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Oct. 18, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

52:39

Edition 415 - Nick Pope

A catch-up with ex-MOD UFO man Nick Pope - now living in the US as an independent investigator of anomalous phenomena...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
	Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain here in London town.
	Not cold, but rain, rain, rain, rain, rain.
	So I think we're sliding into winter now, but enough weather talk.
	It's too depressing.
	Bring back the summer.
	As long as we don't get those 38-degree temperatures that swelted everybody during that time, that would be nice.
	But it's not going to happen yet.
	Hope everything is good with you.
	Thank you very much for all of the emails that are coming in and the new people who are listening to this show and also the people who are sending me their thoughts via my Facebook page, which is the Unexplained with Howard Hughes, the official Facebook page.
	Please go there now and tell your friends all about it.
	As you might be able to hear, I'm still suffering from the back end of the flu that I had.
	Lots of people in the UK seem to be getting mowed down by this thing, and it certainly caught me unawares.
	One morning I wake up, it's the morning of my radio show, I've got a sore throat, but get through the radio show okay.
	The next day, I'm really ill.
	And we talk about missing time on The Unexplained.
	I lost an entire week in bed, but I'm getting my voice is more or less back now, still cutting.
	But I think I'm going to be okay.
	And thank you very much for the good wishes if you sent them through my official Facebook page.
	That was very, very kind of you.
	It held me up and delayed me slightly, but I think we're back on track now.
	Recently, nice to hear from Valerie in Lancashire.
	Thank you very much for your email and good to hear from you, Valerie.
	Tim sent me some really nice, kind comments.
	Thank you, Tim.
	Raph, regular listener in Stains on Thames, not very far from me.
	Raph, good to hear from you.
	Febb and Ben asked me to do a shout out for them a little while ago.
	I did it on the radio show, Febb and Ben, and I really hope that you're both very happy, and I hope that you heard that on the radio show.
	And Tony in Chester, a place where I spent a lot of my formative time as a young person when I first learned to drive a car, little VW Beetle.
	I used to poodle along to, that's a British word, by the way, poodle, poodle along to Chester, which has wonderful Roman walls and artefacts, a wonderful place to go.
	And it's about 45 minutes drive from Liverpool thereabouts on a good day.
	It used to be a really nice day out in Chester.
	So, Tony, your email reminded me very much of Chester, and thank you very much for getting in touch.
	If you want to get in touch with me, you can go to the website designed and created by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
	It's theunexplained.tv.
	And if you'd like to make a donation while you're on the website, as well as sending me an email, of course, with your thoughts and suggestions about the show, then you can do that through the website, theunexplained.tv.
	Just follow the PayPal link there.
	And if you have left a donation for the show recently to help it continue, thank you very much.
	And thank you for all of the nice things that you've been saying.
	Of course, your guidance, thoughts, and suggestions, absolutely vital.
	If you have somebody that you would like to hear on this show, maybe a favorite author or guest that I haven't featured, please let me know.
	And if you know how to contact them, tell me that too.
	Now, the guest on this show is my annual catch-up with Nick Pope, former Ministry of Defense UFO investigator, now living as an independent investigator and commentator on strange and anomalous phenomena living in the United States.
	Roughly once a year, we do a longer piece with Nick just to catch up with him, find out what he's doing.
	So this time we'll be talking not only about UFOs and ATIP and all of that, which we talk about regularly, just in short bursts on my radio show, but also to talk about Bigfoot, to talk about conspiracy theories, including JFK and Diana, and also about his new work of fiction, which is to do with some twin terrorist attacks and the response of the British government to them.
	We'll talk about that too.
	And about his consultancy work for a whole long list.
	I've got the list here of American TV shows and movies of various kinds.
	So Nick Pope coming right up.
	Please keep the emails coming.
	Couldn't do any of it without you.
	And thank you very much for all of your support, especially through my recent flu.
	Okay, let's get to the US now.
	Now, this edition of The Unexplained is going to be slightly shorter for a couple of reasons.
	Number one, Nick has to get to the airport quite soon after he's done this.
	And number two, they're testing the fire alarms in his apartment block.
	So at any point, the fire alarms may be tested.
	And hopefully it's towards the back end of this conversation.
	But having said all of that, past guest and old friend of the unexplained, Nick Pope, thank you very much for coming back on.
	Thank you.
	Good to be back.
	Now, Nick, normally when we speak, and we don't have quite as much time, we tend to talk about the latest piece of UFO news, perhaps the latest thing to come from the To the Stars Academy or whatever it may be.
	But of course, something that the world needs to realize is that Nick Pope, a man I sometimes summarize when you're on my radio show, and I've never known whether you like this as former MOD UFO man, because it's easy initials, you are very much more than that these days.
	You know, I've been reading that not only am I new about your consultancy work for TV shows, but also a published author these days.
	The world is your oyster, it seems.
	Well, I certainly seem to be busy, yes.
	There is a lot going on, and it's not just UFOs, but obviously that's still going to be the bread and butter of what I do.
	And to answer your question, no, I don't mind being called former MOD UFO man.
	I mean, that's the bizarre thing, actually.
	The United States gave their project a name, Project Blue Book, and more recently, ATIP.
	So if the UK had done the same, everyone would know.
	And you could just say Nick ran Project Redbook or whatever the British equivalent would be.
	But we didn't give it a name.
	We just embedded that work in a division which has various titles over the years, Secretariat, Air Staff, Defense Secretariat, Directorate Air Staff.
	And of course, that doesn't mean anything to the public.
	So I just tend to say things like ran the MOD's UFO project, UFO program, UFO desk, MOD UFO man.
	It's all good.
	It does what it says on the tin.
	Well, I'm glad to hear it.
	But of course, in a typically British way, and the Brits being the Brits, all of that opens the door for speculation because It makes it sound like some of the stuff that you did was deeply secret, and I know some of it was classified.
	But also, it opens the door for those people who will email me after they hear you this time, and they email me every time you're on to say, Nick Pope is a disinformation merchant.
	He was employed to do that by the MOD, and he's doing it now.
	Well, I guess I can understand that, and it's partially true.
	I don't think it's any Really?
	Rewind to 1953 and the beginning of the British government's UFO program.
	It's no secret, because the files have now been released, and of course I was involved in that too.
	It's no secret that for years, it was official policy to downplay the true extent of the MOD's interest and involvement in the phenomenon.
	And that meant what I suppose most people would refer to as spin.
	We spun this story for parliament, the media, the public, and we used these dismissive soundbites like no defense significance, almost to minimize all this, to marginalize it, to make it sound like a tiny work strand that wasn't very important.
	But of course, as we now know, over 60,000 pages of UFO documents from that work stream have been declassified and released.
	So it was somewhat bigger.
	So that's where, and of course, when I was there, I had to play my part in that.
	Absolutely.
	I had to write those press briefs, the letters to the public, draft letters for the Secretary of State for Defense to send to MPs who asked about all this, whether it was informally in Parliament or through their constituents writing in.
	And I had to push that party line and say, you know, this is of very limited defense interest.
	And so, yes, I mean, that's why I say it's partially true.
	I mean, I put my hand up to it.
	How could I not?
	The files have now been released and show all this.
	And it was just what we had to do.
	But are you still doing it now?
	I think is the point that some of my emailers would put to me.
	No, no.
	That's where it gets a little far-fetched.
	I mean, I think it comes from people who say, well, once government, always government.
	And you can never really leave all those sorts of sound bites.
	But no, hand on heart, I'm not still secretly working for the government, and no brown envelopes mysteriously being dropped through the mailbox here with my...
	I hear what you say, but I know that's not...
	Now, look, I've thought a lot about the fact that we don't have somebody doing the job that you did for the Ministry of Defense here anymore.
	And UFO reports, they're not collated in the way that they were when you worked there.
	And I wonder if that's partly to do with the way that we react to all of this these days.
	In other words, in your day, you would provide a statement for a member of parliament to perhaps regurgitate in the House of Commons that said, this particular thing is of no defense significance.
	And probably other members of the Commons and MPs generally and members of the media would accept that.
	These days, people are conditioned, because of social media, because we all know much more, not to accept like we did.
	Do you think that's one of the reasons that simply having somebody who did what you did wouldn't be enough these days, even if we had somebody like that?
	Well, I think a few points fall out of that.
	Firstly, I don't think it's entirely ruled out that somebody is still doing that job.
	I mean, I've certainly heard a couple of versions of this from well-placed sources, shall we say.
	One theory is that this work has now effectively been handed over to the US government.
	And I have heard a reasonably credible report to suggest that essentially the US government took over the MOD's work on this.
	The other point, and again, from a different but reliable source, is that, yeah, self-evidently, somebody in the MOD is still looking at this, but outside of any formally constituted UFO program.
	And they are simply looking at it in the margins of things like air safety.
	If a pilot sees something relatively close to the aircraft, if a radar operator tracks something, then self-evidently, no one's going to ignore something like that.
	So I think before we get into your point about acceptance, I don't think we can really dismiss the idea that there is still a program.
	So that's the first point.
	On acceptance, you're right.
	We are in a different era.
	Years ago, everyone was bandying around phrases like, well, the government secretly reads all our emails.
	And everyone was like, oh, that's just conspiracy theory nonsense.
	And then along comes Edward Snowden and the NSA revelations.
	And specifically on UFOs, of course, as you well know, the US government for years said, no, no, we don't have a program.
	And of course, then famously the New York Times broke the story.
	Oh, yes, you do.
	And there it was, but cleverly avoiding using any phrases like UFO, simply calling it advanced aerospace threat identification program, classic, classic way of hiding something.
	So in other words, you're saying that that is an example of something that's happening, that it may well be being investigated now.
	These reports may be being filed and looked at, but they're being looked at from a different angle.
	So first of all, they consider the air safety.
	And as a sort of corollary to all of that, as an aside, there is also consideration of what exactly these things are.
	And we've seen evidence of that with the recent response of the U.S. military, the U.S. Navy to the gun camera footage.
	Yes, yes.
	And I think you may have sneezed there.
	Bless you if you did.
	That actually wasn't me.
	That was the boss.
	Do you want to take a pause and re-art?
	No, that's absolutely fine?
	I think we should, if you don't mind, I think we should leave that in because it shows that we're dealing with human beings here.
	You know, I've just come out of, we're recording this, and I've just come out of a week of the flu, and I've still got the back end of it.
	So sneezing is part of the human condition.
	It's part of the human condition, Nick.
	That's absolutely fine.
	So, you know, the point that I was making is that do we think that the recent surprising, not admission by the U.S. Navy, but certainly acknowledgement by the U.S. Navy that the gun camera footage that we saw is genuine and there may be something that needs to be investigated behind it.
	These are places that we haven't been to before.
	No, we are in absolutely new territory.
	And I just want to take one step back and say a couple of other points that fall out of this.
	I think what we're seeing now is a coming together of some interesting concepts.
	We're seeing, obviously, the rise of what I guess we'd call citizen journalism.
	We're also seeing the rise of activism, which we see.
	I mean, we've always had activists, but it seems that in relation to things like climate change, we see a lot more of it.
	And we see it having more direct influence, perhaps, on the political system than we've seen before.
	So we have citizen journalism, activism, we have 24-7 media coverage, and of course, the rise of social media.
	And all of this, I think, plays into this subject somewhere.
	I'm not necessarily professing to have a complete roadmap, but it's all relevant.
	So we are in new territory.
	And these days we see, you know, in the old days, government would say, we don't have a UFO program.
	And that would be it.
	Journalists would say, okay, thanks very much.
	And that would be the line that would get printed up.
	But now what we're seeing is pushback, pushback from the mainstream media outlets like the New York Times that broke this, the Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, and from citizen journalists, activists, people in the UFO community, often aggressively, proactively using the Freedom of Information Act to push back against these denials and to say, but wait a minute.
	And then they're very good, some of them.
	They track down these Navy spokespeople and with their journalism hat on, engage them in conversations and get far, far more than they would have ever gotten before.
	Every time we talk, we talk around, we dance around the idea that there may be more information coming out, perhaps from the source or around the source that brought us the gun camera footage that made the headlines a couple of Christmases ago, and we've been told that it's likely, it's possible.
	From what you're hearing now as we record this, and I apologise for asking you a question that I've asked you before again, do you think that there is more material going to be coming out fairly soon that will surprise people as those stories surprised people?
	Yes, I think so.
	I don't think anyone's kidding themselves that there are only ever, there have only been three UFO encounters between, for example, the US Navy and this phenomenon.
	We've all seen those three videos, but if anyone thinks that's it, they're kidding themselves.
	Even the US Navy, by their own admission, earlier this year, when they updated the guidance for the fleet to say this is what you should do if you encounter unidentified aerial phenomena, in explaining why they were issuing that guidance,
	which of course they've refused to make public, by the way, but in explaining the reasons behind it, they said it is because of the disturbing upsurge in unauthorized incursions into restricted military airspace.
	And all through this, in a situation where they could kill this story in an instant by saying, look, when we use these sorts of phrases, we're just talking about commercial drones or balloons or something like that.
	But that's not what they say.
	They say, we mean unidentified aerial phenomena, unknown, unidentified.
	We don't know what these things are, and we need to find out.
	So the Navy's own admission is that there are many, many more of these sightings.
	And of course, the jets, they have their gun cameras, they have their forward-looking infrared systems, we have the radar data.
	So there's a whole bunch of information out there that we've not seen.
	We've seen the three videos, a couple of supporting documents, and frankly, that's about it.
	It spawned millions of words, but that's about it.
	So yes, more videos to come.
	Some of the data associated with those videos, some of the most important pieces of the puzzle, of course, that would tell us definitively size of the object, speed of the object, all that has been redacted.
	So that's still to come.
	We know that at least three U.S. congressional committees have been looking into this, calling witnesses, calling for documents.
	That's the Armed Services Committee, the Homeland Security Committee, and the Intelligence Committee.
	That, of course, will have generated a paper trail.
	All this is still to come.
	And that is even without taking into account the fact that if you read the papers over here, maybe the papers in America are similar, but they're certainly like that here.
	Every single day I take a look at the newspaper websites, Daily Express in particular, Daily Star, but all the other papers as well.
	Report on a daily basis now, sightings of strange objects that behave in odd ways that people have seen or think they've seen.
	Reports even off places like Peaceful Guernsey in the Channel Islands very recently.
	Somebody saw something there.
	Reports out of Tucson, reports out of everywhere across the United States.
	Now, either people are so carried away in a UFO frenzy of a kind that we haven't seen since the late 40s, early 50s, or there is an upsurge in things going on in our skies.
	Which do you think it is?
	I think it's both.
	There's no getting away from the fact, and you probably know this better than I do, but sometimes the media can be herd animals.
	So once the Times and the Post and Politico start running this.
	I think everyone else is like, wait a minute, we're missing a trick here.
	So they jump on the bandwagon, so to speak.
	But why I say it's both, there's no smoke without fire.
	And clearly, this is an events-led subject.
	And these stories wouldn't be running if ordinary members of the public up and down the country and all around the world weren't reporting things and increasingly these days, of course, sending in the photos they've taken, the videos they've taken on their cell phones.
	Do people send you videos and images like this?
	They must.
	They do on almost a daily basis.
	And sad to say, of course, now I am no longer at the MOD.
	I don't have access to the intelligence community imagery analysis resources and capabilities.
	So you can't pass them on, but what does your gut tell you about them?
	Well, my gut tells me that it's a mixed bag, as it's always been.
	One or two of them will be fake, not many, actually.
	Most of them will probably be misidentifications of ordinary objects and phenomena, and there will be a small proportion that you genuinely look at and say, what the heck's that?
	And that's where, of course, if I was still in government with access to those resources, I could have brought them to bear on the problem and secured a proper scientific analysis.
	Now, you were at Storm Area 51, very much a phenomenon of 2019, something I never thought that I would see.
	It didn't turn into a storming of the gates, but it did turn into a bit of a festival over a couple of sites.
	You were there.
	The people who were around that and part of it and organizing it have been hinting that there's going to be more like that.
	Now that the dust has settled on it, quite literally, do you believe that there will be more of that?
	That's a really difficult one to call.
	Part of me says, yes.
	I got the impression that I was in at the beginning of something.
	I heard, I think it was the filmmaker Jeremy Corbell describe this as like a burning man for UFOs.
	And he pointed out somewhere along the lines that Burning Man started with eight people on a beach and it evolved.
	So I think there is that.
	And there's certainly the aspiration on the part of people like Jeremy to do something with this, to build on the momentum.
	And when I was there, yeah, I genuinely got the feeling that people were turning up because they wanted to be a part of something.
	This was almost a movement, part protest, part festival, part just everyone coming together, bonded by their common interest in this subject, their common suspicion that the government isn't telling them everything about it.
	On the other hand, and the reason I say maybe not, is it is desperately remote to get to.
	And of course, that's the point about Area 51 in the first place, but it's over two hours' drive from Vegas.
	There's no infrastructure there really to organize something big.
	So you have to bring in RVs and generators and all that.
	The nearest town, or the nearest center of population, Rachel, has a population of approximately 53 people.
	So there's no gas station, there's no grocery store.
	That's why I say there are challenges too.
	So I think it's going to be very interesting to see what happens next year.
	One of the big problems this year is no one knew what would happen.
	First, it was going to be a protest, then there was a festival, then there were two, and then it turned out three rival festivals.
	Now, if there could be one single event and everyone knew where and when, then maybe it would go a little better.
	So it remains to be seen.
	But whatever happens, the fact that a few thousand people did turn up, despite all the warnings, despite the remoteness, that in and of itself says something about current interest in this.
	We talked about the release of information, the release of documents, which we've done in the UK.
	We've now apparently released, with a few small exceptions of things that have been withheld, redacted for security reasons, presumably.
	We've now released all of ours.
	A lot of countries have done likewise.
	As far as you hear, and as far as you know, do you think there are more documents to come or worldwide, have we seen and read most of what is there to be seen and read?
	No, we've seen a lot, but what we've tended to see is the unclassified end of the spectrum.
	So an awful lot of Mr. and Mrs. Smith walking in to say, writing in to say that they've seen a UFO while they were out walking their dog, something like that.
	A few papers relating to an investigation from someone like me, or actually from me, of course.
	And then a letter back giving the usual party line.
	What we haven't really had are the highly classified internal policy deliberations where people in government, the military, the intelligence community sit down and ask themselves, you know, what are we dealing with here?
	What should our response be?
	Now, we've seen some of those.
	Actually, I was surprised.
	Some of the documents that I wrote to the defense intelligence staff and that they wrote back pertaining to our discussions have been published.
	They're a little bit hard to get hold of because those are the files that the National Archives chose not to digitize.
	So you have to actually physically go to the reading room in Kew and pull out the files or ask them to send you photocopies for a price.
	But I'm surprised some of that's out there.
	But there's a lot, particularly in the US, particularly relating to the ATIP program that's not yet been made public.
	So we've made some good progress, but there is still a lot to do.
	And is this part of a process?
	There was somebody a couple of weeks ago in the news, sadly, I haven't got the person's name, but a number of people have said this recently.
	The idea that we are perhaps imminently, certainly very soon, about to discover that we are Not alone in the universe.
	And it's a huge thing to deal with.
	And the question that's been posed, I think it was a former NASA man who said this.
	It was certainly somebody very senior or somebody who had been very important.
	It made the headlines here.
	You might remember the person.
	But the question posed is: what do we do when we have that information?
	And have we prepared the public for reaction to that?
	And are we, as governments, are we confident that the people are going to take it the way that we think they will?
	These are big questions and they seem to be very much on the agenda now, Nick, don't you think?
	Absolutely.
	And you're right.
	There are a number of different people all saying that we may be on the absolute threshold of certainly scientific proof that there is, for example, microbial life on Mars.
	We might be getting to the threshold of where our radio telescopes are good enough to pick up a signal from another civilization.
	That however it comes, whether it's Mars, whether it's Europa, Enceladus, or beyond, that within five years, but maybe a lot sooner than that, we will get an announcement.
	And yeah, I'm not sure we are ready, certainly at governmental level.
	And indeed, so certain was I that we weren't ready that I actually drafted a contingency plan last year for a national newspaper, but it's out there in the system.
	And it's a graduated contingency plan that starts off at the low end with discovery of microbial life in our solar system, evolves upwards through what to do if we detect a signal from another civilization, where of course you get all the questions like, do we reply, who replies, what do we say, and such like.
	And at the high end of the spectrum, some sort of open contact arrival.
	And yeah, we really don't have much more than a few non-legally binding scientific protocols, for example, among the radio astronomers as to what to do if they pick up a signal.
	But none of that's legally binding.
	None of it's at governmental level.
	So, yeah, there is a lot to do.
	And the likes of Seth Szostak, who you know too, have been telling me for years that if the information is out there, it will be put out there to the public.
	It'll get straight out.
	There will be no holding it back.
	And, you know, I believe what he says.
	He says that's the way it's going to work.
	The imponderable in all of this, and we talked about that document you drafted for the newspaper last year.
	But the imponderable is how the public are going to take it, because suddenly all bets are off.
	Everything changes.
	Yes, it depends on where we are on that particular spectrum that I mentioned.
	If we're at the low end of it, I think you might get a degree of, yeah, great.
	So what?
	As the old saying goes, and I think it was Colonel John Alexander who pointed this out.
	You know, we have the announcement and then somebody asks, does any of this mean I don't have to go to work tomorrow?
	And of course, the answer is, no, it doesn't.
	To an extent, life goes on, though.
	Life goes on.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So, and we've seen it before.
	People forget we saw it in 1996 when NASA said we found evidence of fossilized microbial life on Mars.
	And as I've said many times, two things happened.
	President Clinton made an eloquent speech and radio stations played David Bowie's Life on Mars an awful lot, but life went on.
	So if it's at the low end of the spectrum, that's possibly all we'll see.
	But if we get something more than that, like a signal from another civilization to say it's not just microbes or simple animal life, there are other civilizations, communicable civilizations out there.
	That takes us to entirely new territory, as does an arrival at the high end of the spectrum.
	So there we get into all the questions about what would be the effects on politics, religion, science, technology, economics, and that would probably be right across the board.
	When you were there, did the British Ministry of Defence consider any of this?
	And if they did, could you tell me?
	No, not really.
	And it's a mistake because I think these sorts of things, it's the classic, arguably it's the ultimate low probability, high impact scenario.
	It's difficult to think of something which would have a more profound impact than the literal arrival on planet Earth of an extraterrestrial civilization.
	Of course, there are those who say that something along those lines is already here.
	And this is the point at which we start talking about things we haven't talked about before.
	I recently interviewed a man called Ronald Meyer, Ron Meyer, who deals with, as you know, he's researched Bigfoot, as they call it, extensively, and also is very interested in the possible connection between Bigfoot and maybe something not of this earth, or certainly not of this dimension.
	And he mentioned you.
	He asked me to say hello to you.
	Is that something that you've considered the phenomenon that we call Bigfoot?
	If you buy into any of it and you don't believe it's just, you know, people in a hairy suit, Bigfoot sometimes exhibits abilities that are beyond the abilities that we have.
	Abilities of telepathic communication, various other things, the appearance of lights in the sky when Bigfoot appears in various isolated parts of the United States.
	Your name came into the conversation, but I wondered what your take on all of that would be.
	Is it something you've considered?
	Not really.
	And yes, I know Ron and his work, but I have to say, I'm not one of these people who am afraid to fess up when needs be and say that's just not my field of study.
	It's not my area of expertise.
	I haven't looked into it.
	Frankly, I don't really have an opinion.
	Because one of the things that he said, if I'm quoting this rightly from the interview, was that Stan Friedman, the late and much-missed Stanton Friedman, the godfather, the father of modern ufology, was interested in this possible connection.
	So it's something that's fairly new to me in terms of my own readings and research.
	But your name came into that conversation.
	Do you think it's worthy of investigation?
	Well, why not?
	I mean, In one sense, if there are some leads, I think they're always worth following.
	But of course, individuals like myself, there's a limit to what we can do.
	And I just have to say, with something like that, there are people who have been looking at this for decades.
	And I think rather than try and speed learn my way into the subject, it's better that I butt out and leave it to those folks.
	Do men in black exist either side of the Atlantic?
	You know that I've had my own encounter in the UK, so I personally think they do.
	But what do you think?
	Well, I think I've been accused of being one myself.
	And of course, when someone from the government, when an investigator turns up and usually suited and booted, and often in a dark suit and not a light one, I can see how those men in black rumors start.
	And I honestly think that that's at the root of a lot of it.
	But whether there's anything more to it.
	The other thing, without wanting to go too controversial, of course, we've had bogus social workers and bogus police officers and bogus paramedics.
	There is a certain psychological type, shall we say, that enjoys dressing up and playing a part and going out into society and interacting, sometimes with malicious intent, but sometimes just as a sort of low-level mental condition, I guess.
	And it wouldn't surprise me that for fairly obvious reasons, dressing up and pretending to be a government UFO investigator and sort of urging witnesses to stay silent is something that maybe is a factor there.
	Did the MOD ever warn people off, people who saw things and maybe things that may have some kind of peripheral impact on national security?
	Did the MOD have a team of people who did that kind of thing?
	You know that I've had reports from people that I've interviewed that those are the sorts of things that happen, that people turn up on the doorstep.
	No one else will have known about the sighting or the encounter, but the person will say, you've seen something and don't say any more about this.
	Yes, I think, particularly in the days of the Cold War, particularly if there was a suspicion that this might be Soviet activity, an aircraft, reconnaissance, whatever it was, it wouldn't surprise me if people had occasionally said, look, probably best not talk about this to the media.
	But I don't think it went much further than that.
	And I certainly am not aware of any occasions where people have been directly threatened with harm or imprisonment for that sort of thing.
	And, you know, you couldn't, certainly these days, you couldn't get the genie back into the bottle.
	If somebody sees a UFO, they report it.
	The pictures are probably on YouTube and all over Facebook and social media within minutes.
	So you couldn't possibly police it these days.
	Back in the day, maybe a little bit.
	And yet I will never be able to explain who the two men in the black suits and white shirts and dark ties in the black Jaguar outside the old talk sport building in London with a camera on their dashboard following me up the street.
	You know, it's more than a decade ago, Nick, and we've talked about this before, but I will never, I have no idea who they were.
	It didn't look like a joke to me.
	I have to say that one thing about government and, you know, whether we're talking about, I mean, if we were talking about sort of obviously covert surveillance, this would be the last thing you would do because it is so overt, so noticeable.
	But one thing is government folks don't tend to be driving high-end cars like Jaguars.
	So it would have been something a little more low-end if it was.
	But I got the impression that whatever it was, but maybe it's just my own paranoia, was there to warn me off in some way.
	I don't know.
	But I never saw them again.
	So, you know, and I took heed of what I saw.
	But if there was a warning there, I'm not sure quite what I was being warned not to do.
	No, and indeed, sometimes these warnings have the opposite effect because people push back against it, or they think quite rightly that sometimes if there's a threat hanging over you, why not just get that information out?
	And then, you know, it's out there and there's no really no need to do anything else.
	Your website catalogues, and certainly I've discovered for the first time the range of work that you're doing now, now that you're in America.
	Catalogues, the range of things that you do.
	We'll talk about the book that you've written soon, but you also do a lot of consultancy.
	And there's a long list, I won't go through all of it, of movie and TV projects that you've worked on, including The X-Files, The Day of the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, 30th Anniversary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a great series out of the UK from the BBC called Torch Wood, Species 3, and various other ones.
	When these people approach you, what do they want you to do?
	Well, it varies.
	Sometimes it's consultancy.
	It's like, well, look, we're doing a movie or a TV show or a video game about UFOs with the government angle.
	How do you guys do it?
	So that's part of it.
	Sometimes it's more spokesperson work, just going out there and doing an interview that says in the week in which we see the release of the new movie, whatever it is, we talk to a real life government UFO expert and ask how different or similar is truth to fiction.
	So I can do that.
	So it really varies, but I've very much enjoyed this opportunity to get involved in the Hollywood side of things, so to speak.
	And it plays into the fact that I've now written my own sci-fi novels, my own action thriller.
	So life imitates art.
	Art imitates life.
	Well, it sometimes works that way.
	What's the most unusual thing you've ever been asked to do by somebody producing something?
	Oh, it's a great question.
	And unfortunately, because I wasn't expecting it, I don't have a great answer.
	I think some of the video games that I get asked to do are a little outside My comfort zone.
	And I don't play video games, but I know that there's such a devoted core of people that follow them.
	And a couple of times I've been on TV shows which have been based around video games and all the latest releases.
	And of course, if I was going into a TV studio and doing an interview with someone like David Duchovny or Gillian Anderson, I would immediately recognize who they were.
	And that would be fine.
	That's a world I know.
	But to be in the video kind of situation, the next guest might be someone who I never couldn't recognize, haven't heard of, but they could be this huge cult figure because they voice this iconic character on a particular video game.
	And they're absolute superstars in that world.
	And I don't know who they are.
	And to be fair, they probably don't know who I am either.
	So that's kind of a little bit different.
	I had a similar experience myself last year.
	A friend of mine, Cara Noble, who I know listens to these podcasts.
	She used to work for Capital Radio, as indeed did I, and now lives in Los Angeles.
	Cara invited me to her club in London, and we had a lovely lunch together.
	And then a guy walks in and Cara stands up and says, let me introduce you to Kit.
	And we have a nice conversation.
	And I said, what a nice guy.
	You know, we just had a chat about things.
	He was going to somebody's wedding the next day.
	It was really nice.
	And then she said, you do know who that is, don't you?
	I said, well, no, a very nice man, though.
	He's one of the big stars of Game of Thrones.
	I have no idea.
	Now, one of the other things that you do, and it's on your website, is some investigation of, maybe unpicking of, conspiracy theories.
	Number one, how did you get into that?
	And what do you make of the plethora of conspiracy theories that we seem to have in this world now?
	Well, I got into it simply because I've been, I suppose, accused of being a part of it myself.
	The whole accusation that government knows more about this than it's letting on is at the heart of the whole UFO phenomenon these days.
	So I was accused of being part of a conspiracy.
	So that's why I first became interested in it.
	But then, of course, I started looking into Princess Diana, 9-11, Moon Landings, JFK.
	And yeah, it's obviously something that interests me personally.
	Who did it with JFK?
	Lee Harvey Oswald.
	And you know what?
	Literally, no more than 10 days ago, I was in Dealey Plaza.
	And it is very interesting, actually, walking the ground there.
	I'd just spoken at the big Alien Con event in Dallas.
	And I realized that the hotel we were at was literally no more than 10 minutes walk from Dealey Plaza.
	So I headed on down there on the Monday before my flight out.
	And I walked the ground, and I looked at the building from where the shots had come.
	I looked at and took a photo from the so-called grassy knoll and I looked at all that.
	And the couple of things struck me.
	Firstly, it's much smaller than everyone thinks from looking at the photos and the videos.
	It's a very compact area.
	All these sites are much closer together.
	Really?
	So the distance between that window of the Texas Book Depository and the convoy, the motorcade, I always think of that as being a fairly long way.
	It's actually not.
	I'm not very good with distances, but I can tell you it's not a difficult shot.
	And do you honestly believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was able to loose off as many shots as we are told that he did?
	And professional users of rifles found that difficult.
	You're saying that he did that?
	Yeah, there's some dispute about the number of shots fired and etc., etc.
	But the point is, actually, the irony is the shot from the grassy knoll is arguably just as difficult, if not more so, than actually from the building.
	And more so, because what people don't realize about the grassy knoll is if you stand on the grassy knoll, you are so close to the so-called triple overpass.
	And the triple overpass, the point about that is if you look at the contemporary photos, it was lined with railway workers who had been given permission by their supervisor to break away from work and watch the motorcade.
	So had anyone been standing behind the picket fence at the top of the grassy knoll, they would have been yards away from a whole bunch of railway workers.
	And what about the evidence that's emerged in recent years?
	And people like Jim Mars did a lot of research on these things, but the scientific evidence that's come up from some people that suggests the bullet behaved ballistically or the bullets behaved ballistically in ways that they simply couldn't.
	They went back.
	One particular bullet, the magic bullet, went back on itself, giving the appearance that the president was also shot from the front as well as from behind.
	Is there any explanation that convinced you as to how that could happen?
	Well, I watch a lot of true crime shows, and one thing I know is that when a bullet hits a body and particularly when it hits bone, and there are so many variables that sometimes things that might look odd, because people think in very sort of literal straight line terms, like, oh, if I hit someone in the front, it must go out the back.
	And in the real world, it's not like that, particularly if someone's wearing clothing, a bullet's coming from an angle, so many variables.
	So many, many times, things that look a little bit suspicious actually don't.
	And it's the same with all these mass shootings.
	If you look at the mass shooting stories, time after time, you'll hear people talk about there was a second shooter.
	There was a second shooter.
	You almost always hear now people saying, whatever the media is saying, they'll say there were multiple gunmen.
	Yeah.
	And of course there aren't.
	What we're dealing with is people looking at all this from different angles.
	And very often, people just, as they're panicking and running and half glimpsing something out of the corner of their eye, they're seeing the first cops arrive with their guns drawn or a security guard with a weapon out.
	So, I mean, this is the United States.
	There's no shortage of guns here.
	So, all these reports of second shooters, which then play into this narrative that these are so-called crisis actors, and it's all done by the state to take our guns, yada, yada, yada.
	It's all nonsense.
	You know that you're just prompting another flood of emails, Johnny.
	I know.
	I'll pass them on to you.
	What about Princess Diana?
	Now, look, you know, because you were in London then, and so was I, I spent a week on air at Capitol Radio in London breaking the news of the death of Diana.
	What a morning that was.
	I'd just come back from holiday, and somebody told me, turn on CNN, and you need to get into work now.
	So I broke that story in London.
	Then I was on air for that strange week where all of us struggled to take in the death of such a prominent and loved figure.
	And then, of course, someway down the track from there, the conspiracy theory started.
	And I didn't want to entertain any of that because I'd been through that experience.
	And the experience on the basis of the story we were told was hard enough to take in.
	But then the conspiracy theories came.
	What did you think about the Diana case if you investigated, looked into that?
	Yeah, I thought it's an absolute classic in terms of conspiracies, because it shows this kind of false narrative that we convince ourselves of, just because someone famous is at the heart of it.
	So it's the idea that how could somebody take this person away, this person that has immortality about them?
	Yes, exactly.
	How could one of the most famous and iconic people on the planet die in such a ridiculously trivial and mundane way?
	And yet that's the answer.
	Look, if anyone else, if John Smith of 3 Arcacia Avenue got into a car and was being driven at high speed by somebody who had been drinking and he wasn't wearing his seatbelt and there was effectively a chase going on, you know, with the paparazzi and things, that sort of situation.
	And they hit an obstacle and John Smith is killed.
	We wouldn't think twice.
	And John Smith is one of four people in a car.
	And guess what?
	Big surprise, the one person who was wearing their seatbelt survives.
	Would we take any notice apart from the immediate family and friends?
	And of course, it's a tragedy.
	There was always the mystery fiat car, the white fiat.
	I think it was white.
	Yes, they're always, if you look at something close enough, you're always going to find something.
	Okay, your works of fiction, in particular, Blood Brothers, there's a write-up on your website about it.
	It says, in response to twin terror attacks, actually, I wrote that bit, and the claim of responsibility by a hitherto unknown Islamist group, the government responds, the Prime Minister authorizes the creation of a multi-agency team code-named Artemis, led by an experienced MI5 analyst.
	This elite new unit brings together top experts from MI6, GCHQ, and the SAS in a desperate race against time to hunt down the terrorists before they can complete their murderous plan.
	I would say that you cannot write something like that without A, having done a lot of research, and B, without a certain amount of inside knowledge, Nick.
	True on both accounts.
	True on both accounts.
	My last job in the Ministry of Defense was as acting deputy director in the Directorate of Defense Security, and counterterrorism ran at the heart of everything we did.
	So absolutely, my book, Blood Brothers, is about counterterrorism, special forces, intelligence work.
	And yes, I had to get the manuscript officially vetted by the Ministry of Defense.
	And so, yes, it does have some inside knowledge, but it doesn't cross the line.
	I was very careful to keep out anything classified.
	But the premise of the book is that an elite team was put together that coordinates a lot of existing units like the SAS and MI5.
	I think ordinary people like me assume that that kind of thing had already happened.
	Yes, I think it does.
	So Blood Brothers very much plays to things that are already in being.
	And certainly you can look at that.
	And I think a lot of people, particularly people in the system, will know that.
	And indeed, there's a note in the acknowledgements really dedicating the book to those people who do in real life what the Artemis team does in the fictional universe of Blood Brothers.
	Do the good guys win?
	No spoilers.
	No spoilers.
	Now, listen, I know that you're very busy and you've got to go soon, and somebody's been testing the fire alarm in your building as well, just to add to the mix.
	But just quickly, as we come to the end of 2019, what's in your diary?
	More television work, more public appearances.
	There goes the fire alarm.
	Yeah, it's either that or it's the men in black.
	We're crossing a few red lines here.
	I wouldn't joke about it.
	No, obviously, as this story of the Pentagon's ATIP program and the U.S. Navy encounters, as this continues to unravel, I'm doing more and more mainstream media work here to commentate on it.
	So, yeah, interesting times.
	As ever, Nick, that's quite often the way that we end these conversations.
	We'll talk again about the routine run of news or maybe the not so routine run of news, but in the meantime, have a good day in the US.
	Yeah, thank you very much.
	And I apologize for the fire alarm test, but I guess that shows it's all real-world stuff and not done in a studio.
	To prove it, just to end it, there goes the fire alarm.
	Take care, Nick.
	We'll talk again.
	Okay, thank you.
	Nick Pope, he has, of course, his own website.
	Check him out and is involved, as you heard, in many, many projects.
	Your thoughts on This edition of The Unexplained and your thoughts on future guests and the way that we do things, always welcome.
	Go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
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	It's very interactive.
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	So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in rainy London town, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
	Above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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