When it comes to UFOs, there’s little that surprises Nick Pope these days. The former British civil servant spent 21 years at the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and between 1991 and 1994 was assigned to its highly classified ‘UFO desk’, charged with looking into reports of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, a phrase Pope adopted internally to get away from the “pop-culture baggage” associated with the term UFO. It wasn’t your average job. “The remit was to investigate all sightings in the United Kingdom air defence region and assess whether there was evidence of any threat,” Pope explains.
The Cold War had come to an end but that didn’t mean that unknown, advanced technologies from a hostile state couldn’t be out there testing the UK’s capabilities. And if they were, the MOD wanted to know about it. While Pope was in charge he would receive around 300 reports a year. Most had a rational explanation. Meteors or misidentified planes. Satellites or weather balloons. But a small number defied explanation, like the mass sighting of large triangular aircraft over the East Midlands in 1993, witnessed by dozens of people including several military personnel. “One struggles even today to reconcile some of the details people were describing, like the sudden acceleration,” says Pope.