'Hey, Spooky! Seen any little green men lately?'
The smartly-suited young man wends his way down the drab corridor of the the Government building, ignoring the customary salutations of his co-workers. It's not difficult: he's had years of practice. Besides, he has more important things on his mind: there's that disturbing new wave of UFO sightings, for one thing. Not to mention the threat of more trouble from his superiors, whose discomfort with his unconventional beliefs seems to increase daily.
But this is not The X-Files. This is Real Life. The young man is not Fox Mulder, but Nick Pope, an employee of the British Ministry of Defence. Pope is a higher executive officer - the ranking equivalent of an army major - who has worked at the M.o.D.'s imposing London headquarters at Whitehall for ten years. Between the summer of 1991 and the summer of 1994, he was appointed to a post officially entitled Secretariat Air Staff, Department 2A - better known to insiders as 'The UFO desk'. It was an experience which was to change his life.
'When I was asked if I wanted to become, the Government's expert on UFOs, I was extremely interested,' recalls Pope. 'I thought it sounded a fascinating job. I didn't have any idea what I would find or what it would entail, but I certainly thought: yes, I'd very much like to do it.'
Pope entered the job without any prejudices about the subject. 'I was open minded. I didn't really know that much about it - my opinion of UFOs was based on little more than having watched Close Encounters. But as I found out in the end, truth really is much, much stranger than fiction. I came in as an open-minded sceptic and I ended up a believer.'
But as Pope was soon to discover, a believer was not the kind of person the M.o.D. wanted manning Desk 2A. Officially, the brief of the officer in charge of Desk 2A is to investigate reports of UFOs in order to ascertain whether there is any threat to the UK's defence - an initiative which comes from an era where an unidentified flying object could well turn out to be a foreign aircraft, reconnaissance device, or missile. Unofficially, as Pope swiftly learned, the officer at the post was expected to do little more than send out standard letters dismissing sightings and write up reports confirming that there was no threat.
Pope had no intention of going by the book. He says: 'The reason for the M.o.D.'s involvement is to look for any potential threat to the defence of the UK. Now, what I argued was: that was a moveable feast. What did it mean? I think some of my predecessors had interpreted it as meaning that unless there's actually hard evidence of something hostile, it's not our business to investigate UFOs. I disagreed. I took the view that you couldn't make a valid judgement on whether there was or was not a threat until you'd made some effort to find out what it was. Particularly since, as I soon found out, we were talking in many cases about structured craft of unknown origin penetrating the UK air defence region. I wasn't prepared to say "Oh well, I'm gonna assume there's no threat there". Many people would have been more comfortable if I had, but you know, I was paid to do that job, and I wasn't going to turn a blind eye.'
Pope's approach did not win him any brownie points. 'The parallels between myself and Fox Mulder are quite extraordinary: I was a bit of a maverick, a loose cannon within the department, viewed with a mixture of suspicion and distrust by others. I had exactly the same sort of problems as Fox Mulder has, I guess.'
The connection did not elude Pope's colleagues, and it wasn't long after The X-Files began to air in Britain that Pope acquired the nickname 'Spooky'. By that time, however, he had become inured to teasing, it being such a constant occurrence. UFO researcher Timothy Good, who refers to Pope as 'The real Fox Mulder', can attest to this. On his first meeting with Pope at the Ministry, a passing group of sober-looking civil servants broke into a spontaneous rendition of The Twilight Zone theme tune.
The Pope/Mulder similitude doesn't end here. Pope explains: 'I got drawn into various other oddities. Because I did UFOs, everything that was slightly weird and didn't have a normal home would come to me. I got quite a bit about crop circles, and even the odd ghost story. One was a report of a ghost at an RAF base - I think I referred them to a civilian ghost hunter - obviously there's no official interest in ghosts. But, like Fox Mulder, anything weird and wonderful would come to me.'
So what was it that turned this once sceptical young man into a real-life Mulder? 'There wasn't any one absolutely blinding revelation. It was the drip-drip effect. I began to see so many cases which just couldn't be explained. When you added together all the eye-witness testimony - much of it reliable stuff from trained observers such as pilots and military personnel and police officers - with all the photos, the videos, the radar tapes, the radiation traces on the ground, they made for a really convincing case, as far as I was concerned.
95% of UFO sightings are misidentifications, cases where there is insufficient data, or hoaxes - although I must say I had an absolute minimum of hoaxing to handle. But there's a hard core of 5% which I would classify as "genuine unknown" - cases which appear to defy explanation after as much analysis as possible. 5% of the total numbers seen is a lot - you've got to factor in that for every 100 people who see a UFO, perhaps only one or two will ever get round to reporting it. There were enough of these unexplained cases to make me think: there's something there. And if you accept that there's a hard core of 5% that defies explanation, you've got to ask what they are.'
Pope asked himself that question and it took great courage to make his conclusions public. 'There are all sorts of weird and wonderful theories, but I guess I've got to come off the fence. I have now come down on the side of the Extra Terrestrial hypothesis. On the basis of the extraordinary cases I've seen and the accounts I've heard from people, I have come to the conclusion that the most logical explanation is that somewhere out in the universe people are beginning to do what we ourselves are beginning to do now: reaching out into space to try and contact another civilisation.
And I do think that a small number of UFOs, the real UFOs, are ET space craft. And that has made me very unpopular.'
Pope is passionate and unflinching in his beliefs, and is unafraid to criticise the British Government for it's laissez faire attitude toward UFOs. 'There needs to be an awareness that there is a core phenomenon that appears to go beyond human understanding and experience, and that we can't simply write it off as weather balloons or hoaxes. We must make an effort to find out what it is - people (in the Government) know too little about something that they damn well should know about. You've got to figure from a common sense point of view that if a craft slips through your defensive screen of radar and air defense fighters, that its technology is probably above yours. In other words, the attacker seems to be more advanced than the defender - and that makes me very worried.'
His assessment of the situation is that UFOs are a 'potential threat'. 'We don't know anything about them. Until you can say who they are and what they are and what they want, I guess the jury is still out.'
He feels that extensive research should be a governmental priority. 'The sad thing is that we've got all the resources in place - we've got radar, we've got access to satellite imagery, we've got people who can go out and talk to people. It just needs to be targeted and focused and given a proper remit. I did my level best to investigate all the sightings that came my way. But there was a limit to what I could do. I was one man struggling against the tide.'
Regardless, Pope took his investigations extremely seriously, processing as much raw data as possible in the form of telephone calls, letters and reports from the public, the police, the military and the Civil Aviation Authority. He was also unique in being the first officer at Desk 2A to have cultivated a friendly working relationship with the UFO lobby. 'I initiated an active dialogue. The idea was to be there for each other, to know that you can phone each other up and say "Hey, we're beginning to get reports of a wave of sightings over Cornwall, what have you got? What do you think?" And if we found explanations, of course we'd tell each other and we'd both be able to switch inquiries off and concentrate on the real UFOs.'
The lobby found Pope to be a useful ally. His position gave him access to military specialists, radiation experts and other valuable human resources, and the authority to impound radar tapes and make inquiries at cvil airports, RAF bases and obsersvatories.
Despite his good relationship with the UFOlogy community, Pope admits: 'There are areas where I and all these people have to agree to disagree'. Primarily these areas concern belief in the concept that the world's governments know more about the UFO situation than they are letting on.
Pope reserves judgement on the situation in America, 'I know the conspiracy theorists say that the US Government is up to its eyeballs in crashed saucers and dead and live aliens, but its not a world on which I have any window. Unfortunately I couldn't get access to any American opposite number, although I did try.'
However, he is adamant that there is no cover-up in Great Britain. 'I am satisfied that there isn't one and I think it's inconceivable that in three years I wouldn't have caught a hint of something.' His fruitless searches for classified UFO-related documents further bolster his certainty. 'My clearances are very high - not because of the UFO thing, but because I did one or two duties connected with the Gulf War. Now, someone like Tim [Good] will always argue that of course it's not simply a question of classification, it's "need-to-know", and he's quite correct - just because you're cleared to a certain level doesn't give you access to everything on that level. But I would have thought that I'd have had the combination of clearance and need-to-know, given that I was doing the UFO job.'
Pope is aware that some of his allegations can sound suggestive. For instance, there were times when he was, he suspects, 'deliberately given other work just to take me off an investigation.' He asserts: 'I know some people say that's because they were covering something up. But honestly they did not know about flying saucers. If they were covering up anything it was their own ignorance and predjudice about the subject.'
However, Pope's experiences were not without a touch of X-Files-style intrigue.
He reluctantly confesses: 'I don't really want to get into this, but I had a sort of Deep Throat. Not neccesarily someone directly involved, but yeah, I had a Deep Throat character. A sympathiser who I would sometimes consult, who would offer an opinion. Someone in a senior position? I don't think I can really get into that, but I think you could say: well-placed to discuss one or two of the more interesting options.'
After the military style, the M.o.D. regularly appoints its employees to new tours of duty, and in the summer of 1994, Pope was promoted to a position in a financial department. 'An awful lot of people were glad to see the back of me, I can tell you,' he laughs. 'I had mixed feelings. Everyone loves promotions, of course, but there was no way I was ever going to come across a job that was as interesting as investigating UFOs for the Government again. I was very sad to leave.'
But although they took the man out of the UFO department, they couldn't take the UFO department out of the man. Pope's involvment with the UFO lobby continues, and his future plans include a book, provisionally entitled Open Skies, Closed Minds, scheduled to be published in 1996. 'The aim of the book is to get people talking about the whole issue and it's also addressed to the establishment - the military, the civil servants, the politicians. I want to focus people's attention and offer an effective case for the prosecution: to say there is something unknown here that defies explanation and merits urgent investigation.'
Further down the line, Pope would love to become more directly involved in helping to set UFO research firmly on course for the future. He would like to see a coalition between the independent UFO organisations, allied to world governments and able to draw upon their resources, and perhaps run under the auspices of the UN 'And yes, I would love to think that I could be one of the people involved in putting together this study or organisation.'
In the mean time, Nick Pope, like Fox Mulder, remains convinced that the truth is out there, and he is not going to give up searching for it.
While Mulder's desire is not just the truth, but also a resolution to the mystery of his sister's disappearance, Nick Pope's purpose is surely more straightforward. Or is it? 'You could say that, like Fox Mulder, my interest is not purely an academic one and I'm driven by some more personal motivations. My primary motivation is the intellectual belief that there is a genuine unknown phenomenon, and my belief in the people's right to know, but a part of my motivation is a desire to explain some anomalous events in my own past.'
He is reluctant to go into detail but offers: 'The very furthest I would want to go is to say that there are some events in my past which some people in the UFO lobby would say are some of the factors that are sometimes present in cases of abduction. But I want to stay on the fence until I know what happened to me.'
Copyright © 1995 Jane Goldman
Extracted from The X-Files(TM) Book of the Unexplained by Jane Goldman, Simon & Schuster, London 1995, 331pp, £15.99, ISBN: 0-684-81633-4 (The X-Files name: TM & © 1995 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation)
Jane Goldman has written extensively for national newspapers and magazines. In 1987 she was the recipient of Cosmopolitan magazine's 'Women of Tomorrow' award for achievement in journalism. She is also the author of several books, including a series of highly acclaimed works of teenage non-fiction.
She lives in North London with her husband Jonathan Ross, their two children and a pair of salamanders called Mulder and Scully.
Nick Pope's own account of his experiences at the MoD, provisionally entitled Open Skies, Closed Minds, will be published by Simon & Schuster in 1996
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