Nick Pope, former UK Ministry of Defense UFO investigator, reveals 10% of 300 annual cases defy human tech—like craft hovering over nuclear sites or disabling ICBMs—while 20% of abductions show eerie patterns: radiation traces at Bentwaters (1980), missing time, and behavioral shifts like sudden nosebleeds or altered personalities. He dismisses Roswell’s "time compression" theory but highlights NASA’s anti-gravity research as a possible clue. Credible witnesses, including a disoriented Southern California police officer who vanished 22 miles in 50 minutes, underscore controlled, unexplained phenomena. Pope argues extraterrestrials may study human bonding and genetics, with NIDS’s Pentagon-funded experiments suggesting danger, yet calls for open dialogue despite media skepticism. The deeper implication: humanity’s encounters are deliberate, complex, and far from random. [Automatically generated summary]
Incidentally, you're about to hear a government work.
This is really something else.
Now, would anybody in our government do this?
No way.
But the gentleman you're about to hear, Nick Pope from Great Britain, has worked for the Ministry of Defense since 1985.
And he's going to come on the air with us.
And he's going to talk about UFOs.
He's going to talk about open skies, closed minds, and the uninvited, actually the author of his book.
But for somebody to be able to come on from the government, particularly in Great Britain, is shocking to me.
And I'll tell you more about him in a moment.
With the Kennedy tragedy, somebody sent me this, and I thought it worth reading to you.
The sky is overcast and the visibility poor.
The reported five-mile visibility looks more like two, and you can't judge the height of the overcast.
Your altimeter says you are at 1,500 feet, but the map tells you there's local terrain as high as 1,200 feet.
There might even be a tower nearby because you're not sure just how far off course you might be, but you've flown into worse weather than this, so you press on.
You find yourself unconsciously easing back just a bit on the controls to clear those none-too imaginary towers.
With no warning whatsoever, you're in the soup.
You peer so hard into the milky white mist that your eyes hurt.
You fight the feeling in your stomach.
You swallow only to find your mouth dry.
Now you realize you should have waited for better weather.
The appointment was important, but not that important.
Somewhere a voice is saying, you've had it.
It's over.
Now you have 178 seconds to live.
Your aircraft feels on an even keel, but your compass turns slowly.
You push a little rudder, add a little pressure on the original position.
This feels better, but your compass is now turning a little faster and your airspeed is increasing slightly.
So you scan your instrument panel for help.
But what you see looks somewhat unfamiliar.
You're sure this is just a bad spot.
You'll break out in just a few minutes, but you don't have several minutes left.
You now have 100 seconds to live.
So you glance at your altimeter, and you're shocked to see it unwinding.
You're already down 1,200 feet.
Instinctively, you pull back on the Controls, but the altimeter still unwinds.
The engine is in the red, the airspeed nearly so.
Now you have 45 seconds to live.
You're sweating and shaking.
There must be something wrong with the controls.
Pulling back only moves that airspeed indicator further into the red.
You can hear the wind tearing at the aircraft.
Now, you have 10 seconds to live.
Suddenly, you see the ground.
The trees rush up at you.
You can see the horizon if you turn your head far enough, but it's at an unusual angle.
I imagine that caused a bead of sweat or two on the brow of some pilots out there.
So, we're about to go to Great Britain, and we're going to speak with a government employee whose name is Nick Pope.
It's an unusual opportunity.
Just got back from Taiwan and China, and this is interesting.
I was talking to him a little earlier.
This just cleared the wires.
The U.S. 7th Fleet is now monitoring the Taiwan Strait as special envoys meet in Beijing to persuade officials to avoid military means to solve the unification issue.
And for the second consecutive day, President Bill Clinton warned the mainland against using force.
While at the same time, the President has stated he does support the One China policy.
So, I don't know.
You better watch that area very carefully.
I smell trouble there.
Now, Nick Pope is a controversial figure whose outspoken views on UFO's alien abductions have been discussed in national newspapers, led to questions being asked in Parliament.
His endorsement of an extraterrestrial explanation led to conflict with others at the department.
I can imagine that.
He has worked for the Ministry of Defense since 1985, and his postings have included a tour of duty in the Joint Operations Center during the Gulf War.
He holds the rank of higher Executive officer, which equates roughly to that for us, of a major in the army.
Through his work on UFOs, alien abductions, and such, Nick got drawn into looking at crop circles, animal mutilations, and a range of other paranormal phenomena.
This resulted in him being likened to the character of Fox Moller, of course, in the X-Files.
He has written a book called Open Skies, Closed Minds, which reached number three in the Sunday Times hardback nonfiction list and stayed, in fact, in the top ten for 10 weeks.
The Uninvited, also another and a bestseller.
He has written a techno-thriller with an alien theme entitled Operation Thunderchild, which is going to be published in October of 99 by Simon & Schuster, UK.
Simon & Schuster.
He's done many, many radio and television interviews.
And here from the United Kingdom is Nick Pope, Nick Pope.
It is very difficult for me to speak out on these sorts of issues.
What actually helped me in a kind of perverse way was the fact that after the Persian Gulf War, all the generals had written their memoirs using official information and talking about their involvement in the war.
So I came in after that and I thought, well, if these generals can write about their experiences, I'm going to write about mine because I think that the UFO and abduction research that I did at the ministry would be interesting to people.
Now here, help me if I'm wrong here, but I always thought here in America we have this all-encompassing or nearly all-encompassing First Amendment that allows people to speak out on things.
In Great Britain, the national government actually can and does at times censor information, exercising what we call prior restraint here in the United States, not allowing certain things to be broadcast.
So it's unimaginable to me that they would let you speak out on things like this unless, I'm going to say what the audience would say, unless you were sort of towing the line for them, as it were.
What I had to do to stay the right side of the line is let the department see a copy of my manuscripts before I published.
Now, that's not to say that what came out the other side should be regarded as approved by the government, but it gave them the chance to take out anything that I had put in inadvertently that was, say, classified and make one or two other changes.
But I must say that, you know, this was very minor changes.
I would rather pay that price and have some information come out than have the whole thing stopped.
Although I would say to you that right at the beginning, when I first announced my intention to do this and first gave them the manuscript, I received a letter which said your book is totally unacceptable to the Ministry of Defense and quite beyond any suitable amendment.
But following that, there was a lot of politics, a lot of talking, a lot of arguing, and life got pretty interesting for me.
I mean, in the title, the closed minds referred to people who, even when you showed them what I considered to be really good evidence of extraterrestrial craft, things that could do things we couldn't even come close to, these people just put their head in the sand and said, it must be a weather balloon, it must be a hoax, you know, you must have made a mistake.
Well, although the interesting thing is that in Britain, our Air Force here, the Royal Air Force, is actually, I think, a very positive force.
And many of the people that I've spoken to in the Air Force here actually believe in UFOs, but don't really feel too comfortable about coming out and saying so.
Now, of course, the main reason, and I'm sure this is the case in the States as much as it is here, is many Air Force people have had sightings themselves.
But because of fear of ridicule, because they worry that their careers might suffer, they tend not to say anything.
I had a lot of people talk to me just, you know, in the margins.
We would be going to a course or something, and someone would take me aside and say, look, Nick, when I was flying my jet, you know, back in 1980, whatever, I had the most amazing sighting.
We've got lots of time, all the time we need and all the time you can spare to do this.
I've got a million questions for you, so hang tough.
We're at the bottom of the hour already.
Nick Pope is my guest.
He actually works in the Ministry of Defense and has worked there since 1985, which is, you know, like working in our Defense Department.
And can you imagine a Defense Department employee coming on my program to talk about unidentified aircraft, many, many of them violating our airspace in what might be called an invasion.
Not real likely.
So we've got a real prize here.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
Is coming to us from London, England, Great Britain.
He is in the Ministry of Defense, where he's been since 1985, and he speaks out on issues that you wouldn't imagine he could speak out on there, but he does.
So, Nick, I'm going to start off with a real tough one.
We have had a lot of reports here, Nick, of gigantic craft, I mean, really big craft that have been seen by commercial airliners and others traversing the Atlantic Ocean, generally from Europe, from where you are, roughly, to North America.
And we've had report after report after report of this.
But again, though, I think we have chronic under-reporting of this.
But every pilot who speaks out and goes official, I think there are at least 10, and I say that with some experience because I've sat in this job doing it, 10 who don't report at all.
And that worries me because irrespective of what you believe on UFOs, there is a flight safety issue here.
And I just hope we don't have a massive tragedy to bring this home to people.
Well, one might even wonder whether we might already have had a massive tragedy.
And there's an awful lot of air crashes out there that, despite the best investigation of the NTSB here or your counterpart there, are never really quite solved.
And I guess, of course, there are one or two more historic UFO cases like Thomas Mantel and Frederick Valentich, which, you know, continue to perplex people and make people slightly anxious about what's going on in our skies.
Well, the Frederik Valentich case, a very interesting one, where a light aircraft pilot was flying across the Tasman Strait between Australia and Tasmania, and he reported having seen an object.
This was back in 1978, by the way.
He reported that an object was kind of buzzing his plane.
And his last message to air traffic control, he was actually on the radio trying to get some help.
And this is a direct quote.
He said, my intentions are to go to King Island, Melbourne.
He said, that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again.
So, you know, cases like this are not as widely known as they should be.
I mean, a lot of ufologists, you know, will have a passing familiarity with them.
But if you go out to the public and say, what if I were to tell you that a UFO had been directly responsible for the loss of an aircraft and death of a pilot?
You know, the public would think you were making it up.
In America, Nick, the U.S. Air Force conducted its great Project Blue Book, at the end of which they said, whatever these things are, they are not a threat to national security.
As if to have the final word said on the whole thing, not a threat to national security.
And yet, in this country, Nick, we have reports of UFOs that have hovered above ICBM hardened installations.
We have reports of ICBM sites that have gone offline with UFOs hovering above them.
The Russians have had reports of ICBM sites beginning their own countdown.
That aired here on national television.
And I've always thought, Nick, if that is not a matter of national, in fact, international security, then what is?
I mean, I think, you know, let's not beat around the bush.
I mean, Blue Book was, you know, pretty much a whitewash.
And the American government's decision to get out of the UFO game, if they did, was pretty perverse given that over 20% of the Blue Book cases were unexplainable.
And I'm not talking about cases where there was insufficient data.
But yeah, we have near misses between UFOs and aircraft, some of which are military aircraft.
We here have cases involving UFOs hovering over power stations and even nuclear installations on occasion.
Yeah, I think that this is an issue of extreme defense significance, and you know that is fundamentally the reason why I wrote the book.
And yes, I was taking a chance in doing it, but I felt that it was just too important to sit back and do nothing when these things are going on.
Well, again, since you work for the Ministry of Defense, without giving me specifics about the things that you cannot talk about, how many cases or incidences have occurred that percentage-wise, Nick, that you would not be able to tell me about right now?
Well, I could pretty much tell You about most of the cases, although some in fairly sanitized form.
What I can say to you is that when I was doing the UFO job for the government, I investigated about 300 cases a year.
And of those cases, I reckon about 10%, so maybe 30 cases a year, gave me serious cause for concern, made me think we were dealing with structured craft capable of speeds and maneuverabilities that we simply could not match.
I wasn't given anything specific, but I think there was a kind of culture, a kind of general perception that this was a subject that it didn't do to look into too closely.
It was regarded either as a nuisance or as something where once you started digging, who knows where it will end.
So I'm not telling you that I was ever warned off or discouraged or anything like that, but I think it was kind of accepted that, you know, whoever did that job was just supposed to kind of not rock the boat.
Well, I want to just go off to the right here for a second and ask you a question that you might not be able to answer.
But you had a tour of duty in the Joint Operations Center during the Gulf War.
Yes.
And a pretty significant one.
In America, we have a great controversy raging, Nick, about our GIs who came back and are complaining of various and sundry ailments called the Gulf War syndrome.
And I wonder if there is a similar thing going on in Great Britain, and if so, what you know about it.
I understand, and sometimes it is as important to get a no comment as it is to get one.
Now, coming back to ufology for a moment, there's more than just things in our skies.
I understand, though we're not getting any publicity about it, or very little here, with regard to this year's crop circle formation, it's quite astounding there in Great Britain, in Europe generally, and we're not hearing about it over here.
I've been kind of out of the crop circle business for a while.
I mean, I've been concentrating more on abduction research of late.
But, yeah, I mean, of course, it was inconceivable that Doug and Dave, and even their imitators, were ever responsible for all these patterns.
But the media can sometimes be very one-dimensional on this and just got sucked into the whole idea that because Doug and Dave fooled a few people, they must be responsible for everything, which is clearly nonsense.
Well, you know, here we have Dr. Leavengood who does very serious research on the molecular changes that occur in, quote, real and quote crop circles.
And there are, in fact, actual molecular changes that would seem to be mimicked by, but not quite an effect that would be produced by microwave radiation.
No, my statement was that I do not believe a projected energy weapon could be tested, or would be tested rather, by making a pattern on a crop field.
I'm not saying that we don't have these things, and it's very interesting looking at some of the things going on at White Sands at the moment that there are various anti-ballistic missile systems, both missiles and indeed lasers, being tested.
When I saw that, actually, I can tell you that I had in my house some time ago, without naming who it is, and I can't, somebody who worked on the initial SDI project here in America.
And I sat this person down and I let them see that portion of the SDS-80 video.
And this person said, oh my God, I know what that is.
I've got a man named David Jacobs coming on the air with me next week.
I've invited him back.
He wrote a book, Nick, called The Threat.
And the contention is that when you look at what these visitors, if we can call them that, the craft, the abductions, all the rest of it, what they have done, these are not friends of ours.
These are not beings who are well-intended toward us.
Or at least I'm certainly not prepared to say that they're all warm and fuzzy and we should welcome them.
I'm recalling Independence Day, the movie, and I thought the first half of that movie was very compelling because in that movie, the aliens did not want to make a deal with us.
They didn't want our gold.
They didn't want our women.
They only wanted us to die.
The movie kind of went downhill from that point, I thought, with some of the Area 51 baloney.
But, you know, the first part of that, I thought that could be quite realistic one day.
In other words, they really wouldn't want anything except for us to be off this planet entirely.
Yes, whatever they're doing, I don't think they're doing it for us.
Because if they were, they would ask or they would tell us.
They are pursuing their own agenda.
And because they do it with attempts to cover their tracks, this is a covert alien agenda.
And, you know, from someone who's looked at things from a kind of government and military point of view, if someone sneaks around and does things behind your back covertly, that's always a bad thing.
Well, you actually work for the Ministry of Defense.
So if there was government awareness or a deal had been made, as many people speculate, or a contract already has been made, you should know about it, shouldn't you, Nick?
Abductions are probably the main focus of a lot of research here in the U.S. by many, many researchers who are trying to get to the bottom of what's going on.
What do you know about abductions from your side of the Atlantic, and what can you tell us?
Well, I first came across these reports, you know, when I was looking at UFOs for the government, and the abduction reports came in, too.
And at first, I'll be honest with you, I was pretty skeptical of that.
I thought I could just about comprehend that, you know, some of the UFO sightings were interesting and merited further study.
But I regarded the abductions as almost a kind of distraction.
I thought, how can we make a case?
How can we convince senior people within the government, the military, whatever, that UFOs are real when all these other flaky reports came in?
But then I realized, then I actually started to meet some of the abductees.
And I realized what I guess every good scientist knows, that you can't filter out data just because it's inconvenient or doesn't fit your theories or just because you think it's too wacky.
You have to go where the data takes you.
And these people started coming and saying, look, I have had these experiences.
These were often people that didn't know anything about ufology.
Their knowledge of even basic cases and theories was non-existent.
And yet, independently from all over the country, people were coming up with some remarkably similar accounts.
And that made me think there is a real phenomenon at work here.
And one of the interesting things is that I came to regard, and I suppose this is just a quirky, amusing little soundbite, but in a way, the whole UFO question became irrelevant because the UFO became simply a means of transport.
The real issue was who's in the UFO?
Why are they coming here?
What are they doing?
What do they want with us?
And that's how I got into abductions.
And I shouldn't have said UFOs are irrelevant.
That's a bit flippant.
But let's just say that I have come to concentrate much more on abduction.
And it is very sad that here in Britain, I'm not saying there aren't people that do it, but when you think of the well-known abduction researchers, Bud Hopkins, Dave Jacobs, John Magg, you know, a lot of good work is being done in America, but you don't hear that much about what's going on here.
And yet, it is going on here.
So people just, I don't know, they roll their eyes and they think that this is some sort of, you know, lunatic fringe of the subject.
Well, it's not.
I've worked, I guess, I've looked at over 100 cases myself.
Now, with regard to abductions, surely a number of the reports, some healthy percentage of the reports, are people who had dreams, people who are mentally disturbed in some way, a bit of undigested meat at the wrong time, or, you know, something or another, all of that.
But then there are a certain percentage of inexplicable ones as well.
Does it break down kind of the way the UFO thing does?
I totally agree that many, many abduction accounts, as you say, some will be dreams, some will be hallucinations or combinations of things like sleep paralysis and, say, hypnagogic or hypnopompic imagery, mad hysteria, false memory syndrome, all sorts of other things.
I think it is more difficult to put a percentage on it.
I think with UFOs, because you can look at things like radar and try to validate sightings to see if there was anything solid there, to see if it behaved in a way that our own aircraft can't, you can pin down UFO sightings to a fair degree of certainty.
With abductions, frankly, it's guesswork.
I'm extremely reluctant to put a figure on it, but I would say that maybe, I don't know, 20% of the reports that I get are really worthy of further study.
That's not to say that one in five are definitely extraterrestrial.
If you take the ones that you consider as probably genuine and you throw out all the others, and then you look at the ones that are probably genuine, what kind of conclusions do you draw from the study of those?
In other words, regarding why these are occurring, who they are, what they want, you know, all the normal questions.
I would like to be able to say to you that I have found one neat solution, but I haven't.
I found a lot of different things going on.
And of course, it's not inconceivable that there are a number of different agenda being pursued in parallel.
I have found cases which would validate the research of people like Bud Hopkins and Dave Jacobs, suggesting that there is some sort of breeding campaign going on, an effort to hybridize humans with extraterrestrials.
But I found other cases which I guess stray more into the territory of people like John Mack.
I have cases involving dual human-alien identity, things like that.
People who recall even past lives when they were extraterrestrials.
I have cases, again going back to perhaps Bud Hopkins and Belinda Cortile case, I have cases where it looks as if children were abducted repeatedly and put together in their early years to see how they would bond.
That's my perception.
I think extraterrestrials are interested in human relationship and human sexuality.
I have other cases, and this is a really interesting thing, I think, where it looks as if the focus is on actually effecting change On humanity.
It almost looks, I have a number of cases where people come out of the experience very different to when they come into it.
They have interests in environmental issues, in various esoteric subjects.
They come back very often with enhanced psychic abilities, abilities to do things like ESP, to remote view, things like that.
It's almost as if the abductions are a way of changing us as a species, and that I find fascinating.
I have a lot of scientists that come on this program and talk about the environment.
And here in America, we are noting whether it's short-term or profoundly long-term, whatever it is, the weather has changed.
It's not changing, or it is continuing to change, but it has already changed and become significantly more violent, possibly due to global warming, if you want to believe that story, possibly due to the sun.
But the weather is definitely becoming more violent and unreliable here.
We've got big ice fields beginning to break off at the Antarctic.
We've got all kinds of indicators of trouble in the environment with small species, with trouble in the ocean with the plankton, trouble in the ocean with all kinds of things.
Some oceans dying.
Real, real serious trouble in the environment.
And a lot of people think that if there is intervention going on, it is related to what's happening right now.
I have a lot of cases, abduction cases, and I'm certainly not the only researcher who does, of abductees who are shown apocalyptic images during their experiences.
Sometimes on a screen of some sort, almost as if they're being given a formal presentation.
Other times they report images and feelings which are transmitted to them telepathically.
But this is a common theme that runs through a lot of cases I have.
And I think it could be some sort of a warning.
And these people come back and they are more inclined to take an interest in these sort of environmental issues, to get involved in green politics, to lobby for changes in environmental policy.
And I'm not a great believer that the future is set.
I think we can change it.
And again, the transformative nature of the abduction experience, a psychologist will tell you any traumatic or sensational experience is traumatic, is transformative, rather.
That's true.
But the cases I have go beyond that.
It's almost as if deliberate changes are being engineered in people.
I've got a fact here that I consider worthy of reading to you.
It says, both Nick Pope and a former military aide from Buckingham Palace were on a TV special that I saw recently.
Could Nick possibly clarify about a Buckingham Palace military aide who apparently had unofficial permission from Prince Philip to look into at least one UFO event concerning military craft?
Yes, I think that's a reference to Sir Peter Horsley, who was a former extremely senior member of the Royal Air Force, who acted as a sort of equary to Prince Philip.
And yes, that's right.
He asked permission to look into the Air Force files, and according to his testimony, Prince Philip was interested in that and gave him permission in a discreet way to look into this.
But this is not the only case of very senior establishment figures within the British military taking an interest in this.
When he was alive, Lord Dowding, who was commander of fighter command during the Battle of Britain, he was a firm believer in an extraterrestrial reality.
And of course, even former chief of the defense staff, so someone who was doing, I guess, the job that someone like Colin Powell was doing when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Lord Hill Norton here was former chief of the Defense Staff and former chairman of the NATO Military Committee.
And he is a believer in an extraterrestrial reality.
So in Britain, I think there is a healthy tradition of people within the government, within the military, within the intelligence agencies, taking a more positive view of this than many people in the public might suppose.
Now, it would be amazing, I suspect, if in America, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs spoke out on the UFO issue.
I think, and people ask me, is there a cover-up in Britain?
And I'm convinced that there isn't.
I'm convinced that the solution to this mystery is not going to be found in any files or whatever here in Britain.
And that what we're dealing with is people, senior military people, genuinely doing their best to look into what they correctly perceive as an important mystery.
I think if there are answers to this, I don't want to, you know, I'm not here to make accusations, but if there is a solution to this mystery, if there is knowledge, I don't want to say complicity, but if there's knowledge about this, it's probably on your side of the pond.
There's Canada up to the north, and there's Great Britain.
Certainly we're all very close.
And I would imagine that your government at some level might well know what my government probably knows.
And I guess I've got to ask you, Nick, even though you're in the Ministry of Defense, and I'm sure you've been asked this, do you imagine it to be possibly true that there would be knowledge above your level of everything that,
or at least some of what's going on, that you are not privy to, and you are an honest but useful spokesman for those who really don't want everything known?
I know that people like Stanton Friedman have said, not necessarily towards me, but that ego does get in the way here.
And it is very tempting to say, no, no, I would have known.
I think I would have known, but of course I can't rule out the fact that things would have been going on that I had no knowledge of.
All I can say is that, to the best of my knowledge, those people never sought access to the one thing they would have needed, I would have thought, from me, the raw data coming in, the UFO sightings, the abduction reports, the crop circles, the animal mutilations.
Since I've got Nick Pope here from London, and since he is an official government employee, the Ministry of Defense, of all things, I guess I want to ask one question, then we'll go to the phones.
Nick, here in America, a couple of years ago, for some reason, the Air Force decided that it was going to have a press conference on the subject of Roswell, the famous Roswell case here in New Mexico.
And we were shown pictures of experimental aircraft in balloons and balloon trains and dummies that were dumped out of airplanes and so on and so on.
And we had a Colonel Haynes who was the presenter for all of this.
And he came out and talked about things like time compression.
You know, he talked about the fact that people, why, you know, after a certain amount of time goes by, they begin to forget what really happened and things get added to the original story.
And time, he said, gets compressed.
And that was his answer for what occurred at Roswell.
And I always imagined some cigar-chomping general telling this poor Colonel Haynes, now, Colonel, you're going to have to go out there and you're going to have to tell him about time compression, son.
And I can see the Colonel saying, but, General, time compression, how can I possibly explain away what all these witnesses have said and what we know and has been written about Roswell?
And with the passing of time, people's memories become clouded.
I think that's human nature.
Applies to everything, not just UFOs.
But I don't think you can wave a magic wand and explain the entire Roswell incident in those terms.
And I think they did themselves a disservice by trying to bring in the kind of high-altitude parachute test business with the dummies and things like that.
Well, it certainly was very embarrassing the way that people came back, I think, within a matter of hours, if not hours, days, and said, hey, but those tests with the dummies didn't begin until, what was it, 52, something like that.
So straight away, the whole case had been undermined.
And maybe that's careless, but who knows?
I mean, I've written press briefs myself, and, you know, again, without wanting to criticize, it's not the way I would have done it if I'd have wanted to close a case.
Again, going back to these craft, these very large craft that commercial aircraft have reported to be as big as football fields or bigger, traversing the North Atlantic at incredible speeds.
Does your government have any additional information?
I mean, I get BBC reports of pilot sightings and that kind of thing, and American pilots have seen them, and they call them fast walkers, I believe.
The amazing thing about this was that when I first became aware of these things, through the embassies, we asked the American government, well, what do you know about this?
Okay, but I mean, people in America, for example, people like Ruppelt spoke out, and, you know, he'd been involved and headed up Blue Book for a couple of years.
You know, really, it's quite a good question, Nick.
In other words, do you believe that your government or my government, our government here, are in possession of any craft that they are back-engineering and that there are propulsion systems out there now that we're using of the sort he described?
Again, the truthful answer, because I have no direct knowledge, is I don't know.
I have to say there are some cases which suggest that that might be so.
Certainly, if you look, I guess, back to the Cash Landrum incident in 1980, it appeared that a craft of some sort was being escorted by a number of military helicopters.
I have a case involving a UFO sighting in February 1993 from Los Angeles, actually.
An abductee I'm working with now saw a UFO in broad daylight in Brentwood, which looked as if it was being escorted or chased, we don't know which, by five unmarked helicopters.
If we do have technology, it is extraordinarily difficult to back engineer it.
So I can quite understand that if we did have it, we still don't have that technology.
Let me give you an analogy.
If a stealth fighter had crashed, say, during one of the, I mean, somehow or the other, going back through time, and crashed, you know, on the field of one of the Civil War battles in America, the finest scientific minds in the country would probably not have been able to put it back together again or build one.
That's even figuring they knew what it was.
So it is extraordinarily difficult, even with something simple, to back engineer.
You can't just wave a magic wand and say, ah, that's how it's done.
It doesn't work like that.
So who knows?
But it's interesting, one little snippet of information, I saw that the other day, NASA, or a few months back, I think, NASA actually placed a research contract for an anti-gravity study.
Now, that didn't come from a UFO magazine.
That was in, I think, the scientific journals, either New Scientist or Scientific American.
I live about 65 miles west of Las Vegas, and just over the mountain range from me is Area 51 and Area S4, where on nearly any given night, you can go up there if you wish, and you can watch things that seem to defy gravity flitting about in the sky in ways that normal aircraft don't.
Now, it was some years ago, Nick, and this is an absolutely true story.
My wife and I were on the way home from Las Vegas here in Perump, about a quarter mile from home, maybe a little more.
My wife, who was in the passenger seat, said, what the hell is that?
And she noticed something coming up from behind.
I pulled the car over to the side of the road.
We both got out.
She came around to the driver's side, and we both watched this triangular object that I would estimate to be 150 feet from one point of the triangle to the other.
Only about 150 feet above me, Nick.
And I was in the U.S. Air Force.
I know what aerodynamic flight requires.
This thing was moving at about 30 miles an hour, if that fast.
Obviously, nothing would be...
It passed directly over our head, Nick.
The stars went away.
The moon went away.
It passed.
You could see the solid bottom side of the craft.
We watched it float out across the valley toward Area 51 for, oh, I don't know, four or five minutes with our mouths open.
And it was that close.
I mean, it's like I could have taken a rock and thrown it at the damn thing if I wasn't in shock and I was in shock.
So if that's not anti-gravity, then I don't know what it is.
It's one of the cases in Open Skies Closed Minds, but the witness saw it fire a beam of light down at the fields just beyond the perimeter fence of the base.
He said it moved over.
He said it was about the size, he said it's midway between a C-130 Hercules and a Boeing 747.
So big.
About 150, 100 feet above the ground, traveling very, very slowly with a low frequency humming sound coming out.
And then he said the light retracted back into the craft and the thing moved off from having gone at 20 or 30 miles an hour.
He said in an instant, it was off to the horizon.
And this guy was an Air Force, serving Air Force officer giving me this report.
So he could estimate speeds and heights pretty well.
Well, a question about this incident, after I wrote it in the book, there was a question in our parliament here about that.
In our parliament, hear about that.
And the official response was that the government keeps an open mind on these sorts of incidents but does not believe it to be proof of extraterrestrials.
Well, you know, you can argue yourself around in circles on this.
Yeah, until you actually get one of these things, of course you can't say for sure.
But hey, what I say is when it does things that we can't do, and it didn't show up on radar, and we didn't even manage to get any of our jets in the air, we'd better be worried about this.
Well, for example, here in the U.S., a number of years ago, in Michigan, we had a particularly striking set of sightings over Lake Michigan moving towards Chicago.
And I have a tape of the radar operator and of the 911 dispatcher and all these calls coming in.
And then the weather radar guy saying, oh my God, now there's two, now there's three, now they're moving together, they're going at an impossible speed.
All of this stuff from the radar fellow that was on the line to the 911 operator.
These are very solid reports, and I find it beyond reason to believe that our government would not regard an invasion of its airspace, something we zealously protect here and I'm sure there as well, not to be a matter of national security.
I mean, there was a wave of UFO sightings in New Hampshire in 93, and the local paper ran a front-page story, and in huge letters it said, if you see a UFO over the Piscataca River, do not call 911.
It is not an emergency.
And they were getting so many calls that the system was getting overloaded.
But I agree.
You know, these things are of extreme defense significance.
There are serious defense and national security issues at stake here.
So then you must understand why so many people are skeptical in my country and yours, at least my country, when our government says they are not a matter of national security.
Yeah, I think the truth of the matter is that if there isn't a cover-up, and I know a lot of people will disagree with that, but if there isn't, the simple truth is that the government doesn't know and cannot control this.
And that's one thing governments can't stand, not being in control.
And I was wondering if Mr. Pope would comment about a book that I have heard, not only have I heard about, but I've also have a copy of it, by an Englishman named Leslie Watkins.
The book is called Alternative 3.
Now, Art, I know that I've sent you some information because I think I shared a letter that Mr. Watkins wrote to me when he answered my letter that I wrote to him.
And I was just wondering what he would know about Alternative 3.
And the stuff that was written in this book, it seems so far out and so out in left field.
But as time has progressed on and on, it seems like I see stuff materializing from this book, like the possibility of the ozone layer.
The astronauts were mentioned about what they did or didn't see on the moon.
Yeah, I mean, my perception, and I'm sorry to kind of say this, is that it was probably a hoax but if you want to talk to someone here who knows a bit more about that you'd have to ask someone like Georgina Bruni onto the the show she she's actually someone who's putting together a book on on the Bentwaters incident at the moment that's going to be out next year but alternative three is something she's looked into so I might have to pass the buck there I don't know enough about it to really comment
And yes, for Mr. Pope, I had heard you saying a little bit ago that you had said that you had felt that these aircrafts were possibly threats to national security, whereas Art said that the U.S. government stance on it was that they were not threats to national security.
My question for you is, I mean, just looking at this whole thing and seeing that these beings, quote-unquote beings, if they're this much advanced, if they're this much more advanced than we are, and I'll go so far as to presume that their weaponry is too, that don't you think that if they wanted to take us, they would have already done it?
That's assuming, though, that they're here for a straight kind of Independence Day scenario, you know, a wipeout, a takeover, whatever.
But I often like to speculate that the real reasons, their motivation, and indeed their modus operandi are going to be literally alien.
So there are going to be things that they do and things that they think that we simply can't understand.
And I don't think it's necessarily the case, and this is going to be a controversial idea, I don't think it's necessarily the case that they are as far ahead of us as we think.
And that means that there might be things that we could do.
Now, I'm not suggesting for one moment that we get into some sort of shooting war, that would be silly, but we could make things difficult and we could let it be known that, you know, we are going to take care of our airspace, we're going to police it, and we're going to take care of our people.
And we're not going to be happy with people being taken against their will and subjected to these experiences.
We've got an integrated air defense network with increased radar coverage and things like that.
I think we can track these people better than you might think.
Okay, well, when I took over the job looking at these UFO sightings for the government, there was a file on the Rendlesham Forest incident.
And one of the first things I did in the job is I read this file.
And at the end of it, I just thought, my gosh, what the hell happened there?
It seemed to me that we had handed to us on a plate, you know, pretty much as much proof and convincing evidence as you could want.
And yet, we seemed to let this opportunity, for some reason, slip through our fingers.
On the face of it, we have an incident in December 1980 where a whole string of United States Air Force personnel witnessed not just lights in the sky, but also at one stage a metallic craft.
And, you know, the great thing about this is that it left traces.
And always, when I was researching my own cases, I would love it where we could get this kind of secondary evidence, where you could get burn marks, tree damage, that sort of thing.
And this object, and we know it was an object, had a definite effect on the environment.
There was tree damage right where the guard patrol said that the craft had been.
There were indentations right on the forest floor where this thing had been seen to land.
And best of all, they took radiation readings.
Now, I reopened the investigation into this case.
Of course, it was difficult because it was many years later.
But one thing I did is I took those radiation readings and I gave them to the Defense Radiological Protection Service, an official government organisation in Britain.
And I said, just tell me, I said, is this normal or not?
I mean, no one had looked into these readings.
No one had compared them to what the levels should have been.
I found that incredible.
The answer came back, whatever it was, was 10 times background radiation.
So, again, scientific, empirical evidence that there was a structured craft there, that it left an effect on the environment.
Now, I've spoken to people like Larry Warren and Peter Robbins, of course, and I've spoken also at length to Charles Holt.
I'm convinced that these people are being truthful.
I think in cases they have, you know, they've got different bits of the same story, so I don't necessarily read too much into the fact that some of the accounts differ.
That's what you find in real incidents.
Where I get suspicious is where everyone says exactly the same.
And I just think it is without question the best case in the country.
Now, I'm a great fan of Peter and Larry's book, Left at Eastgate, which I think is excellent.
A British researcher called Georgina Bruni is just putting the finishing touches to what I think will be the definitive book on the Bentwaters incident.
And her book will be published, I think, next year, pretty much late next year on the 20th anniversary of the incident.
So I know that she's tracked down many, many new witnesses, that she's got a number of senior people in the defense and political world to speak out and say what they think and what they know about this case.
So this case is going to run and run.
And I think on the 20th anniversary with Georgina's book, we're going to see some real resurgence of interest.
In a way, I think this case is better than Roswell because, again, Kennell Haynes was right.
Time compression does exist.
It is difficult with a case 50 years old where most of the witnesses are dead.
But Bent Waters, you know, pretty much everyone is still here.
Okay, let's, for one second, before we go back to the phones, let me ask you, in America, we have something called the Brookings Institution, and they did a study on the probable consequences of contact should it occur and how the American people would react.
And it wasn't really good news.
In other words, it concluded the American people would not react well, that a lot of what they believed in would be challenged, and that there would be general chaos if contact actually were to occur.
And I suppose the recommendation was that, if possible, the American people would not be told, or should not be told.
Have there been any similar studies in Great Britain on this subject?
There have been some privately sponsored opinion polls, which tend to suggest, as I think is the case in the States, that belief in an extraterrestrial reality is running pretty high, sometimes over 50%, I think consistently.
I am not so sure, and it's just a gut feeling, that there would be panic in the streets, et cetera, et cetera.
I think in a way the question is so open-ended because it depends on the circumstance of the contact.
One issue that to me seems to have been sidestepped, and this is to me from my official background, much more important, is the potential biological hazard from contact.
So it makes the idea of UFO crashes even more disturbing.
And perhaps the potential biohazard is one possible reason, and this is only my personal speculation, but why governments, if there had been a crash somewhere, would rush to secure the crash site and immediately seal it off.
Not so much to stop the public knowing the truth, but to protect the entire world from a potential hazard which could wipe us all out.
Now, of course, it's difficult to say when children are involved Because, of course, for all sorts of very ordinary medical reasons, children get nosebleeds all the time.
But what I found is that adults who have not had a nosebleed for years and years in the aftermath of, say, UFO sightings or abductions will suddenly get this.
And in a way, this is very traumatic.
I mean, you know, seeing your own blood, even in a nosebleed, can be very distressing.
And I've had abductees.
I have several cases where abductees have been almost more upset by the nosebleed than the actual experience.
It might well be, but I think the more popular theory amongst abduction researchers is that it has to do with either the insertion or removal of an implant.
Now, that's something you should ask Whitley about tomorrow, because I know he knows a lot about that.
Nick Pope is here, and we'll get right back to the phone.
Just a quick little item from the New York Times, yesterday's edition, as a matter of fact, of the New York Times.
Dayline, Washington, Congress says in a new report, the Pentagon defied the law as well as the Constitution by spending, listen now, hundreds of millions of dollars on military projects that lawmakers never approved, including a super-secret Air Force program.
The Pentagon acknowledged that some of the accusations Wednesday night were, they said, honest mistakes which led to its failure to notify Congress about the way it was spending money.
Now, Nick, that's kind of interesting.
That's front page of New York Times, our own government admitting they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars.
And they're sort of saying here that, sorry, we just, it was a mistake, we forgot to notify you.
About three months ago, and let me preface at the outset that I have no recollection of any little green men or being swept away or anything like that.
About three months ago, I started undergoing some psychological changes, a much More relaxed view of things, much less uptight than I've been for most of my 47 years.
That corresponded with a huge divot in my left nostril, as if something that had been there for a long time had been removed.
As it happens, I went to an autolaryngeologist, which is a $3 word for an eye-ear, nose, and throat guy, on Wednesday, and the guy examined me, seemed to be very agitated, gave me some saline solution, told me there was basically nothing wrong with me, but couldn't explain why my nose has been bleeding profusely all day long for three months.
I mean, there are many different things going on, and not all abductees will have implants.
unidentified
I had a reason for asking that question.
Over my lifetime, I've had some odd things that I couldn't explain.
Let me give you one example, and this is going back 25 years.
I used to live in Orange County, in upstate New York, and for any of the listeners in New York State, they'll be familiar with the Walk Hill River.
On one night when I was driving home from my bus stop, I worked in New York City at the time, I was making a hairpin turn around the Waukhill River on a night when it was snowing and icing, and I was going like five miles an hour in first gear for fear of spinning.
The area where I was turning, the local government had stopped putting up the retaining wall so many times because so many cars had gone over the edge.
I'm driving in a little lightweight pinto, and I'm going five miles an hour, and I end up going into a spin anyway.
The car starts, being a new driver at the time, not knowing any better, I slam my brakes on.
So, of course, I begin to spin even faster.
Make a long story short, I'm spinning closer and closer and closer and closer.
I'm about to go over the edge of this stuff.
I screamed no, not in fear, but in anger.
Then all of a sudden, it's as if a movie had stopped shooting, and then the next scene was shot three months later, and it was cut together.
All of a sudden, the car was at a dead stop.
I was so close to the edge that I couldn't get out of the car on that side.
I climbed over the stick shift in the middle, got out the other side to see what had stopped me, and there was nothing.
The thing is, you talk about in all these abduction things, a sense of missing time.
I had a huge sense of missing time.
Not minutes, not hours.
It seemed, it felt to me as if months were missing.
And yet from that point on, I drove home and there was no missing time at all.
When you have two things happen together, when you have three things, when you have perception of missing time, when you have an unexplained incident like that, when you have the nosebleeds, and when you have the transformation in your life, in your outlook, all these things individually, you know, you can make excuses for.
But when all these things happen together, I think it could well be a sign of an abduction.
And I agree, it's worth seeking out someone like John Mack, Bud Hopkins, Dave Jacobs, you know, to look into this.
A routine night, I was working third shift, and I got a call.
It was like 1.30 in the morning.
And I responded.
And I keep a log in my, I used to keep a log in my unit.
The time I got the call, the time I got there, and the time I left.
And it was a routine call.
In fact, I never even got out of my car.
It lasted maybe a minute and a half.
And I left.
And this is like 1.30 in the morning.
My next recollection was about an hour and 50 minutes later when I'd driven through, out of my jurisdiction, our jurisdiction, through another city and just inside a third city.
So after that happened, it's not like anybody was out looking for me, but I do know that four other officers did respond to four of my calls that were on my beat.
And so I drove back and basically was non-functional for like a week.
And the feeling of disorientation as well is something that I've come across before.
I have a case here in England involving missing time of about three and a half hours where somebody, two people in a car at this time, which is quite unusual for these experiences, found themselves one moment they were driving along the freeway, the next moment they were in a city center.
These things happen, and the more people come forward and speak out, particularly people who have had responsible positions in the community, the quicker I think the public at Mirage will see that we are dealing with a real phenomenon.
Are you tempted, sir, to seek somebody, as we've been talking to the other callers like John Mack or Bud Hopkins or somebody or another, to try and get to the bottom of what, you know, fill in the empty spots?
unidentified
Yes, Lord, I am, especially as time goes on.
And I have talked to other people about it, not publicly, but I have talked to other people about it.
You mentioned that they seem to be interested in our sexual nature, our reproduction.
Others have said in our genetic structure, there's a group of people who believe that the grays or whoever they are have a weakened genetic structure and they're trying to strengthen their genetic structure by mixing it with ours.
Do you have any beliefs in this area about what's going on?
I think that all these things could be going on in parallel.
I think it very unlikely that simply one facet of human behavior is going to be of interest to these people.
So I would not rule out a scenario where they are interested in all these things.
And also, and this is something I keep coming back to because it crops up in my caseload, they are very, very interested in human relationships, how we bond with people, how a mother bonds with a child, how we form friendships, how we form sexual relationships.
What he said was that he has determined that it would be possible for a very serious research group, NIDS, here in the U.S., sponsored by Bob Bigelow, who I'm going to have on the air next week for the first time ever on radio.
And Ed Dames felt that one way to attract, or the way he put it, to set bait, would be to put a mother and an infant at a specific location on this ranch.
And that there was something about the bonding, Ed Dames said, between the mother and an infant that would attract them.
Now, NIDS are doing some excellent work, and in many ways, I think, are putting money into something which a lot of people think the government should be doing.
However, I think we have to be very careful with the moral implications of using that.
Now, I'm sure NIDS will, if they do do that ever, they will do it responsibly.
But I think we need to be very careful about offering people as base.
Well, as a matter of fact, in behalf of NIDS, Colonel John Alexander called in during that program and said, you know, there was actually a mother and an infant on the ranch, and they were removed because of perceived danger to them.
They're very interested in it, and one reason may be because they can't do it themselves, or they're not good at it, or they've lost the ability to do it.
It may be our very humanity, what makes us individual, which is the most precious thing in the universe.
Yes, a lot of people are perhaps subconsciously, if they can't remember the details of what happened, nervous that it may happen again.
So that's one explanation.
unidentified
Yeah.
And my other question is, since you are on the inside of government, it seems like the media pretty much controls the public's perception of everything.
And media, I think, on either side of the pond is pretty cold when it comes to these topics or very skeptical.
Whenever they want to talk about anything in this genre, first thing they want to do is bring in somebody to debunk it all.
But when it is time to be all sometime, if you get the chance, sit down and listen to the words of this whole song.
Oh Let me do a little promo coming up on Dreamland this Sunday.
Hilly Rose is going to have the publisher of Magical Blend magazine, who has compiled predictions for the new millennium from many very well-known personalities in the new age metaphysical world.
So note that.
Coast to coast, Monday night, again with Hilly, William J. Olson, who is an attorney, an expert in presidential abuses of power via the executive order.
So that's what's directly ahead.
Next week, on the 27th, I'm going to have Robert Bigelow in his first national radio interview ever.
And that's something you're not going to want to miss.
He funds NIDS and a lot of other very special research, and he has an announcement that I think is going to, I guess the right word would be electrify you.
So you're not going to want to miss that a lot more.
We're going to have Seth Shostak from SETI.
He'll be here next week as well.
And let me see.
What else have I for you?
I know there's one other thing that I'm missing, not thinking about.
Yes, of course.
Dr. David Jacobs, who wrote The Threats.
He'll be here Thursday night, Friday morning next week.
We touched on Dr. Jacobs' work briefly during the program tonight.
Now, let me hit you with a couple of things that are in the news here that are kind of interesting.
Of course, the news is being dominated nationally by the JFK tragedy.
And in fact, there are a lot of questions about the amount of news on this story.
So I will not add to it.
It is a tragedy, and the Kennedy family has had to bear certainly more than their fair share of them.
From Baltimore, the Associated Press, a teenager who had half of her brain removed to stem the spread of deadly neurological disease was released today from Johns Hopkins Children's Center.
I said, released.
Amber Ramirez was transferred to Mount Washington Pediatrics Hospital, where she's going to begin physical and speech therapy to recover all the function she lost when surgeons removed the left half of her brain.
It shows you how little we know about our own brains, that literally half your brain, attempting to make a Rush Limbaugh remark here, but I won't have your brain gone, you could still, as a human being, function and lead a useful life.
That's forcing their husbands, many, for the first time in their lives, to actually cook meals, do laundry, and wash dishes.