might be. But the cases like Randlesham, you go through all that and you still come up blank. Okay. So after all the accumulated knowledge that you've had in your years studying UFOs and the phenomenon, looking back at the investigation

of Rendlesham, would you say that they did an adequate job investigating it? Or what would you have done in that position to give yourself a little bit more information knowing what you know now about UFOs? The investigation was completely mishandled for a number of reasons. And again, they are two things that often sabotage a police investigation, two things that any cop will tell you if something goes wrong, these two things are usually the problem. The first was a jurisdictional dogfight. Basically, these were U.S. bases on British soil.

So you had this kind of, well, who's got jurisdiction, who's got primacy, some things the U.S. military did, some things the British Ministry of Defense did. And allied to that, the second problem, is poor information sharing. Again, just an unrelated example, but one of the lessons of 9-11 was that all sorts of intelligence agencies or parts of the government that had access to intelligence had intelligence but didn't share it. So FBI had something that CIA would have wanted to know and vice versa. That happened with Randlesham that we had this kind of U.S. West government doing its thing, British government doing its thing. Everyone was kind of, you know, secretive and holding their cards close to their chest or vest, whichever saying you use.

And so a lot of things fell between the cracks. Oh, and delay. Because this happened over Christmas, a lot of people were on leave. And it sounds like a silly thing, but actually it. particularly back when I was doing this job, but particularly before this, Randlesham, 1980, before the internet and before email, before the 24-7 news cycle, before social media. The fact that something like this would happen over the Christmas break when a lot of key people were on leave was a much bigger deal than it might sound. That is true.

It's almost serendipitously done, almost maybe even deliose. deliberately during that time, you know, a lot of these UFO cases and visitations are done in remote areas. They're not, they're rarely done in crowded places. And so it probably would be a little, it would make a little bit more sense that it would be done in a remote area, but also in, you know, a time where there are less witnesses. However, what's interesting with Rendlesham is the people that involved. So Jim Penniston, John Burroughs, and obviously deputy base commander Charles Holt. These were all active duty military personnel. Do you think that there is a reason to believe that that was intentional, that this encounter somehow lent itself a little bit more to, you know, the narrative that there is some type of communication between military,

Terry and UFOs? Yes, I think so. And I'll directly quote Colonel Holt here. And I know all three of those people very well. And of course, I wrote a book with John Burroughs and Jim Paniston. But Colonel Holt, when he talks about seeing the UFO on the third of the three nights of activity, he talks about it zipping around in the sky like it was doing a grid search. But he says that at one point in the individual,

counter, a beam of light came down and struck the ground in front of him and the half dozen or so people he'd taken out into the forest to investigate this. And he said, looking back on this, he said, was this a weapon? Was this a warning or was this communication? And he doesn't know the answer to that, but he said, well, whatever it was, it was under intelligent control. And again, for this to happen right next to Bentwater's and Woodbridge, these two military bases separated by Randallsham Forest, yes, it's remote, but these at the time were two of the most strategically important bases in the entire NATO military alliance. And this was a time, December 1980, when, and not a lot of people know. this, but when we probably came closer to nuclear war than any other time since the Cuban missile crisis, according to some military historians, we were very close, and this was because of what was going on in Poland with the trade union solidarity. And there is intelligence that suggests

that the Soviets had told that the Polish government, you deal with this. If you don't deal with it, We will, and that they had a winter exercise regularly scheduled, which was a build-up of troops, and they practiced sort of transition to war. But there is intelligence that suggests that this time they were saying this exercise is going to turn into the real thing, unless the situation in Poland is resolved. And Rendlesham Forest, of course, played itself out to this backstory. This was the geopolitical situation at the time. Are there nuclear arms in that region?

You know, we've hit one of those NCND moments. I can neither confirm nor deny. Yeah, it would make a lot of sense looking at even the recent activity in Lake and Heath and even going back to, you know, Randlesham, the amount of, I mean, just even state-side And I think even in Russia, you know, these things are highly interested, intrigued, curious, or perhaps even wary of our nuclear capabilities, whether that's having nuclear meltdowns at these facilities or the place where we house nuclear bombs. I mean, that would be, that would potentially be one of the reasons why this craft was in the area. Again, we have to be wary of anthropocentrism, but, you know, there is a certain, if you're kind of saying, what assumptions could we make about visiting extraterrestrials or a non-human intelligence if you want to use that phrase?

One of the good assumptions would be they would be interested in the cutting edge of our technology, particularly if it's a technology that we could literally induce an extinct. level event and, you know, the shorthand for this would be that other civilizations would look perhaps at the Trinity test in 45 and then Hiroshima and Nagasaki and say the kids have found the matches. That's right. Yeah. And, I mean, you know, if you're looking, you know, what other possible explanations could you find for a UFO being interested in this area with these military personnel?

I mean, there's no, you know, they weren't doing CE5 out there. No, and we've been aware of this UFO nuclear connection for years, of course. Malstrom, 1967, my not, 1967. Did the case, another case from actually Ukraine, I think, I think in 82, that was the one, that was the really scary one, because of course, in a lot of these cases, the allegation is that the nukes were shut down, maybe as a demonstration of strength, maybe as a warning, whatever. But in this Ukraine case from 1982, of course,

the missiles were put into their pre-launch sequence, and that was truly scary. Yeah, that's definitely terrifying. Shutting them down is scary, but turning them on is even scarier, I think. Yeah, and the guy, one of the main witnesses to this, his hair turned white. I mean, literally, it's one of those medical things that apparently shock can do this,

but the next day his hair was white. Wow. And, yeah, never went back. Stress related? I mean, yeah, he literally thought that on his watch, the Third World War was going to start because of something weird happening to the nuclear weapons that was not, you know, that high command had not given a launch order or anything. So this was like, he thought on his watch some bizarre accident.

And yes, of course, there was a UFO sighting in relation to this. And that's what triggered the stress and the fear. Wow. That's really, that's, I mean, that's really, that's one of those wild, again, one of those fringe sort of cases that you're like, what? How does that fit into anywhere? Exactly. And this is one of the reasons why the United States Congress has one of the many things that they've asked the Department of Defense to do. They've asked the question, hey, look, we are aware of this UFO nuclear connection.

Go find out whether this is a real thing or the skeptical theory is that some of this is collection bias that nuclear facilities are, by their very nature, more heavily surveilled. And therefore it's maybe more proportionally likely that if there's a UFO sighting, it will be picked up. But obviously some of the things we've discussed go over and above that. Yeah, no, understandably. If you could ask sort of one candid off-the-record question to any of the witnesses at Rendlesham, what question would that be? It would be what didn't you put in the official report? because again, people self-censor. Even with something as bizarre as this,

one of the reasons that people like John Burroughs and Jim Peniston could speak out was that the deputy base commander, Charles Holt, had seen it too. So they kind of felt, okay, the boss has seen it. So there's no shame in saying, yeah, I saw a UFO. But they self-censored. and Jim Peniston, as we know, self-censored the whole business of touching the sign of the binary code. The binary code. This sort of, as he puts it, almost like a telepathic download of data that he got.

I still wonder, to answer your question, which other witnesses self-censored? What didn't some of the others put in the official report? Hmm. Is there anything you're aware of? No, no. If I had to guess, I would say that with some of the things coming out now, it relates to health issues. I see. There's a line, a throwaway line in a British, not American, interestingly, British intelligence assessment of UAP as a whole. Throwaway line on Rendlesham, which says this is a case where it might be postulated that,

the witnesses were exposed to UAP radiation for longer periods than normal. And that crops up again in atyp and or sap in one of the papers that they did about human effects. But all this is very, you know, sensitive. Yeah. Kind of, like I say, people self-censor. So you have to dress it up as, I mean, if you're reading this report, it's dressed up as, I mean, if you're reading this report, it's dressed up as. sort of physiological effects of exposure to UAP, and it sounds very sort of dry. And then you read between the lines and it's, wait, that this is a government document,

basically about close encounters. Right. Yeah. And I mean, the work that Dr. Gary Nolan is doing to, you know, study these physiological effects and, you know, corroborating a lot of what David Grush came out and said publicly and even what Lou Elizondo had spoken about. There is, you know, this danger in interacting with this phenomenon that is sort of an offset, perhaps from the propulsion or whatever they, you know, end up using. Yes, we don't think it's deliberate.

Yeah. It does, as you say, it seems to be leakage. Right. Except, I mean, the case in Brazil, I think would be maybe the exception to that. Yes. But then, yeah, if you're looking at a whole range of data, there are always going to be outliers. and yeah, for whatever reason. And sometimes that's where you should look.

Yeah, perhaps. And again, like you mentioned at the top, this is perhaps just a plethora of, you know, different encounters. We don't know. Like I always like to think that like it's either zero or a million. You know, if we're thinking of like species in the known galaxy or even, you know, interacting with Earth,

it's either nothing or everything because it's such a vast, universe in that like if one of them through these billions of years discovered that technology then a million of them did yes that's kind of where i sit with that absolutely um in a universe nearly 14 billion years old there might be civilizations out there a billion years ahead of us and like like you say that the statistical chances of there only being two civilizations in the universe us plus one are I think as ridiculously long odds as the idea that we'd be alone. And the more we find out about the universe, the more ordinary we look. And I guess it's the Copernician principle that you're probably somewhere in the middle. So there are probably emerging

civilizations much more primitive than us, but conversely, like I say, in a universe this old, even with the cycles of star formation and needing heavy elements that were only formed after So the first wave of stars, you know, went supernova and ceded the universe with these heavier elements. Even taking that into account, like I say, there could be civilizations out there that got going a billion years before us. And it also, before I forget, it reminds me of something John Mack once said and talking about the abduction experiences. And he said, when abductees say, oh, it was like a medical procedure. He said, yeah, the word is, it's like a medical procedure. That's just our anthropocentrism.

He said it may be something completely different. We kind of put it in a very human context and we settle on the nearest match we can find. So people say, I was on a table. They started doing stuff and we say, oh, medical procedure, hybridization program, samples. But John Mack said it might be something completely different. Right. And that's just impossible for us to even conceive. Yeah. We can only use the words that we have, which is why people like Jacques Valet, of course, look at the folklore and they say, well, this is something that's always been going on, but we've used different words for it. Dwarves, fairies, elves, you know. And flipping that around, there might not only be things that we don't have words for, but things that we don't have words for, but things that we don't have.

the conceptual ability to even process. I mean, rather like you couldn't explain quantum physics to a chimpanzee, maybe you can't explain the phenomenon or some aspects of it to humans. That's right, yeah. And those are fun lines to think of because that's really the fringe of it all. That's like where you get to the extremities of this phenomenon. And you kind of have to just hypothesize, you know, anything you can using this human interface, you know, what are the limits of that, you know, and even thinking so far as like some of these extraterrestrials possibly also observe UAP to them, you know, like they're in, and even thinking on the lines of, you know, they might be a billion years more advanced to us. If you look at the trajectory, the absolute,

I mean, just shocking rise in propulsion technology, in, in just tech in general, in the last several hundred years, how that line goes straight up exponentially. We might only be a hundred years behind some of these things. Yeah. I remember one time, slightly off topic, but it isn't, talking to my grandparents. And my grandparents were telling me, oh, yeah, I saw one of the first German raids on the UK. And I sort of had in my mind, like, you know, images of bomber planes.

And my grandmother said, no, no, I'm talking about the Zeppelins. And it just brings it home that, like you say, we've come from horse and buggy to stealth fighter and space probe in like a couple of hundred years. And, you know, you don't have to kind of go too far beyond that. When you look at the exponential rise of technology, particularly with AI, to say, where are we going to be in another, well, even 10, 20 years? But imagine 200 years, 500,000, a million. Yeah, we don't even have to like speculate that far, you know, ahead to really become alien to our own selves. Like, I mean, we're eventually going to look back in the last, you know, 50 years and go, wow, this is just we've changed so much as a species. You know, hopefully we get to that point.

Yeah. And again, sort of related to that, as much as we talk. about an ancient universe, 14 billion years old, civilizations a billion years ahead, you can flip that and say, in one sense, we are in the first heartbeats of the universe because some of the stars are going to last for trillions of years, and yet we're in the first 14 billion. So in one sense, statistically, if you look at it this way, in the age of the universe, when we come to look at it, it's, it's kind of bizarre that we, we are at the very beginning. Yeah, very true. Hard to conceptualize all of these things, especially when, you know,

our feeble human minds can barely, you know, conceive of time and, and space. Back to some of the cases that we were talking about. Now, we'd, we touched on Rendlesham. I do, I do also want to ask a little bit more about the binary code download when interacting with this craft. I mean, can you, in a nutshell, describe how credible you think that was, considering the evidence that was given and the information that was taken from it? Well, I got to know Jim Peniston very well, and to me, he comes across as an honest man and quite a humble man. And one of the most credible things, about this is that he sat on this aspect of it for decades, probably about 30 years. Firstly, just out of

embarrassment, and again, I'll use the phrase self-censorship. It was okay to say he'd seen a UFO because the colonel, the deputy base commander, had seen it too. That's fine. But he couldn't talk about a telepathic download when he touched the side of this thing, not least because he stayed in the service for years. And he knew he had a very high security clearance. He was in the PRP, the personal reliability program, a handful of people who have exceptionally high security clearances, go through all sorts of extra vetting, security clearances, psychological evaluation, that sort of thing. He knew that if he'd mentioned telepathic download, he'd be out of that. And then, effectively he'd never get any good postings again he would just be in charge of the stores depot

yeah very true um not that there's anything wrong with that no not that there's anything wrong with that yes of course do a very good job yes of course but that was not the job that the sort of job that he wanted understood um and what do you make of the actual message itself first of all this was given to him in these zeros and ones that he jotted down how did jotting those down to deciphering those? How did that end up happening? Well, he didn't even know what binary code was. And maybe that sounds surprising now,

but I don't think it was maybe that surprising back in 1980, maybe unless you were a computer person, which not a lot of people were, or a mathematician. That's right, you wouldn't. So he just got this kind of what he described as this. compulsion. He touched the side of the craft, felt a sort of jolt, something happened. Then two or three days later, under a compulsion, he wrote 16 pages of ones and zeros in a notebook and then promptly kind of half forgot, half self-sensored for 30 years. And it was only when somebody else, and by a bizarre

coincidence, this somebody else was Linda Moulton Hell. Jim was on a TV show and he was due to talk about Randlesham and he was due to show his police notebook where he had made a sketch of the UFO and the symbols on the side

Linda happened to be walking behind him before the interview as he was leafing through this looked over his shoulder and said Jim what's that and Jim was like you know really almost nervous and embarrassed

and he was like oh nothing and Linda pushed the point, Linda can be quite forceful, good investigator. And only then did the story of this binary code come out. And he didn't know what it was. So the TV company got hold of a, they, somebody realized it was binary. They got hold of a computer engineer, a computer scientist called Nick Sisk. Nick Sisk said, well, you know, it's binary.

And obviously you can just run it through a conversion program. And out came this message, exploration of humanity, continuous for planetary advance, eyes of your eyes, origin year 8,100. and then the sequence of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates that happened to match a whole list of ancient and sacred sites all around the world, everything from the great pyramids, Giza, to the NASCAR lines in Peru. That is an incredible series of events when you, you know, if we take it on faith that that is what happened, that that is how that information came about, you know, which there's no real reason not to believe it. But if that is true, I mean, there's just a thousand questions that spawn from this. Like, it's in his own mind, in binary. It's not a message, so he didn't know what it was.

So first of all, you're unconsciously writing binary. Second of all, that binary translates into English. Yeah, parts of it. Right. You know, it's like some of it is maybe junk, but in there there's a message. And I suppose code breakers, cryptographers will say that this is often the way that classified information is sent. You have a whole lot of data, but there's there is a message in there somewhere. But that message was, I mean, I can't be certain of this, but almost deliberately given to him.

You know, because that just kind of doesn't line up with what the message is and the fact that he could read it. Because, you know, if this was something that these extraterrestrials didn't want him to have, then it wouldn't have been in, I would assume it wouldn't have been in English, right, unless they communicate in English, which would also be strange. But yeah, I mean, that's just such a bizarre, you know, encoding to receive. You would almost think that, yeah, it was deliberate that he was meant to get this message. What do you make of that message? What is that, what general sort of gestalt do you take away from that? It's difficult to get away from the time travel aspect of this. And, you know, people say, well, is it alien or is it time travel?

The two are not mutually exclusive. Again, any civilization that's mastered interstellar travel might also have mastered time travel. But that being said, origin year 8,100. And then my attention was drawn long after this happened. My attention was drawn to the work of a theoretical physicist called Ronald Mallet. and Ronald Mallett is one of the few theoretical physicists doing research into time travel. And he subsequently said, and I don't believe he had heard of Randlesham, and he had no particular interest in UFOs, but he just said,

if you ever wanted to send a message back through time, you would use a subatomic particle stream, and you would choose subatomic particles that had a spin state of either up or down, and you could then manipulate that, and that would enable you to send a binary message back in time. And so, of course, I had that light bulb moment in my head. I'm like, wait, this is exactly what Jim Peniston said. Wow.

That is, you know, also just writing down 16 pages, pages of anything, let alone a coherent code. I mean, I can, even if I could just draw zeros without ones, that's a lot of effort. Yeah. To do sort of mundanely and unconsciously, like 16 pages is a lot. That's a lot of writing. It is. And he, looking back on it, he can't really explain his state of mind at the time.

He, the nearest he got to it was, it's almost like he's under a compulsion of, like a trans. Almost a trance. Yeah, yeah. It's like he was not himself. Have you ever encountered any other witnesses that described some type of download during, during your investigations? Not quite like that, but I have come across abductees, people who've had. close encounters who believe that they've had some sort of communication, a telepathic download of a message.

But usually those messages are very cliched. I mean, abductees get told things like, this won't hurt, and then it does. It's almost like a, you know, like, again, like John Mack, like what a doctor tells you just before he sticks the needle in. Don't worry, this won't hurt. Yeah. But also very, what I would call almost cliched. messages about the danger of pollution, nuclear war, although that does, of course, segue

into what we discussed about the UFO nuclear connection. But again, it's why would these abductees get a message like that when, frankly, I don't mean this in a disparaging way, but they are not personally in any position to do anything about that. It's not like that the president or the prime minister or something. It's just ordinary people. Yeah, I completely agree with that sentiment. It's something that's really stuck out to me researching a lot of abduction cases. And even from the children in Rua to, you know, more modern cases, even Chris Bledso, they were all sort of given these messages of, oh, the world, you know, you got to take care of the world. We can't be destroying it, all this stuff. And in my head, I always think, well, what good?

is that? Why are you telling these people? All you're doing is create is is traumatizing people. And then these people just end up, you know, at the very most in partaking in whatever that is, the very most, like going to like writing a book and going to UFO conventions. Like there's no actual change being made to, you know, completely change the way we behave into in regards to the environment or war or anything else, there's no significant changes happening. They are aware of that. You know, you would almost think like, well, if you have the capacity to zip around like this and do all these things and implant these thoughts and these messages, like, just do it yourself, you know? Exactly. Which brings me back to this analogy of the magician's trick. It's like maybe that's just what they want you to think this is.

It's like, oh, yeah, they're here for giving us warnings, but maybe what's actually going on is something completely different. Maybe it's a psychological evaluation of humanity and that they're giving these messages to people, not because those people are able to act on them, but to see how they react to them. Might also be some type of justification for the procedures that they've been doing as well. Like, I mean, if you say, you know, ow, that hurt. And then they go, yeah, but look at how bad you're treating the world. And you go, oh, and you feel sad. And then they go, see, you're the bad guy, not me. And we kind of, like, accept that exchange of, like, oh, they did this for the greater good.

Yes. I mean, I think one of Jack Valet's books, wasn't it? It was, you know, messages of deception or whatever the title is. But the idea of deception runs, I mean, of course, it's. one of these great ironies. UAP are often investigated by people in military intelligence, where deception runs through as a theme. And the phenomenon itself demonstrates, I would argue, a degree of deception.

Deception as to its true nature. You know, maybe like John Mack said, it looks like a medical procedure, but it may be something different. It sounds like these people have been given warnings about nuclear war and pollution, but maybe it's something else. And the idea that there is deception at both ends of the phenomenon, the phenomenon itself and then those who investigate it and try and interpret it is kind of one of those cosmic ironies. And then it brings you to the idea that some of this, again, I've mentioned how surreal some of this is when you get past the self-censorship, that some of this is almost like,

and then this is a phrase that's been coined, of course, the concept. cosmic joker. And every culture in human history has had a trickster god. What comes to mind when you say that is something that you've investigated when you say the cosmic joker? What's one thing that comes to mind as you say that? Well, back to the art shop and that kind of thing. Yeah, it's almost ludicrous. It's like a Monty Python sketch. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, well, truth is, in my opinion, often, you know, stranger than fiction.

A lot of times. So fascinating. So bizarre. So weird. You know, and you said, too, they demonstrate things.

So that, that itself is an act of whatever that is. Like, why are they demonstrating these things? They are demonstrating them. They know very well we have capabilities of picking them up on radar or, you know, tracking them through,

you know, mental processes, i.e. psionics or any of these things. So, you know, there's that question. Why show yourself is the big question, right?

Sure. We can do stealth. So absolutely any civilization that's mastered into stellar travel, self-evidently, wouldn't be seen unless they wanted to be seen. Which brings me back to this speculation. If you say they want to be seen, they want to interact with people and have, there is an agenda. here, what that agenda is, I don't know. Maybe it's, like I say, a psychological evaluation of certain individuals or of humanity collectively, but maybe it's something else that we don't, like I said, I mentioned, have the conceptual awareness, but they are showing this. They,

as you say, they are demonstrating something to us for a reason. It smacks of purpose and and deliberateness. Yeah. It would be hard for us to believe that it's just straight up negligence. But maybe that's also a possibility. Maybe they are making, you know, they're fallible as well. They might, but I'm drawn by something that David Grush said recently. And again, David Grush is really, you know, when people say, well, how many people did

David Grush talk to and why was he doing this? he was doing this because Jay Stratton told him to do this. I mean, Jay Stratton, who headed up the UAP Task Force, told David Grush, you go to all the different parts of the intelligence community, all the different parts of the military, go find out who knows what. So when David Grush came back and said, I've talked to 40 people and all the rumors are true, there really are intelligence community legacy programs doing crash retrievals and reverse engineering. that was not him pursuing some sort of hobby or that that was him following an order that he'd been given by the head of the UAP task force. But my point is that he said one aspect of this was that some of this was almost like gifts from the gods. Donations. Yeah. He said some of these things had not crashed. They had been left for us.

Yeah. Yeah. that's a that's a really hard one to grasp as well because you know if if it is future humans you know then then that almost doesn't make sense that well unless there's you know some type of time manipulation and and you know but then they want to give us this technology so that we will figure it out and build it and once we've built it then we need to go back and put it you know or messages is about it to Rendlesham Forest in 1980, there's a great Isaac Asimov story, I think, the end of eternity, which deals with this kind of nature that the people going back,

you know, have to kind of go back in time and give the mathematical equations, which will lead to the development of time travel so that it can be done in the first place and round and round it goes. Yeah. Too much for my meager brain to conceptualize. Mine too. But I can kind of say the words, but yeah, whether it really, I don't know, permeates. I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. Chicken or egg, you know, what came first? Well, in the UFOs, in the UFOscape, it would definitely be egg. This brings me to another famous case that I'd like to talk about is the, Calvin case. Now, recently in James Fox's documentary, the program, you were featured as a key figure when discussing the Calvin UFO case because during your time there, you had come across these photos, these famous photos of what seemed like this giant diamond-shaped craft being

intercepted or observed by a fighter jet from the Air Force. When, who was it? It was Craig Lindsay. Craig Lindsay, yeah. He was the Royal Air Force. The press officer. The press officer who recently came forward with an image that he said is one of the originals.

Now, I can't comment on whether it is or not simply because the Ministry of Defense hasn't commented on that. So when I talk about these cases, I can only talk about them because the Ministry of Defense has themselves declassified and released some of the information because they haven't commented on the authenticity of Craig Lindsay's picture. You can't confirm. I can't comment on I can't confirm or deny. But absolutely, we had six images and the associated negatives. I we had one of them the best one blown up to a sort of poster size and we had it literally on our office wall. So a few years back, when they declassified the file, there was a photocopy of a line drawing in there. So from that and just from my memory, because this was on my office wall for years, I did a with a graphic artist from Los Angeles suite.

did a CGI recreation. And it's pretty similar to the Craig Lindsay photo. So people can can make of that what they will. But yeah, absolutely. These pictures were real. Daylight footage of this huge diamond-shaped craft that the witness, the two witnesses said just hung there in the sky and then accelerated off at high speed. But this time straight up.

We looked at it in the Ministry of Defense, obviously, we had access to Jarrick, which was the Joint Air Reconnaissance and Intelligence Center. So again, imagery analysis, intelligence community imagery analysis folks. They looked at all this and they said, yeah, it's real. It's whatever it is, it's 75 feet across. It's a solid, structured craft, but we have no idea what it is. And that, because there are people online that say, oh, it's like, it's the mountain in the background or it's some type of water reflection or anything like that. You're saying that this is definitely a solid craft, that this is what it perceives to be. Correct.

And firstly, of course, the people that are saying that they're working off the Craig Lindsay image. Like I say, I'm not commenting on that. But we had six images. And this was an official intelligence community analysis. Yeah. This was not a fake. This was not some sort of optical illusion. So, yeah, I've seen all sorts of speculation online.

Like it's a mountain peak wreathed in clouds. It's like a reflection of a rock in a pond. It's a Christmas ornament. You know, yada, yada, yada. No, that was not the assessment of the British intelligence community. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the clearest image of a UFO that you've ever seen during your time there, where does this Calvin photo sit? Oh, it's 10. It's a 10.

It's a 10. Yeah. You've not come across anything else that is as. striking is this one? Is that because the multiple images? That's part of it, yes. Multiple images. Also daylight images. Because the key point about that is so many pictures of UFOs are taken at night and you don't have any other features in. But where you've got a daylight picture with like the ground, a distant forest. Foreground as well. Yeah. You can triangulate. And once you can triangulate, you can start to make some calculations

about the distance of the object from the lens, the height of the object, the diameter of the object, that sort of thing. And the size compared to another craft as well. I think it's an important piece of information. Yes. You think that pilot will ever be located? I'm not going to comment on that.

Sorry. Again, you know, I have to be very careful. Of course. The Official Secrets Act in the UK is binding for life. I see. And when I talk about this, I can only talk about cases that are either unclassified or that the Ministry of Defense has declassified. So I can't, yeah, I can't preempt them.

And there are some, so I'm not really able to comment on the pilot. Sure. And I appreciate the answer regardless. And I apologize for asking, but it is my duty to ask these questions. It's absolutely. I understand and respect that. Okay. Yeah.

Let's see here. Well, I mean, I have more questions about the Calvin, but I think we'll move past that. I want to get into now your work. Well, actually, before we get into ancient aliens and your work with the History Channel, what you're currently doing and the projects that you're working on now, I did want to ask one last thing. did you ever encounter or hear of stories from the people that you've visited of them being visited prior to your visitation? It did come up, yes.

I guess you would call this men in black kind of cases. From time to time it would be, well, why are you asking me all this? I've already told those guys. Like, wait, what guys? and I didn't have a lot of that, but it did happen from time to time. And the other thing is, it wasn't necessarily on the cases that you would think would be the significant ones. Sometimes it would be on a really, what you would think was a really low data case, like just a sort of casual light in the sky thing. And then you get this story about men in black.

And it's like, well, you would think if you were going to get that, you would get it with the flagship crown jewel cases. Randlesham, Calvin, well, of course, they do say that it happened in Calvin, but that's another story. But to find it happening, just, you know, John Smith out walking his dog on a wet Tuesday evening, seeing a momentary light in the sky, a case that you would think nothing of. You couldn't even investigate, you know, over and above saying, well, is it on a flight path? Was there a meteor shower that night? Was there any satellite that might have been, that sort of thing. But a really low data case. And then suddenly you would have, and these two guys turned up, interviewed me at great length, told me it would probably be in my interests not to discuss this.

Wow. And you would think, why on a case like that? When it almost draws your attention more to it. And then you think, but maybe that's the point. Were the descriptions of these men ever bizarre? It was almost always just, you know, government people in dark suits. I see. Yeah, never like bald with big eyes or.

Not like that. overly tall or nothing like that. I've heard of those sorts of cases mainly in the U.S., but it was generally just, well, these people looked like they were government or air force in civilian clothes. And American accents? No. British. British. In the UK, British.

So, I mean, immediately, as someone who is working at the secret levels of the government, I mean, that must raise a red flag for you. You must be thinking, well, who else is? working on the same things that I'm working on, and how did they come about this information prior to me receiving it? Like that, did you ever look into that? Yes, and again, we worked with, I mean, you asked me earlier, could there be another unit doing this on a clandestine basis? And my answer is I struggled to see how they would get the data.

Because, I mean, we were the ones who had literally a UFO hotline for, for like I say, the 85, 90 plus percent cases that came from the public. Now, you know, I guess someone could bug the line. That's easy to do. But sometimes you meet people face to face. You hear things. You have face-to-face conversations with Air Force people. And we, it's not like we didn't do this ourselves.

I mean, we did, we did, like, for example, covertly attend U.F. FO conferences, for example. Really? Yeah, I've done that. There's even, there's a declassified paper in a Ministry of Defense file somewhere at the National Archives with me saying to one of my opposite numbers in defense intelligence, something like, I just come back from the conference, lots of chatter about X and Y, that sort of thing.

Wow. And they did the same themselves. It was just who can go to the conference. They're having the big conference this weekend. And it was literally, well, who's free? Who's closer to geographically? Sure. And one time I went along and I took a, you know, you always like, I took,

I took someone, I took it, it's probably totally illegal, but I took like a civilian friend of mine, not even in the Ministry of Defense, female. who I just thought, well, it's good. You're much more likely to get busted if you're like a single male. But go as a couple and no one's going to question you. So we did that. Interesting.

So there almost certainly is. So we were the men in black. Right. She was the woman in black. And one time she actually I did this with two different people. One of the women definitely lent into. this and would literally attend dressed all in black with huge black sunglasses. Oh, no.

Not exactly covert. No, but then it became a double bluff. Right. Because it's like, well, she's so obviously like. Men and black. Yeah, a weird, a woman in black. Yeah. That it couldn't be her.

That's right. Covertly here. And of course it was. It obviously makes sense that governments are attending. each and every one of these because even if there's a 1% chance that there might be sensitive information being shared, they have to be aware of it, right? So it does make absolute sense that they would be going to these things. Now, as someone who was going to these things in a sort of aloof manner, what were some protocols that you would adhere to in order to not blow your cover?

Well, don't get caught. Right, but what does that mean? Don't engage in conversation? Or does Does that mean engage in conversation, but don't talk about what you do? Definitely, the latter. Yeah, yeah. Don't get drunk at the bar and tell them that you're secretly working for the government. That really would be a double bluff, I suppose, or triple bluff or something like that. But no, yeah, just be natural. Don't draw attention to yourself and don't get caught.

Do you ever, because you've attended a lot of these UFO conventions, and namely, we didn't even mention this, and I'm probably going to put this at the top of the video, but this interaction happened because of contact in the desert. And so I'd just like to give them a quick little shout out here. They put us in touch, which allowed you to come here, and we will both be present at contact in the desert. So thank you for hooking that up. I just wanted to throw that at the top before anything else.

Yes, and absolutely I will be speaking at contact in the desert, of course, interacting with folks. and I could be virtually 100% sure there will be folks from the government there covertly. I mean, I even talked to someone recently who told me that a particular intelligence officer had been told in association with what the US government was doing. You know, we need to find out what's going on. And part of that is find out who knows what.

And the only way that this intelligence. officer could really do that fully was to go to some of the conferences. That's so interesting. Do you ever have, because you've been to so many of these conventions, have you ever suspected anyone else of playing that role? Yes. It's like any particular group of people, the language they use, the body language. Like, for example, if you were an undercover.

have a cop, or if you were a cop, but just not in uniform, you could probably go into a crowded bar and spot the other cops, particularly if you start talking to them. There's a certain bearing, there's language, there's the look. And you find it in almost every niche of society that, you know, I mean, you have the same, for example, with gay people, you know, who would be able to spot each other or cops or military or whatever it is, whether it's magicians. Magicians. You can probably maybe spot them. Definitely. I don't know. If they're wearing a fedora. Right. And so, yeah, I often go to these things like contact in the desert and see people.

And I'm like, yeah, but I'm too much of a kind of nice guy. to out anyone. To draw attention to it. Because they've got a difficult enough job as it is. And they're there to gather data. I don't want to kind of give them that extra headache. Plus, it's like, well, the magicians club. It's like the government club.

You wouldn't want to bust someone. Sure. Yeah. No, I definitely, that's a great analogy. But I will be coming to see you a contact of the desert for an update, by the way. Right. Maybe on the last day, I'm going to go find Nick. And I'm going to be like, Nick, break it down.

Who's a spook? So off the record, you might have to confirm or deny some things to me regarding potential spies among us. Okay, let's discuss a little bit about your transition, which is kind of a wild. It almost seems like, you know, because you start at ministry defense, nothing to do with UFOs, nothing to do with UFOs. nothing to do with UAP, just like a really important work that you were doing there, you know, counterterrorism or like all these really important things to going into the X-Files, essentially, getting so enamored by the subject matter and convinced yourself that this is happening that there is something to this phenomenon, that you started pursuing it on your own,

which eventually led you into the second half of your professional. career, which is becoming sort of this outspoken figurehead for transparency, for uphology, and namely eventually led you to, you know, working with the History Channel. So can you give me a little bit of a timeline on how that looked like and how that came to be? Sure. And absolutely, I personally, the way I describe this is that I came out of the shadows and into the spotlight. And it was a real 180 flip. Because when you're in the Ministry of Defense, you can just about tell people that you're in the MOD, but in conversations with people not there, you just have to be very general and say, oh, it's just an admin job, nothing exciting. Things like that. You can never get into details, of course. So much of it is classified, particularly on things like counterterrorism and, you know, which I have. been fortunate enough to be involved with in one of my my mody postings. So yeah, you have this

kind of contrast that for 21 years I was this smartly dressed civil servant who couldn't really discuss anything about their work. And then I felt when I was exposed to this UAP information, I felt that it was too interesting and important to walk away from. And I felt that the ministry corporately was not really gripping this. And I knew that there was more that should be done. And so I stayed involved. Even while I was in the Ministry of Defense and somebody else had that job, I stayed involved. The Ministry of Defense then under open government initiatives started declassifying

and releasing some information, and that, even though my non-disclosure agreement and the Official Secrets Act applies, enabled me to speak about this. And I wrote some books and I did some TV, mainly news. So, for example, the BBC, if they wanted somebody to talk about this subject, they would come to me. You were the UFO correspondent, essentially. Yes. And ironically, I actually did some, some of the first interviews I did, of course, was between 91 and 94 when I was doing that job. I was put up as spokesperson. But once you're on a BBC list, you know, you never really get off it. And with the agreement of the press office, they were happy for me to carry on doing that. As long as I did them the occasional favor. I see. Very interesting. So I carried on and then I took early retirement in 2006 because I felt that I was doing two jobs.

And since then, obviously when I stopped doing government work, it freed up a whole lot of time and I was able to ramp up what I did privately. And then it just so happened because that's my life journey that I got married and Elizabeth is a U.S. citizen. So I moved to the U.S. in January 2012. That put me right in the center of the crosshairs when it came to folks like A&D History Channel doing shows like ancient aliens and suddenly thinking, well, hey, we've got this government guy who's done this, not as a hobby, but as a job, we should get him on the show. Yeah, that's an incredible thing to have on your resume as someone, you know, in and around uphology. We're often, you know, our own researchers and where, you know, we don't readily have access

other than FOIA requests to a lot of these official cases. So it does make for an interesting, I mean, it does make it very interesting when someone comes into this space having prior. knowledge to how these things function within, you know, the confines of the government. So I, I agree, like, for me, even sitting across from you now is, you know, a treat because someone who's interested in this stuff, I mean, you were the type of person I would like to ask the most questions to. So I can see how that was very fitting. Was there ever a, I mean, obviously there probably was, but was there ever like a conflict of interest there going from, like, did you ever get a call from MOD being like, hey, Nick, what are you doing? No, but only because I knew where the line was. And I mentioned earlier that I did them the occasional favor. And I knew what lines they wanted to push in relation to this, and I was happy to do that.

One interesting thing, one interesting indication of this happened, well, a few years ago with the whole Let Storm Area 51 thing. And I did an interview on Fox News and I said, let's not storm Area 51. There's a really bad idea for a whole bunch of reasons. And subsequently, I got an email from my old boss at the MOD who I thought had long since retired. Turned out he was still at the MOD, 43 years on or something. And he said, saw your interview, Nick. You know, good, good line. And so it just reinforced the fact that they're always watching.

Whoa. So, no, I haven't had conflicts because I know where the line is and I don't cross it. And because of these sort of favors. Favors. What is one of these favors would you say that you're comfortable talking about? What's something that they would ask you to do or say or not say? I think one of the favors is to promote the line that we believe in open government on this and that information is being released.

And that isn't necessarily the case, is it? It's not always the case. Okay. Fair enough. But that's what they want us to believe. Yes. It's what you would call in public affairs language. You would say it's a key message that they want to promote. always promote open government.

You know, we are quite open with this, even if we're not. Right. And that definitely counteracts what is kind of happening right now with the U.S. government because of the, because the government, the general consensus of the population believes that the government is withholding sensitive information that could pertain to their welfare well-being. That is why, you know, that is why the current administration, was so favorably, you know, put into office. And that is also why this UAP and sort of not just the UAP, sorry, but the whole declassification task force has now being put forward because of this

lack of transparency. So it is in a government's interest to at least promote the idea that they are being transparent, even if that is in the case, to avoid things like we're seeing now. Yes. And on the very first day of President Trump's second term, He signed an executive order that related to the declassification of information about the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK. And this is kind of a little complex in legislative terms, but the newly formed task force on the declassification of federal secrets, which has been headed up by Representative Anna Paulina Luna, is associated with that executive order. It derives some of its authority from that, but it's not specifically mentioned in it.

But the letters that this task force sent out to the various government agencies cite the original executive order. So you could say that this is really a top-down initiative. and those letters specifically mentioned UAP as being part of the business of this task force. They're going to do JFK first. They're going to do some other things, but UAP is definitely on the list. And of course, in parallel with that, we know that, of course, there is information that the government isn't telling on this. one of the reasons that we know it is because there are public hearings, but there are also classified briefings.

And sometimes journalists will buttonhole someone as they come out with one of these and stick a microphone in their face and say, hey, what just happened? And they'll say, well, it's very interesting, but it's classified so I can't tell you. Occasionally, people's language and sometimes body language kind of makes you wonder. I think one congressional representative said, yeah, I've just been, had the classified briefing, lock your doors. And you get these kind of, and another said, I can't discuss what happened in the classified briefing because it's classified. But if you were to ask me whether or not I think we're alone in the universe, then my answer would be that I'm not. And of course, that question had not been asked,

though it was perhaps implicit. And we know that, of course, the UAP task force, now, of course, it's Arrow, the All-Domain Anomily Resolution Office, had at least one meeting, maybe more now, they testified under oath that they had held, that they had set up a Five Eyes UAP caucus or working group.

So we know that not only is the United States involved, but Canada is involved, the United Kingdom is involved, Australia is involved, and New Zealand are involved. But I think all of the Five Eyes nations have confirmed that they sent people to this UAP working group. meeting in the Pentagon, I think the first one was held May, May 23, if I remember correctly. But of course, the details of what was actually discussed have not been made public. Yeah. I mean, those are all interesting things. Again, it's because like you have this like public facing issue with this stuff as well. And as you mentioned, you know, like these favors of, of, you know, seemingly making it seem like they're transparent. I mean, when we hear about these task forces or these congressional hearings, you know, I think a lot of people, especially people who have been in the subject matter a little longer, kind of see through a lot of that because it's

public facing, because there are dops or requests. And, you know, there is somebody telling these people what not to say. And it seems like that is not something that we're so easily going to have access to. And that probably, you know, ends up being the frustration of a lot of people. Do you think this task force, this current task force, is more of a front facing sort of public demonstrative organization? Or do you think that they're actually going to go deep and find what it is that we're looking for?

I don't know. It could be either. because I don't have access to the president on this. And it literally would be a presidential issue. Now, President Trump has said and has hinted that he knows some interesting things about this. And of course, if he has truly empowered this task force and said that this must be a vehicle to disclose all information, then it is. it will happen because that will be a lawful top-down order from the commander-in-chief. But if it's just window dressing again, it will kind of look the same.

It will look the same. It will look the same. Until and unless it actually delivers a smoking gun. Right. Yeah, it's hard to tell, isn't it? Yeah. All right, Nick, I'm going to start the other camera. We have some questions here from our members, basically.

So they join a membership on YouTube or on Patreon. We call them interns. So there are interns here are allowed to ask the guest a few questions. And I cherry pick these questions. So I'm going to go turn the camera on. And then we're going to get to those questions if that's all right with you. Suddenly. And they don't pull any punches.

All right. So feel free to answer any way that you would like. Here is the first one by FireMist. It's fun, right? Oh, yeah. What is the most ridiculous explanation you've had to give to the public about something mysterious or unknown? I'm not sure it's ridiculous, but just the, I guess, the sound bite, it's of no defense significance. That's in one sense the most ridiculous.

And this was a standard sound bite. And of course, it was fine when you were talking about a case that was either explained or low data. But of course it's ridiculous when you have to trot it out in relation to something like Randallsham or Calvin or the Cosford incident that we talked about. So the most ridiculous thing is to say that something is of no defense significance when you have a pilot chasing something that he can't catch. Of course it's of defense significance. Or military personnel being zapped by radiation and downloads. Yeah, absolutely. So, oh, don't worry, it's of no defense significance.

And I guess a follow-up is like if someone was to come back and say, well, what does that actually mean? The answer is whatever we want it to mean. Yeah. Do you ever have a list of these things that you were told to say? Or are these things that you've come up with yourself? Or was this like a general memo? Like, this is what you say in these times. We literally had, I think I mentioned, say, public affairs folks would have what's called key messages.

We had various key messages, which I inherited from my predecessor and he inherited from his. And some of them go back to the Second World War. Are those classified? No, I don't think so. Sometimes they've actually even been released. But it's a classic case of the best place to hide a book is in a library. I see. These key messages like, you know, stress this, say that.

And first of all, you have key messages, which I think is like the UFO phenomenon is of no defense significance. Or the current favorite is something like, in over 50 years of looking at this phenomenon, we have yet to encounter a case with direct evidence of an overt threat to the United Kingdom or something like that. And then, so those are your key messages. And then occasionally they release what are called, or called in my days, defensive lines to take. And then you would have brackets if pressed. And these were things that you were not to volunteer. But if a particularly tenacious journalist were to ask them, it was okay to say these.

So you start with the key messages and you work your way down. And wow. Yeah, some of those have been released. How many tears down does it go? You know, nothing is truly effective if you can't say it on one sheet of paper. So most of these bullet points you can fit on to one sheet, key messages in the top half, defensive lines to take, if pressed, on the bottom half. Right. And bullet pointed.

Huh. Were you ever reprimanded for saying anything you shouldn't have said? No, because I was good at it. Fair enough. Well, you've been good so far. I'll tell you that. I mean, here's a men and black question that we actually already got to from HEC, so we won't get into that one. Okay, this is actually a really interesting question by Dada Queen here.

I'm getting hypnotized by this coming up on the board here. She says, how much reality? concerning UAP did you put in your books Operation Thunder Chill and Thunderstrike? I think it should be Thunder Child. Sorry. Something's going wrong with the board. There is a typo, my mistake. Operation Thunder Child and Operation Lightning Strike.

Oh, Lightning Strike. Oh, this is, okay. My bad. This is Data Queen's mistake. These are my two sci-fi novels. And the answer is quite a lot. In fact, the answer is enough so that these books had to go through security clearance. Now, all my non-fiction books, so on Randallsham Forest, for example, when I teamed up with John Burroughs and Jim Peniston, our book there, actually, it's the only book that ever had to go both for Ministry of Defense security clearance in the UK, and it went to DOPSA in the US, the Defense Office of Pre-Publication and Security Review at the Pentagon.

on. My two sci-fi novels are the only two sci-fi novels that I'm aware of that had to go through that government security vetting. So I had to give them the manuscript and had to wait to get the green light. And yeah, I put a lot in. Randallsham is mentioned. Calveen has mentioned. Cosford is mentioned. A lot of the, what would now be called the five observables, are mentioned. And yeah, I had to be as careful in my science fiction as in my nonfiction. That is incredible to me that somewhere there is a government official whose job it is to officially read fiction books.

Yeah. And you know what? By one of these bizarre pieces of irony, that official once was me. Wow. I've never read officially sci-fi, but one of my jobs in the Ministry of Defense was security vetting of non-fiction books with an Air Force angle. So after the first Gulf War, and just before I actually did the UFO job, one of my jobs was to read, in fact, I think it was parallel. I think, you know, because when I was doing that job, it wasn't 100% of my time on UAP. And it's coming back to me now that one of my other, I mean, I had not forgotten that this was my job.

I'd just forgotten that they were concurrent. Actually, on when I was doing, when I was in that division, before and during my time on the UFO desk, I was occasionally given books on the Gulf War or manuscripts like Storm Command by General Sir Peter de la Bileer, tornado down, which was the story of what happened to an air, two, two man crew that got shot down and then taken as POWs by Iraq. You know, horrendous story. I mean, good book, but horrendous what they did, I mean. what was done to them. So that was my job. But yes, when I wrote my sci-fi, some years later, I think I wrote them in about 1999,

somebody in the Ministry of Defense had to read those science fiction novels and do the security vetting. The same with the last book I wrote was actually nothing to do with the UAP. It was all about counterterrorism and special forces. And that was called Blood Brothers. Again, that had to, one of the few thrillers that I know that had to be security vetted. But a lot of intelligence officers have constantly doing this. Actually, that's the one thing that my former bosses didn't like is when my publishers put on the front cover of my two sci-fi novels,

going back to the question, the truth can only be told in fiction. Oh, wow. They didn't tell me they were going to do that. And it was Simon and Schuster, so it was one of the big six. Massive. And you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube,

and I got a very snippy message. And, of course, it was totally, I had no idea they were going to do it. Uh-huh. But once it was done, yeah, that did upset a lot of people. Yeah, and probably triggered a lot of conspiracy theorists out there, too. I was like, we knew it. The sci-fi was telling the truth the whole time.

Very, very interesting. Is there anything that had to be redacted in those books without going into it? Was there anything that they were like, could you reword this or could you change this? I'm usually very good at knowing where the line is, not crossing it. Same with people like Lou Elizondo and David Grush. They know where the line is. So, you know, nobody wants to give Dobser a whole load of stuff that they're going to say don't publish. No, of course.

It's just going to waste everyone's time. So everyone is pretty good at writing at an unclassified level, even if you're writing about something that is classified. Right. I did slip up, I think, once. And they did ask me to make a fairly minor change to a specific bit in, I think. Operation Lightning Strike, although it might have been Thunder Child, I can't remember. And same with Blood Brothers.

Actually, there was one particular aspect of it where they did ask and basically gave me a form of words for a rewrite. I see. And of course, I agreed. Of course. Yeah, of course. You don't want to, I mean, literally you would be breaking the law. Yeah. If you did.

You could be jailed. Yeah. Yeah. That's very interesting. That's super. interesting. Was it a big, was it a major change for the one in in Thunderstrike? Was it like something a major? Was it just wording like how you worded something? There was one specific thing that they wanted removed. Okay. An event? Yeah, I can't really go in. I see.

Say more than that. And was this event fictionalized in the book or was it, uh, no, it was sort of name check. Oh, I see. And it was like, okay, don't, don't name check. Oh, I see. Oh, very interesting. Yeah, that just goes to show you that they did, in fact, pay attention and read your whole book. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And because I would have expected nothing less. I mean, these people, like when I was doing it with the Gulf War books, you would do it not just line by line, word for word. Because your mission was to make sure that nobody had inadvertently put anything that's still classified in there. Of course, yeah.

And, you know, obviously divulging classified information. without lawful authority is a criminal offense. Yeah, yeah, as it, as it, I think as it should be. I think, you know, national security is important to think. We often get hung up in the UAP space about this national security narrative because of over-classification. But at its core, it is there to protect us. Yes. You know, and we often forget that, I think, in these semantic sort of conversations on Twitter,

as if people forget that there are classifications for a reason. Yes, sometimes, you know, there is over-classification, which can. can become a problem in the long run. But I think, yeah, at its base, I think it's there for good reason. Yes, I mean, literally in the security manual defines the different levels of classification. And from memory, you know, for example, in the U.S., top secret is defined as, it's not verbatim, but information, the disclosure of which could cause catastrophic harm to the national security of the United States. Mm-hmm. And I mean, you know, the point obviously is that when you declassify these things and say, you're not just telling the American people, the Canadians, the Brits, whoever it is, you're telling Russia and China and Iran and North Korea and ISIS and anyone and everyone.

Yeah, I guess a lot of the problem with all this is not only is there levels of classifications, you know, within the countries, but also within the country itself. And then that's like this sort of compartmentalized thing where it's like, well, it's just so sensitive that we can't even tell another secret agency about it. And that's where it becomes, I guess, highly, highly confusing when you're on the inside trying to, you know, have some information be approved because you have to go through all these different intelligence agencies and they have to coordinate to make sure it's okay. Yes. And sometimes you end up playing phone tag on this. And one time, nothing to do with you. UAP, but I had something and I called someone and said, I need to clear this, and they passed me to someone else, and they passed me to someone else. And then the last person I spoke to said, oh, yeah, I can't help this with this, but the person you need to speak to is a guy called Nick Pope. And this, this kind of thing goes on. I mean, sometimes it is Byzantine and Kafkaesque,

if I can mix metaphors. But I mean, yeah, underclassification is a problem. but over classification too and misclassification. Sometimes people, and this is technically illegal, but they classify things because it is politically embarrassing. Right. As opposed to something that is genuinely something that should be classified for national security purposes. Right.

And I think we're seeing a lot of that with like the Epstein stuff as well. It looks that way anyways. Unnecessary redaction. Okay. Okay, this one last question here. And then if you don't mind, we still have time here. After we're done here, would you mind sticking around for an extra like 20, 20, 30 minutes? No problem.

We're going to have an extra conversation for the interns as well. That'll be just for them and we'll get into some more things. Okay. Last question here. This is from J. E. Hardy, who asks, in your time on UAPs, have you ever seen shifts in religion by fellow researchers or even yourself? Not in myself, but yes, I have, and this is such a good question because it takes us to an interesting and kind of dark aspect of this. One person who was involved in this, in British intelligence, kind of got sucked into what I would call a sort of end times

fundamentalist kind of apocalyptic Christian sect well not sect but mindset I see

put it that way came to believe that we're in the last of the end of days the last times and quite how he convinced himself of this

I am still not entirely sure but it does tie in with something again, a little bit dark side, that there is a faction of people in intelligence in both the US and the UK who have convinced themselves that this or aspects of UAP are demonic. And one of the, when I came across this first in the UK and there was a maverick priest called Paul Ingallsby.

who was exerting a strong influence on a retired chief of the defense staff. So like basically Britain's most senior ranking, you know, the equivalent in the US would be the chairman of the joint chiefs. I see. This retired chief of the defense staff, Lord Hill Norton, was a great ally in this UFO field. and one of, you'd almost call it like an invisible college of people, of which I was a member too, after I stopped doing this officially, but as I carried on, there were a group of us. But some of these people, like I said, this maverick priest, Paul Ingallsby,

started suddenly exerting a real influence on Lord Hill Norton, who was basically the senior member in this kind of, enterprise or whatever you call it. And I felt this was really counterproductive because just as we were trying to stress the defense and national security aspects of this, along came this faction saying it's demonic. And one of the reasons they cited a passage in the book of Ephesians, where it talks about Satan as being the prince of the power of the air. And that was one passage that they cited. But I think there must have been more to it than that.

But you find it in the U.S. as well. Lou Elizondo told me. I think he's talked about this publicly. One time when he was briefing someone even more senior at the Pentagon, they said, son, go home and read your Bible. Yeah. And so, yeah, the answer to that question is, yes, I have seen this, though it's not touched me personally. And like I say it, it ties in with this belief that aspects of this are demonic and that ties in to this whole fundamentalist Christian end times philosophy. And the scary thing about that is these people believe that before you can have the same. second coming, which they really, really want, you must first have the apocalypse, Armageddon.

Right. So this has even been spoofed in, I think, a couple of comedy TV shows like Whoops Apocalypse, where they had this character of the deacon. This was not entirely made up. I mean, this was not in that show. It wasn't in relation to UAP, but you see it in the UAP field. Right. It's like the three secrets told by late.

of Fatima as well, where the third secret, you know, they kept, the Vatican kept a secret because it was, it related to like potentially like an end times thing as well. And there's no getting away from the fact that, of course, the theological implications of first contact or disclosure, whichever, you know, you get first, are going to be profound. And one of the fields that's going to be most deeply impacted is religion. And of course, we see every day, sadly, the consequences of religious division and hatred and things. Throw an extraterrestrial presence into the middle of what's already an explosive situation. And it would be like a hand grenade going off in a closed barrel.

Yeah, good point. And that's probably also why the Vatican is, you know, in communication with the government at some level about this very subject. Because even years ago when they discovered exoplanets, because the Vatican also has their own sort of astronomy division and their own physicists. And they have, they have all this as well. But when they started discovering these exoplanets, you know, I think it was, it wasn't been. It was prior to him. But the Pope came out and said, um, that we need to prepare in the event that there is, like, more life out there.

Yeah. And how to, yeah, and how to fit that into the narrative. I think somebody, well, the head, you mentioned the Vatican, the head of the then director of the Vatican's observatory, Father Gabriel Jose Fuenez, said in May 2008 that there is no doctrinal objection to the existence of alien life because man may place no cremate. creative limits upon God. That's right, yeah. And then subsequently, I think this came up in a press conference.

And I think, I can't remember if it was Benedict or Francis. I think it might have been. Benedict? Francis. Okay. Said, and this was one of the, this is probably on his list of if pressed. And he was asked, would he baptize an alien? Yes.

I remember that. And he basically said yes. Yeah, and that was the headline. Yeah. Pope wants to baptize aliens if they come to Earth. Yeah, but of course, it particularly for, I mean, all the major world religions are clearly thinking about this at some level, some more openly than others. But of course, for Christians, it poses a very profound theological problem, however much they say they're open to the possibility. Yeah.

Because the problem, of course, and I've seen this come up. at a conference, a royal society conference where there were both cosmologists and astrophysicists, but also theologians. And the thing that caused the biggest row was, well, wait, if we find that there are other civilizations out there, are you saying that Christ died on the cross for them too? And if not, this idea of Christ dying in the cross to take away our sins and to forgive us, so central and so unique that if we find that, you know, either it's happened elsewhere or it hasn't happened, that's a huge problem for Christians, even if they say it isn't. Right, right, right. Yeah, that definitely, it definitely brings about just another list of,

you know, questions to add on to that. And it becomes increasingly more difficult to sort of retrofit or put the cats back in the bag, so to speak. You know, this whole narrative of, you know, Jesus and everything else. But, you know, who knows? Who really knows? You know what I mean? There's, there are speculations out there that like, oh, perhaps, you know, this visitation, this early visitation was one of extraterrestrials already. And that is part of like the grander thing. So. Well, that's, that's ancient astronaut. Exactly. Basically, the idea that they came here in our past and our ancestors misperceived them as and then worship. them as gods and built great monuments in commemoration of those visits, most of which are all aligned on Orion, Sirius, or the Pleiades. Or the Pleiades, yeah. Fascinating stuff. Nicholas Pope, you are an absolute scholar and a gentleman. I appreciate you opening up to me about these topics and answering all these questions. It has been a great joy to have you on my podcast, so thank you very much.

Thank you. I've enjoyed coming and this has been a really fascinating conversation. So I've enjoyed it too. Thank you. Nick, one last thing before we go. Is there anything you'd like to plug? Is there any dates or any websites that you would like to tell my audience about? My website is nick pope.net. My Twitter or now X is at Nick Pope MOD, standing obviously for Ministry of Defense that has started a few conspiracy theories. is the idea that I'm still secretly working for the government. But then if it was, I wouldn't put it in my Twitter handle. Or would I? It's double bluff. I'm also doing the ancient aliens live tour, which I moderate. And so we go around the U.S. I hope that in time we will bring it to Canada, to the UK, elsewhere maybe.

But for now, it's in the U.S. I think we've done about 80 dates So that's ancient aliens live tour.com It's it's I moderate it and it's based on the TV show The hit TV show Ancient Aliens but you see us live and in person on stage So I do that but but I think it's it's Twitter slash X at Nick Pope MOD where I tend to put my breaking news about upcoming conference appearances, TV interviews that I link to big podcasts that I've done, etc. Great. Well, thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it. And if you guys want to see

Nick and myself in person, you guys can also sign up to go to contact in the desert. We will both be doing our own things there speaking or having a podcast or some type of engagement and we'll probably be present among other, you know, spooky characters in the crowd that we mentioned. So if you want to come out and say hi, that'll be happening. I think at the, is this end of, what is it, May 29th through to June, third or second or third. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

So if you want, check it out at contact in the desert.com. Thank you so much, Nick. Thank you.