Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Nick Pope and Alien Invaders

Nick Pope is making an entire career out of having once been responsible for the UK's Ministry of Defense UFO investigations from 1991 to 1994. One would think that such a brief stint would not count for much, but Pope is not one to let an opportunity pass. He gets invited to all the major UFO conferences, and frequently is a guest on the Coast to Coast AM radio show, to spin his tales.

Earlier this year, Pope claimed that a UFO photo that was perhaps the best and clearest ever taken 'mysteriously vanished' from the MOD offices.

Nick Pope
In June Pope got a lot of attention when he warned that mass sightings of UFOs were likely during the upcoming London Olympics. When some  videos showing the Goodyear blimp over the Olympic stadium were interpreted by some people as a UFO, some said 'Nick Pope predicted this.' (Of course, it was only people seeing the video on TV who called the blimp a UFO; people in the stadium recognized it as a blimp, and did not report seeing a UFO.)

Pope also warned that "The government must - and has planned - for the worst-case scenario: alien attack and alien invasion. Space shuttles, lasers and directed-energy weapons are all committed via the Alien Invasion War Plan to defence against any alien ships in orbit," he said, apparently unaware that America's Space Shuttle orbiters have been dispersed to various museums, and the rest of the  system scrapped.

Since the collective response among "serious" UFOlogists has been astonishment, Pope began to slowly backtrack, in a very clumsy manner. He told Richard Dolan (who says quite a few wild things himself, like about aliens on Mars),
“My comments concerning Alien Invasion etc, arose because I was commissioned to do some tie-in PR for the launch of the alien invasion themed Sony Playstation game, “Resistance: Burning Skies”, out exclusively on the Playstation Vita. I came up with the idea of an alien invasion war plan. There are 2 versions out there, I can email you copies, a serious version and a more pop culture version that got picked up by the Daily Mail. The real issue here, and it applies to lots of subjects, is the increasingly blurred lines between real news reporting and marketing. 
In an entry titled The End of Nick Pope, blogger "nickpost" on ufodaily.net  reveals his own conspiracy theory:
Nick Pope has completely discredited himself in the field of UFOlogy. Ironically he speaks of “the real issue of blurring the lines between news and marketing” whilst perpetuating just that. It also reconfirmed my assumption that he’s not ex Ministry of Defense.  The issue of Disinformation and Counter Intelligence Programs, (COINTELPRO ), designed to deliberately spread false Information in order to keep the public away from the truth and muddy the waters by intentionally spreading false stories to de-legitimize the subject. In other words if some of the info is true and some of it is ridiculous, it’s all perceived as ridiculous. [emphasis added]
Blogger Simon Sharman writes, "In Pope's own words he 'came up with the idea of an alien invasion war plan' only because he had been commissioned to do some PR for Sony. Secondly, his war plan was carefully thought out because he has no knowledge that any such plans exist." Or in other words, he made up the claim about a government plan for alien invasion,  for commercial gain.

UFOlogist Joe McGonagle wrote, "I struggle to understand why anyone thought Nick Pope had any credibility to start with."
The same man who claims to have investigated Alien abductions,
crop circles, and animal mutilations for the British Government
when he was "in charge of" "the British Government's UFO
Project", when according to the head of his department in 1997;

"Turning specifically to your comments concerning Mr Pope, I
should point out that he was a junior desk officer in the
Secretariat(Air Staff)2a section from 1991-1994 and was not in
charge of, or the head of any part of Secretariat (Air Staff)2.
Mr Pope was an executive officer and shared the support of one
administrative officer"....according to one of his successors, Linda Unwin, "The first point to make is that there is no 'UFO Project'. Handling of UFO sightings is a very small element of our work."
McGonagle adds that Pope is "the man who still pushes the "Cosford incident" as unexplained, when in fact there is an obvious explanation for the majority of the reports on 31st March 1993... The same man who discussed an obvious image of a gull as "If I was still there [on the UFO desk] I'd be looking at this very closely. The object looks structured, symmetrical and metallic"... The same man who continues to portray the radiation readings as hard evidence of something unusual at Rendlesham forest when in fact the readings are meaningless."

Some have described Pope as a 'very conservative' UFOlogist, but the facts don't bear this out. As skeptic Ian Ridpath noted, Pope "has been banging on about potential alien invasion for years."  In a 2006 news interview Pope warns, 'Aliens could attack at any time':
a former MoD chief warns that the country could be attacked by extraterrestrials at any time...
During his time as head of the Ministry of Defence UFO project, Nick Pope was persuaded into believing that other lifeforms may visit Earth and, more specifically, Britain.
His concern is that "highly credible" sightings are simply dismissed.
And he complains that the project he once ran is now "virtually closed" down, leaving the country "wide open" to aliens.
There has been no suggestion that Pope was 'promoting a video game' at that time.

10 comments:

  1. Pope is a bit of a publicity seeker. I suppose anyone who did some official MOD work on UFOs, however small, is entitled to plug this fact and thus gain recognition and publicity among the UFO fraternity, and to be in demand in the national media.

    As for a claim that such-and-such COULD happen, well so it could. By inserting the word 'could' you have neatly covered yourself against any failure of the event to happen.

    Let's face it: If I walk out of my house right now I COULD be struck by a meteorite. And if I did the Euro Lottery I COULD win £150 million.

    Think of that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pope has become the darling of the UFO media circuit. It happens here in the States, someone with the modest of governmental credentials eventually is seen as someone speaking from authority.

    Supposedly Pope has relocated to the US (So. Cal?). This should put to rest that the CIA and other intelligence services are attempting to debunk the UFO phenomena, ie, Robert Hastings' latest rant on TUFOC, since Pope apparently wasn't on the "No Fly List" of Homeland Security.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Richard Dolan is a Brit? That is news to me....

    Since the latest internet furore, the Examiner has reported that "...Nick plans on withdrawing from the limelight, so to speak. Presumably to spend more time with his new wife or possibly write another book."

    Obviously the NSA, CIA, and FBI have got to him...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oops, Dolan attended Oxford University, but he's American. I fixed that.

      And Mr. and Mrs. Pope have moved to Tucson, where he plans to lay low. Obviously he needs time to recover from the self-inflicted bullet wound in his foot.

      Delete
  4. Nick Pope is at it again: "Britain has alien-war weapons, says former government adviser."

    http://news.uk.msn.com/exclusives/britain-has-alien-war-weapons-says-former-government-adviser

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sadly Nick loves the publicity , but he was a spook with all that implies and he will,no doubt, promote misinformation and disinformation at any and all opportunity. Almost every UFO encounter since 1943 has been the result of one government project or another. The nonsense in Corso's book The Day After Roswell is a case in point.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I take my hat off and bow to Nick Pope's ability to turn 3 little ol years as a clerk in the MOD as some sort of UFO authority. Makes as much sense as if the clerk that filed Blue Book reports surfaced as a UFO authority. Kudos to you Nick.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Maybe it is of interest to point out that Mr. Pope - always exploring all opportunities to make money - also authored two "science-fiction" books which features alien invations (of course)!

    Operation Thunder Child
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26185143-operation-thunder-child?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=UWNm4Yvh4w&rank=5

    Operation Lightning Strike
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25371603-operation-lightning-strike?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=UWNm4Yvh4w&rank=7

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Pope is still warning about 'alien invesions', almost ten years later!

      https://www.the-sun.com/tech/4580270/alien-invasion-game-over-earth-ufo/

      Delete
  8. So project condign was nt a UFO project?

    ReplyDelete

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