Author, journalist and TV personality Nick Pope worked for the British government for 21 years, at the Ministry of Defence. In the course of his career, he served in a number of different posts, but is best known for work that he did between 1991 and 1994, when he was posted to a division where his duties included investigating reports of Unidentified Flying Objects. The purpose of these investigations was to see whether anything reported might pose any threat to the defence of the United Kingdom, or suggest the existence of anything that might be of more general defence interest. Most sightings turned out to be misidentifications of ordinary objects or phenomena, but a small percentage remained unexplained. Contrary to popular belief, there was no definitive evidence that any of these sightings were extraterrestrial in origin. However, the Ministry of Defence remained open-minded about the possibilities and took no position on the existence of extraterrestrial life.
Nick Pope was initially sceptical about UFOs, but his official research and investigation convinced him that whatever the nature of the sightings that remained unexplained, the UFO phenomenon raised important defence, national security and air safety issues. He was particularly interested in cases where the witnesses were pilots, or where UFOs were tracked on radar.
More recently, Nick Pope has been involved in the programme to declassify and release the MoD’s UFO files and send them to the National Archives. This involved selecting some cases that would be of interest to the media, making a film to promote the release and giving newspaper, TV and radio interviews to publicise the story.
Nick Pope left the Ministry of Defence in 2006. He now works as a freelance journalist and media commentator, writing and broadcasting on a wide range of subjects, including UFOs, the unexplained, conspiracy theories, fringe science, defence, intelligence, space and science fiction.
Nick Pope works with a wide range of film companies, TV networks and production companies, helping develop ideas for new films, TV shows and documentaries. He contributes regularly to various news programmes, chat shows and documentaries.
Nick Pope works with various PR, marketing and advertising agencies, promoting sci-fi films and advertising campaigns themed around the unexplained. He has worked for clients that include Microsoft, 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures and has been involved in promoting The X-Files: I Want To Believe and the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still.
Nick Pope lectures all around the world and this has included addressing the Oxford Union and the Cambridge Union Society, as well as speaking at the Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall and Global Competitiveness Forum 2011.
Nick Pope has written four books, all of which have been published by Simon & Schuster. His non-fiction books are Open Skies Closed Minds, about UFOs, and The Uninvited, about the alien abduction mystery. Both books made the Top Ten in the Sunday Times list of hardback non-fiction books, with Open Skies Closed Minds reaching number three and staying in the Top Ten for ten weeks. These books have been translated into various foreign languages. Nick Pope has also written two science fiction novels about an alien invasion, Operation Thunder Child and Operation Lightning Strike. There have been discussions about producing a film or a TV miniseries based on these books.
Nick Pope lives in California.
