In 1980, two US airmen reported an extraordinary encounter near a military base in the east of England. What really happened? Well, if you were hoping for a definitive answer, you’ve come to the wrong place - but you have come to the right place for a story involving the British government, a UFO desk, and a man who once played down the very phenomena he was paid to investigate.
Nick Pope wrote his first book, Open Skies, Closed Minds, in 1996 - a semi-autobiographical examination of well-known UFO cases mixed with his own research. Pope worked at the UK Ministry of Defence for more than two decades, from 1985 to 2006. For three of those years - 1991 to 1994 - he worked on what was known colloquially in the department as “the UFO desk.” The desk’s official name, the Secretariat (Air Staff) Sec (AS) 2a, was responsible for assessing the defence significance of reported UFO sightings. Yes, the British government had a desk for UFOs. No, it wasn’t shaped like a flying saucer.
To promote the book, Pope appeared on BBC Newsnight, the UK’s flagship news programme famous for its adversarial interviews that left even the most formidable politicians and intellectuals looking like startled deer. Given the subject matter and the platform, this could have gone horribly wrong, but Pope held his own. “I wasn’t nervous, probably because I’d been media-trained by the MoD,” he says. “The irony was that when I was posted to the UFO desk, I occasionally had to go on television in my role as the department’s subject-matter expert and play down both the phenomena and the true extent of our interest and involvement in the subject.” His interrogator that night was Peter Snow. “What do you believe now that you didn’t believe five years ago?” Snow began.
And so the perfect storm of a UFO case - involving secret desks, media-trained experts, and a forest in Rendlesham - continues to baffle, delight, and provide excellent fodder for late-night pub debates.