Nick Pope (died April 6th 2026, aged 60) was a British civil servant who became the country's best-known authority on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). His father worked in aeronautics, though Mr Pope himself had no particular interest in extraterrestrial matters before joining the Ministry of Defence.
In 1991 Mr Pope was assigned to the Secretariat (Air Staff) Department 2A, a one-man operation deep inside the MoD tasked with examining reports from the public UFO "hotline" for potential security threats. The desk received two to three hundred sightings a year. Colleagues called him "Spooky". He found that roughly 80% of reports were false—typically aircraft lights, meteors, weather effects, methane flares or CGI—while about 5% defied explanation even with the help of physicists, astronomers and imagery experts.
In 1994 he was moved to the finance-policy department but remained at the MoD for a further 12 years. The ministry allowed him to publish two science-fiction thrillers and Open Skies, Closed Minds, a book rebuking world leaders for ignoring UFOs. In 2009 the MoD shut down the UFO desk, declaring that no plausible threat had ever been identified.
Mr Pope moved to America in 2012 and became the go-to television commentator in both Britain and America on UAP occurrences. He positioned himself as a man of calm appraisals in a field otherwise dominated by wild speculation. He never had a UAP sighting or encounter of his own.
Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it.