All Episodes
Previous Next
June 27, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
54:21
Edition 466 - Nick Pope
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Still Howard Hughes and this is still the Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your contacts.
I'm going to mention a couple of people in just a moment.
If you sent me an email recently, thank you for it.
And if you've made a donation to the online show, then thank you very much for that.
The website is theunexplained.tv.
That's the way to contact me.
It was designed by Adam.
And thank you, Adam, for your continuing hard work on this show.
And thank you to Haley for booking my guests for me.
The guest on this edition, we're going to have a long conversation with Nick Pope, former MOD UFO man.
This was on my radio show recently, so it comes from there.
But like everything that I do at the moment, it's being prepared at my home.
So, you know, it's the whole thing about lockdown, it continues.
And as I speak these words, it is actually like 34 degrees Celsius into the 90s Fahrenheit.
So it's pretty hot and sticky stuff still here in the United Kingdom.
Who knows what the weather will do next?
But I know that some of you do not like me as a Brit, constantly harping on about the weather.
So that is all I will say about it, apart from the fact that it's damned hot here right now.
So Nick Pope coming up.
Thank you very much for all of your emails, like I say.
Thank you to James in Houston, Texas.
James has been telling me how that he's listening to the show while he builds a Ford truck from the ground up.
You know, I love engineering and I love vehicles, but I'm, you know, practically useless when it comes to them.
And to think that somebody has the skill to do that is just amazing.
And thank you for listening to my shows while you do that, James.
Thank you.
From Calla in Winnipeg, Canada, thank you very much for your communication and for the story that you told me, Calla, in Winnipeg.
And Carolyn, thank you very much for sending me a video that we think is a fake ultimately, but a very well-produced fake, if indeed it is.
It is of a mermaid appearing close to the ocean floor.
You know, these things may still exist, but we need to get more firmly documented proof than perhaps on that video.
But it was nice to hear from you, Carolyn, and nice to hear from you if you've emailed over the last seven days or so.
I've gotten more emails now than I've ever had at the Unexplained.
It's always good to hear what you think, get your thoughts and guest suggestions and, you know, reflections on how you're dealing with continuing lockdown, which, you know, as we say, continues to be a fact for all of us, or many, many of us.
If you're listening in New Zealand or Australia, that's that, you know, disregard that statement because I know things are a lot easier for you there.
Okay, let's get to the United States now to another hot place.
And Nick Pope, former MOD UFO man, now independent investigator.
Nick Pope, thank you very much indeed for listening to all of that.
How are you?
I'm good, thank you.
And I'm speaking to you from Tucson in the great state of Arizona.
And it's pretty hot here, too.
In Fahrenheit, I guess it's been 100 plus for the last few days.
But you cope with it.
I mean, we're not going to talk about the weather too much, but you cope with it much better there in the United States than we ever would.
Well, I guess I've become acclimatized to it now.
I've been here since January of 2012, so I'm getting used to it, yes.
Or as they say in America, acclimated.
Love the way they say that.
Okay.
Now, I said at the beginning of this that you were with the Ministry of Defense, and I think it's just a good idea because there will be new people hearing this either online on the replay or they'll be hearing it on Sunday night into Monday morning.
Just talk to me about what your role with the Ministry of Defense in London used to be.
Sure thing.
Well, I worked for the MOD for 21 years, and I had about seven or eight different postings during that time.
But I'm best known for a job I did in the early 90s, and my brief was to research and investigate the UFO phenomenon to determine whether there was anything in any of these reports that was a potential threat, was of any defense significance, or any more general scientific interest.
And we got about two or 300 reports each year.
I had to investigate them, but I had to do anything else related to the subject, whether it was setting the policy, briefing defense ministers, drafting responses when this issue was raised in parliament, as it was from time to time, and dealing with the media inquiries.
I would have to be drawing, I was the one who drafted the material for the press office to use to bat away, and I use that phrase deliberately, inquiries from the media.
Yeah, right.
Now, that is interesting because I remember when you were doing that job, and I'm sure that I approached you a number of times about stories that appeared in the tabloid papers and other places that had piqued the interest of the media.
And sometimes I have to say, I got the impression that your raison d'être, your reason for having that job, was to knock these stories down.
Is that how you saw yourself?
Yes and no.
I mean, in terms of the investigations, which at the time, of course, weren't made public, or not till 30 years afterwards.
Things have changed now with the Freedom of Information Act.
But with the sightings, I had to play a very even-handed role and be absolutely data-led in my approach.
But absolutely, you're right, with the media responses and with the public and parliamentary work too, very much my job was to, I suppose, downplay the true extent of our interest and involvement in this, to try and kill media stories if possible.
And if not, to try and spin them so that we would just downplay the whole significance of the subject.
We would say dismissive things like, well, we glance briefly at these reports to see if there's evidence of a threat, but we've not seen anything overtly hostile.
So, yeah, it's just one of those little topics that we file away somewhere.
Now, we know that right up to this day, the media gets extremely excited because it fills column inches and it gets people interested.
You know, sometimes the media get overexcited about stories and they should be knocked down by somebody.
You know, they're getting too enthusiastic.
But it's interesting to hear you say that part of your job Was to bat some of these stories away and give these people a reality check.
You know, because the reason I say that is that whenever I have you on, you know that I get 85% of the email is great that you got Nick Pope on again.
Please ask him this.
And 15% says, Nick Pope, he was an apologist and he was a denier and he was, you know, a cover-up merchant back in his days with the LOD.
And no change now.
Yes.
And if you search on the internet for phrases like Nick Pope still secretly working for the government, you'll find an awful lot of those conspiracy theories.
Not much I can do about them.
You know, no one's going to, if people buy into that, they're not going to believe my denial.
But, you know, we are where we are.
And I would say rationally, looking at this rationally, if you were an apologist and a denier, you wouldn't have gone to America and continued some of that work, I wouldn't have said.
But then what do I know about anything, Nick?
Well, my reasons for going to the United States have nothing to do with the UFO subject.
My wife's American, but there's no getting away from the fact that obviously I have picked up a lot of work by virtue of being fairly close to Hollywood, of course, and doing consultancy spokesperson work for various movies, TV shows, computer games that have a UFO or alien theme, doing a lot of that sort of thing, sure.
But I mean, going back to your other point about batting away these stories, and yeah, I mean, eight times out of ten, it is justified because some of the stories are just crazy.
I mean, most of the sightings turn out to be misidentifications or hoaxes.
A lot of the films that we see on YouTube and elsewhere are just done in Photoshop or wherever.
But some of these stories, and we've discussed a lot of them over the last few years, some of the stories are real.
And when we get into talking about the United States Navy UFO encounters, where they chased these objects and filmed them, and where the radar operators simultaneously tracked them, that's all real, as is the associated congressional interest.
So, yeah, I do feel a pang of guilt that in one sense, it was throwing out the baby with the bathwater, because in downplaying this subject, I did downplay, too, some really extraordinary material, along with some of the crazy stuff.
And that to me sounds like a note of regret.
Of all of the things that you downplayed, because that was your job, is there anything in particular you feel regretful about downplaying?
No, I don't think so.
I think it's just the whole thing holistically.
I think, as I say, the phrase throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I think the regret I have is that in doing that job to downplay the significance of this, in parallel with downplaying some of the misidentifications and hoaxes, I probably downplayed the phenomenon in its entirety.
Whereas we now know, particularly from what's going on in the US, there is a very real defense and national security issue here.
I knew that all along.
And of course, things were going on behind closed doors at the Ministry of Defense, which are only now coming out.
But I mean, of course, at the time, none of this had been declassified.
Well, we seem to be reaching peak UFO, certainly in the United States at the moment.
I don't think it's quite as much in the UK.
We seem to pick these stories up a few days later, and sometimes the versions of them that we get reported in the British media are a little diluted, perhaps.
Not always, and sometimes the stories feature you, and that gives it a bit of topspin.
But the big thing that is interesting America at the moment, maybe not so much Britain, because we've got other things, but you've got other things to think about too.
Fox News about 10 hours ago reported this.
The Pentagon should release a public report on UFOs, argues the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, in addition to requiring a public report, the committee plans to impose new rules on how the Department of Defense, the DOD, shares information about UFOs.
Now, those two sentences actually encapsulate something pretty damn huge, don't they?
Yes, this is immense news.
And it is sometimes slightly difficult to convey, certainly to maybe a UK audience, just how impactful something like this is.
But essentially, in the United States, we have the Congress.
So think of Congress as being rather like Parliament.
And Congress is split into the Senate and the House of Representatives, just often abbreviated to just the House.
And so you can think of that almost.
I mean, it's not really the same, but the nearest analogy is to think of it as Parliament split between the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
So basically, what's happened is that the Senate Intelligence Committee in the Intelligence Authorization Bill for fiscal year 2021 has basically set down a whole load of requirements and requests that it wants from the U.S. intelligence community.
And a lot of it relates to things like the insider threat or Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc.
And on pages 11 and 12 of this document, there is a whole section on UFOs.
And essentially they say, we are not satisfied with the current situation, way in which this has been handled.
There's very poor information sharing between agencies, let alone with the public.
We, the committee, therefore direct that the Director of National Intelligence, in conjunction with the Secretary of State for Defense and other agency heads as appropriate, for example the FBI, produce a report within 180 days of this being enacted.
And they want To know a whole load of things about UFOs, what's going on, essentially, and they want processes set in place for proper investigation, regular reports, one single official in whatever agency is deemed most appropriate being put up as the focal point for all this.
And I mean, this is the equivalent is, imagine if, I don't know, the House of Commons Intelligence Committee had done a whole load of things about counterterrorism and then had said, and we absolutely think this UFO issue is really important and we want a full report on this from, say, head of MI5 or MI6.
It is that astonishing.
But a number of things, of course, as we know, are going on in the world as well.
COVID-19, the ongoing threat of terrorism, and you're in an election year in the United States.
So it's going to seem astonishing to some observers that this issue is playing like it is now in the U.S. A lot of people are going to be saying, I wonder why they're doing this now.
Absolutely.
And there is a school of thought that says it's the old adage, is this a good day to bury bad news?
With the world looking the other way, whether it's COVID-19 or the election, is this a good time to get out this UFO issue?
I don't know how it's going to play out along party lines.
We can get into discussing perhaps presidential statements on this.
So far, it's not necessarily panning out as a Republican versus Democrat issue.
But in the U.S., we have this phrase called an October surprise.
And the U.S. presidential election is always in November.
So an October surprise refers to some big thing, a story that suddenly breaks or comes from left field that maybe throws everything on its head and turns the result of an election.
And I've mischievously speculated that in one way, of course, aliens would be the ultimate October surprise.
Yeah.
And if you look at the way things are transpiring here on Earth, not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, you know, there's a lot of tension.
There's a lot of stress at the moment.
We seem to be reaching a tipping point in an awful lot of ways.
And what would upstage the tipping point in a lot of social issues that are beginning to become extremely problematic at the moment and, you know, a lot of tension, a lot of aggression that is being displayed?
Well, of course, if there was some kind of huge announcement that actually, guys, we're not alone and or we suspect we're not alone, that would be a game changer.
And it would also, I suspect, for reasons that I can't quite work out, but I just know it, it would materially affect the U.S. presidential election, you know, one way or the other.
Well, I think it would.
Now, obviously, there are a couple of provisos here, which are fairly important.
Firstly, the fact that this requirement to produce this report went into the Intelligence Authorization Act does not mean that this is going to come to pass.
I mean, this still has to be debated.
And obviously, parts of what's in this act could be stripped out as part of the sort of political horse trading.
That's going to be a hell of a debate, Nick.
It would be, but it's probably going to be a debate that I don't know how much of it would go on in open session or how much would go on behind closed doors.
So it's not a certainty that this requirement will go forward.
And even if it does go forward, of course, and this is something I can speak to from direct personal experience, it's perfectly possible to produce what will look like a very detailed report, which will actually say very little.
All the usual platitudes.
And I know because I've drafted this sort of thing myself.
You start off by saying we take, of course, we take incursions into our national airspace very seriously.
We defend the territorial integrity of our UK air defense region.
Obviously, this is going to be a US document.
All reports are taken seriously, investigated thoroughly.
But then you go on to trot out these sorts of phrases that I've been responsible for in the UK.
However, in the absence of any overt hostility, we remain convinced that this phenomenon, while unexplained, is of no defense significance.
And then you, as I say, you bat it away.
So question number one is, is this requirement going to get enacted in the first place?
And question number two is, if it does, is it really going to be gripped in the way that the Senate Intelligence Committee want it to be gripped?
Or is it going to just generate the same sorts of fairly boilerplate responses that Pentagon public affairs officers are coming up with now that people get in response to Freedom of Information Act requests?
Right.
Okay, we'll pick that up in just a moment because there's more to talk about, plus a lot of other ufological topics and some of your questions too.
We're talking with Nick Pope, former UFO man for the MOD, now independent investigator based in the United States.
We are living, as we often say when we speak together in interesting times.
Back to Nick Pope in the United States.
And Nick, these developments over the last week or so, as we say, are quite astonishing.
There was another element to this, another spur of it.
And I quote from Fox News here.
Now the Senate committee wants to regulate the Pentagon's tracking effort according to the committee's Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021.
Now that's interesting, isn't it?
Because they're saying that not only do we want a report, but we also want to do our tracking of these phenomena in a different way.
Yes, I think the concern from the Intelligence Committee is that things are a little bit piecemeal at the moment.
And those infamous three videos of the U.S. Navy jets chasing UFOs are what seem to have galvanized them here.
And you may well recall, and I think we spoke about this, but last year, a number of senators went on the record as saying that they had received classified briefings about this.
And one of those senators was Mark Warner, who is vice chair of this Senate Intelligence Committee.
Marco Rubio is the chair.
So obviously, I think, and I was quoted in one of these Fox News reports on this, I said, my take is that the senators that received this classified briefing, they've been a little bit rattled by this, somewhat disturbed, obviously, by what they heard, and disturbed enough that they are not content anymore to say, okay, yeah, I'll just note that.
That's interesting.
No, they want this gripped.
They want a process set up.
And I think, as I say, there is a concern that at the moment the Navy's been doing their thing.
We're not quite sure what the Air Force is doing, which is interesting in and of itself.
Every now and then we have other stories like these mysterious drone swarms that were seen over a number of states, Kansas, Colorado.
And there were reports of the Federal Aviation Administration and even the FBI being asked to investigate this sort of thing.
And the Senate Intelligence Committee kind of want all of this, all the threads drawn together.
And that is interesting in itself.
And I quote from this Fox News report again.
The committee understands that the relevant intelligence may be sensitive.
Nevertheless, the committee finds that the information sharing and coordination across the intelligence community has been inconsistent.
It is extraordinary that, I mean, it's not dirty laundry, but it's astonishing that this is being discussed in public about in this way about this issue.
I've never quite heard that sort of discussion in the public domain before.
No, and the funny thing is, of course, that for people who are skeptical about this subject, when they hear people in the UFO community say, oh, you know, government's probably got information about this that it's not sharing.
There's something going on.
We can't quite get to it.
I want them to be more forthcoming.
Skeptics kind of dismiss that sort of talk as crazy conspiracy talk.
But yet, if you review the phrases that you've just read from the Senate Intelligence Committee's appropriation, Intelligence Authorization Act, pardon me, it's virtually saying the same thing.
But it's just in the very much more diplomatic language of government.
But essentially, the Intelligence Committee is saying there's something going on.
We can't get to the bottom of it.
We want processes put in place so that we can get a proper report on this.
And if you were to look at it a slightly different way, slightly obliquely from there, you might say the people who've said we need to do something about this, the people on that committee, maybe they are aware that something might be coming down the track.
You know, their interest may have been piqued by the Nimitz affair, etc.
They may be aware that something is coming down the track.
They've had these secret briefings and they don't want it to be said, should something come out, you knew about this.
I think that's absolutely spot on.
I think, you know, I don't want to make it sound negative, but yes, I think there is a certain amount of covering of rear ends that if something big does happen, people will look back, for example, at the Intelligence Committee Vice Chair, Mark Warner, and say, wait, you told us in, what was it, May, June last year that you'd been briefed on this.
What did you do?
And now it enables people who've received this classified briefing to say, well, we did do something.
We demanded that the U.S. intelligence community, which is a complex and multifaceted beast, but we told the intelligence community and the military that we wanted them to grip this and produce a proper report on what's going on.
So yes, I think there is a degree of, you know, they were told something, it disturbed them.
And A, for the right reasons, they want something done.
But B, to cover themselves, they want something done too.
But lest we get carried away with ourselves, one thought that I had as I plowed through, and you kindly sent me a link to the report, and you also sent me a couple of other links, and I saw that piece on Fox News today.
I had this feeling that deflated me somewhat.
And the feeling was we've been here before, not in any time that perhaps was in our lifetime, but in the 1950s when there was the great UFO flap.
It was post-Roswell.
We didn't know that then.
But there was a lot of interest in UFOs and there was a lot of requirement for investigation and enter people like Jay Allen Hynek and people like that.
So are we just actually seeing history repeating itself?
Yes and no.
I don't think we must regard a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee as being a sort of absolutely, well, that'll fix everything.
And neither if this evolves into more formal congressional hearings, whether they're public or private.
And neither does that necessarily achieve that.
As you say, we've been here before.
There have been congressional hearings into UFOs before.
What I think has changed is society.
I think back in the 50s and the 60s, there was much more trust of government.
And when they gripped this issue and said, okay, we've had a look at the UFO sightings, but it's all just swamp gas.
I think the Congress and the media, even the public, to a large extent, were maybe more inclined to go along with that and say, okay.
But I think Now we live in such a sort of challenging environment in terms of pushing back against the official narrative, whether it's on UFOs, whether it's on coronavirus, whatever it's on.
I think we're in this 24-7 media society.
We are in this era of citizen journalists and bloggers and Freedom of Information Act.
And I think it is a fundamentally different landscape.
So yes, there are dangers that we simply repeat what has gone before.
But I think it's a new environment and we are perhaps going to make more headway.
And in case my listener thought that we weren't in a new environment and it was history repeating itself, let's just bear in mind some of the pronouncements of the United States President Donald J. Trump, and in particular something that made the press last week.
And I've got a recording here from NBC.
It's just a very quick recording here.
But the president was asked about Roswell.
Now, he was speaking to his son.
And this is an astonishing piece of sound, I think you will find.
I played it on the show last week.
But in case you didn't hear it, have a listen to this.
Before you leave office, will you let us know if there's aliens?
Because this is the only thing I really want to know.
I want to know what's going on.
Would you ever open up Roswell and let us know what's really going on there?
So many people ask me that question.
It sounds almost ridiculous, but it's actually the real question I want to know.
It sounds like an acute question, but it's actually...
I won't talk to you about what I know about it, but it's very interesting.
But Roswell's a very interesting place with a lot of people that would like to know what's going on.
So you're saying you may declassify, you'll take it?
Well, I'll have to think about that one, right?
I'll have to think about it.
All right.
Okay.
I'm not sure what to make of that.
I've never quite heard anything like that.
We know that the president likes to be a little more forthcoming on some things.
But there he says, well, there's an awful lot going on at Roswell, and it's very interesting.
And sort of, and wouldn't you like to know?
What did you make of that, Nick?
I think there's two schools of thought.
I mean, firstly, I have to say, a lot of people have said he seemed to be somewhat blurring the lines between maybe Roswell and Area 51, particularly with reference to millions of people want to go there and see what's going on.
I thought that too, yeah.
But I mean, there's no getting away from the fact that normally when sitting presidents are asked about this, they bat the whole thing away with a laugh and a smile and a jocular reference to sci-fi movies.
But here, it's like, well, I'm not going to discuss everything that I know about this.
And when pushed at the end, are you going to declassify any of this?
It's like, well, I'll think about it.
So in one sense, it's a very straight response to what normally gets a very light-hearted reply.
And that's interesting.
And it's not the first time that President Trump has been asked about this.
He's been asked about this by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and he's been asked about this also on ABC News.
And the ABC News interview was very interesting because he got into a big discussion about this, and he said, yeah, there does seem to be something a little bit different about this.
You know, he basically was talking about these Navy sightings and he's like, well, yeah, there does seem to be something a bit different this time around and we're watching.
Well, it's kind of, you know, wouldn't you like to know?
Well, I think we just, we have to park that there because there's no more we can say about that.
But it would be interesting to know if the president can back that up in this election year with a little bit more information.
And, you know, maybe he might be the president who is the president of revealing.
But then we said that about a number of presidents in the past, didn't we?
Yes.
I think it goes back to the point about this would be the ultimate October surprise.
Now, of course, the question is, is the US government sitting on some big secret that it can reveal?
Or is it simply that even the US government doesn't know?
These things are in our skies.
We chase them in jets, track them on radar, but we don't know.
And if that's the situation, of course, you can't disclose it because there's nothing to disclose or not in the terms of a sort of spaceship in a hangar.
But, you know, President putting himself front and center in the story, and that is something that he is wont to do, I think.
Now, we're going to do listener questions in the next segment, Nick, but I want to highlight something that Rob, one of my listeners, asked me to ask you about in this segment.
And I had to look this up.
I have to say, I didn't know very much at all about this.
I just knew it as a name.
The quotes Wilson leak or leaks.
And now, this is somebody militarily connected, isn't it?
And when I looked it up, I got a summary of the leak or leaks is a verified document outlining everything from secret programs surrounding unidentified craft, privatized black budget programs, reverse engineered alien technology, and of course, you know, technology.
In the words of the notes, not made by any man, not made by human hands.
I think there's a T missing on that.
It's technology not made by human hands.
What is this?
Okay, to distill a very complicated story down to something hopefully a bit more manageable, this is in a nutshell the situation.
A few years ago, Edgar Mitchell, sixth man to walk on the moon, became very interested in UFOs and fell in with a number of people in the UFO community.
And they used, and I don't mean this in a cynical way, he was a willing participant, but obviously Edgar Mitchell was an all-American hero.
And, you know, if Edgar Mitchell wants a meeting with you, whoever you are in government, you're probably going to say, yes, great.
I mean, who wouldn't want to meet the sixth man To walk on the moon.
Well, it's a chance to meet him, isn't it?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And I met him.
I mean, he was a great guy, really, really great guy.
And one of the people that they met with was Admiral Wilson.
And Wilson was a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense.
And of course, we now know it's the agency that issued the contractual solicitation and originally was the parent agency for the mysterious ATIP program, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
So in 2002, there was this meeting where a number of people got together with Admiral Wilson, facilitated by Edgar Mitchell.
And one of the people was a scientist called Eric Davis.
And Eric Davis is one of the people who wrote a number of the scientific and technical papers that were produced under the ATIP contract.
And Davis allegedly wrote up notes of this meeting.
And the notes say, you know, essentially everything you've heard about UFOs is true.
Roswell was real.
There was a crash.
It's alien.
The US government got it.
They're trying to figure out how it flies, trying to back engineer it.
All the work is classified above top secret, and it's been taken outside congressional scrutiny by putting it into the hands of defense contractors.
Right.
Okay, now this would have been fascinating.
Okay, this would have been amazing.
And we'd have heard more about this if it had come from Wilson himself.
But it didn't.
It didn't.
It's been leaked.
Apparently, it came from the estate of Edgar Mitchell, who died a few years ago.
Eric Davis was asked to comment on this and he said no comment.
You know, fair enough.
He has pointed out that there are severe penalties for discussing classified information.
Now, some people, skeptics, might say that's just a little bit of a tease.
Others might say, no, it's a genuine concern.
And so we don't even know for sure.
He hasn't even confirmed that these are his notes of this meeting.
Though that is the main theory out there.
Right.
So once again.
Oh, sorry, you were saying.
Yeah, the important recent bit of this news is that a local journalist in the US called Billy Cox managed to get to Admiral Wilson and say, come on, what about this?
And Admiral Wilson, instead of, as you might suspect, sort of saying, I've got no comment on this or neither confirm nor deny, he basically said, it's complete fiction.
And what's interesting about this is that for the last couple of weeks, there have been rumors that possibly the New York Times, but certainly one or other really top draw mainstream media outlets have been looking to do a story on this.
And maybe Wilson's flat outright denial has killed the story.
Now, of course, the UFO community say, well, he would say that, wouldn't he?
I mean, this is something which, I mean, how could you kind of confirm this or even in a sense, no comment it without giving credence to, as I say, almost everything you thought was crazy about this subject turns out to be true.
Boy, this story, yeah, it's a minefield.
It's an absolute minefield.
But research is still going on.
People are kind of trying to get to the bottom of it.
There may still be a big story about to break on this.
Or as I say, Wilson's denial of it may have killed it.
We don't know.
I don't know.
It makes me think to flat deny it like that is interesting.
Very, very.
And if I was a journalist on the story, I'd keep digging.
But what do I know about anything?
I mentioned a question from Rob.
There is another one from him.
And if we can just deal with this very quickly.
Rob wants to know what your thoughts on the To the Stars Academy are, Tom DeLong's outfit.
What do you make of it?
What do you think it's achieving?
Well, Tom DeLong has undoubtedly gathered around him a fine group of minds.
People like Christopher Mellon, of course, of former intelligence insider in US government.
Lou Elizondo, career intelligence officer who's been involved with ATIP and the UFO issue more generally, Jim Samivan from an aerospace background, a number of other distinguished people.
I think the way that I would characterize the To the Stars Academy is that it's a continuation of efforts that were originally going on inside government.
And I think people like Chris Mellon and Lou Elizondo have made it quite clear that when they were in government trying to take this issue forward, they hit some roadblocks.
Well, now they're trying to pursue that through this private interest group.
And good luck to them.
And just very quickly, this exotic material that it was reported they had, where have they got to with that?
Well, they did sign what's called a CRADA, which is basically a sort of collaborative research agreement with the U.S. Army on this.
So, you know, again, to the skeptics who say, oh, this is all just pie in the sky.
Well, if that were true, I don't think we would have seen the U.S. Army expressing interest in these exotic materials and obviously any potential military applications that they might have.
It's not necessarily the way that the sort of more spiritual New Age faction in the UFO community want to go, but it is what it is.
How intriguing, like so many of these things are.
Steve asks, do you think disclosure has already happened?
In other words, with all of the things that have dripped into our consciousness through popular culture and various other things, do you think actually we're pretty much there already?
In a sense, yes.
And it goes back to the point, if we do have a spaceship in a hangar hidden away somewhere, well, I guess we're not quite there, but maybe that will be the ultimate October surprise.
And you can say, my fellow Americans, people of the world, we are not alone.
But if we don't have a spaceship in a hangar, then yes, in a sense, we've pretty much had disclosure of sorts.
I mean, we have had the U.S. military say that, yes, these videos of Navy jets chasing UFOs are genuine, and they remain unexplained.
We've had the Senate Intelligence Committee obviously convinced enough that it says, yeah, we just need to draw all this information together and see what we have and what we think.
So, yeah, in a sense, maybe that is a sort of disclosure.
Israel asks, as far as you know, and this is directed straight at you, as far as you know, and without saying anything that you're not able to because of the non-disclosure agreements or whatever that you're bound by with the MOD, do you know of any recent, quotes, real UFO stroke alien contact with humans?
Well, that's a difficult question.
I think the short answer is no.
The slightly longer answer is, I mean, there obviously continue to be these incursions into restricted military airspace, certainly in the United States, probably in other countries too.
Whether we are dealing with extraterrestrial visitation or not, I don't know, of course.
Somewhere in the US government, even if their official position is we don't know, there will be a best current assessment.
And if that best current assessment is extraterrestrial, then so be it.
But of course, it might be Russia, it might be China, it might be our own technology, but something so highly classified and deeply compartmentalized that it's bound up in one of these impenetrable black projects that you just can't get access to, even within government.
It's the classic left-hand, right-hand.
But I no longer hold a security clearance, or I don't think I do.
I left you.
Well, you know, I say that because some of these ones, you have to actually sign off them as well as sign on them.
And I can't absolutely guarantee that I signed off everything on the last day.
But, you know, that's almost a bureaucratic administrative point.
I have not been briefed on anything that I think would fall into the absolute yes category to Israel's question.
Okay, so the answer is no, as far as we know.
No, as far as we know.
But again, picking up on just very briefly something that you mentioned earlier, yes, although the British government's UFO program was formally terminated at the end of 2009, I have it on some very good authoritative inside sources that, of course, this issue is still being looked at somewhere in the MOD, as you would fully expect.
You would.
You would indeed.
And I would like to know more about that, but I don't think I'm going to be finding out in a hurry.
Manjee got in touch and asked this.
We're aware of, obviously, that UFOs are sight in Australia, sighted in every country and reported.
But, you know, we have a lot of reports in the UK and US.
But he asks about a specific location in the US, and that is the Blue Mountains.
And Manjee says that there's been a documentary featuring you, so you'll know about this, talking about the mountains in Australia where people have disappeared.
Animals and human beings, they go missing when they're around those mountains and there have been reports of phenomena in that area.
What do you know about this?
Well, it's a little bit of a complicated one because I think, as ever, there's two schools of thought.
I mean, it's an unforgiving environment.
And I know from living in Tucson, for example, how quickly a desert hike can go wrong if you don't bring enough water, if you get lost, if you get bitten by a snake, all sorts of things.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything paranormal about this.
I mean, yes, there have been some mysterious disappearances, but we shouldn't necessarily attribute anything otherworldly to this.
Sadly, Mother Nature can be pretty brutal and in these extreme environments, some tragedies can occur.
And I think it's hard for people who live in the UK, because we're a small country, and we don't really have terrain like this.
But if you go to Australia, you know that you don't have to go very far inland from Perth or from Sydney, and you are in a very hostile environment.
Yeah, I mean, just a few miles from where we live.
I mean, people have died.
Even on supervised hikes where they have water, but not enough, you can very, very quickly get into difficulties.
And if you go off by yourself, as some people do, you'll never be found.
And of course, the various animals that live out there in extremists will pretty soon pick the carcass there and there maybe won't really be anything to find.
I mean, does that mean all disappearances have conventional means?
Not necessarily.
I keep an open mind, but I think, and I can't actually remember the details of this show.
I must do too many of these shows if I can't remember this one.
Well, no, I think that's a sign of success then.
If you can't remember all the shows that you've done, I think that's pretty damn good.
Okay, well, we'll park that one and we'll see if any more information that arises or emerges about this.
But there may be a perfectly rational, if tragic, explanation for it.
Jonathan in Werving, regular listener, asks a number of questions.
We're going to do two of them.
I've never actually spoken to you at any time.
We just have never got round to it, about crop circles.
And of course, they are back in the news in the UK, in the usual places this year.
And Jonathan points out there have even been reports of crop circles appearing in snow-covered land, which I've never heard about.
Neither he.
Crop circles, what's your take on them?
I'm a real sceptic when it comes to crop circles.
I did look at this briefly at the Ministry of Defence because of the perceived connection with the UFO phenomenon.
But so far as we were concerned, these were just made by people.
And until and unless you get absolutely something written up in science or nature, and no, I don't think the scientific community would buy into a cover-up because somebody would win the Nobel Prize off this until we get something written up saying that there is something fundamentally different.
I've seen these sorts of claims in the UFO lobby.
Oh, there are changes at the cellular level.
Well, if that's true, write it up, get it peer-reviewed, get it into science or nature or something like that, and then we'll see.
As far as I'm concerned, we're not there yet.
And I've seen, and you've probably seen too, over the years, a number of different brands have run advertising campaigns based around crop circles.
I think a well-known breakfast cereal did it, a well-known national newspaper did it.
And the point is that you can produce some pretty sophisticated patterns.
So people look at this and say, oh, you know, people couldn't do that.
And my response is, yes, they could, particularly if they go out in teams with night vision goggles, with GPS, and sometimes, because they charge entrance for this, by the way, with the full knowledge and complicity of the farmers.
Right.
Well, I'm not aware of that, but that would be interesting to know.
But I know that there are those, and we've got to remember that those who are crop circle devotees and believe completely in the phenomenon have an almost religious zeal about it and won't have anything said against it.
But we know that some people fake them.
But equally, we get reports of orbs that appear and seem to create these things at lightning speed.
Although there seems to be people.
Well, exactly.
And there appear to be quite few people who've actually observed this.
Although, having said those words, I'm going to get bombarded by email now with people pointing out that actually it has been widely observed, them being created like that.
Very quickly on this one, and I'm going to paraphrase Jonathan's question.
It's basically about your TV work, really.
What sorts of TV work are you doing?
Gosh, all sorts.
I'm a regular on ancient aliens, of course, though they tend to get me in not for the ancient stories at all, but when they dip their toe into the more modern stories about the U.S. Navy, Pentagon's ATIP program, etc.
So I do ancient aliens.
Two of my recent episodes on that.
One is I interviewed Tucker Carlson on that.
That was fun because he'd interviewed me eight times on his show.
So I got to interview him back.
And also I interviewed former presidential candidate.
He was seeking the Democratic nomination a couple of times, Dennis Kucinich, about his sighting at Shirley McLean's old house.
And we went back to that house and we did that interview.
So I do Ancient Aliens.
I'm in a couple of episodes of William Shatner's new show, The Unexplained.
Great time.
I'm in, yeah, I'm in, yeah, I've heard it before somewhere.
I'm in a great show, which has been a real smash hit.
New York Post journalist and filmmaker Stephen Greenstreet created this show called The Basement Office.
And we've done two seasons of it.
And it's been a huge hit, completely free on the New York Post's YouTube channel.
And it's just been this amazing came from nowhere left field.
And everyone loves it, whether they're deep specialists or newcomers.
So I'm doing, particularly because I'm in the US and so close to LA, I'm doing such a lot of TV at the moment.
We joked about it, but it is almost getting to the stage where, was I on that show?
Trust me, it's a sign of success.
You know, moving to America was exactly the right thing, I think, for you.
Now, Jonathan, just to conclude Jonathan's questions, and I'm going to paraphrase this one too, and just a quick answer on this one, I think.
The whole idea of we can or can we handle the truth, assuming the truth is, as they say, out there?
A few months ago, I would have said, absolutely, you don't shock people by telling them something they already believe.
However, when I see, and I'm not trying to downplay the seriousness of the deaths and hospitalizations, but there's no getting away from the fact that with coronavirus, there has been panic and hysteria too at every level, whether it's government planning or should I say mismanagement or whether it's the public reaction.
And that makes me wonder.
That's given me pause for thought.
Right.
And I totally understand and get that.
It is a question that we can legitimately ask, but if we're going to do it, we have to do it sometime.
And you and I would both say sooner rather than later, but who knows?
Final question from Sue.
Sue, thank you for this.
And this is one that you will have been asked a million times, but it's a good one.
Could you please ask Nick if he believes that we have been visited by extraterrestrials?
And if he does, why?
I'm convinced there's life out there in the cosmos.
I am undecided about whether we've been visited.
So my short answer is I don't know.
I'd like to think so, because the world would be more interesting with aliens than without.
If we are being visited, I think, I hope, that they come here as explorers, as scientists, and perhaps as anthropologists, looking not at our science and technology.
We're not going to have anything to teach them about that, but looking at the more abstract things, art, literature, music, political systems, philosophy, all those sorts of things, the things that make us human.
And in parallel with that, the huge biological diversity of planet Earth.
So I hope that they're coming here not, as I say, as conquerors or exterminators or here to plunder resources, water, gold, whatever it may be.
But as I say, that they're coming here in a more sort of altruistic, driven by the same sorts of curiosity and quest for knowledge that is beginning to lead us to take our first steps out and ask what might be out there.
Well, let's hope that they are as well motivated as that, Nick.
Thank you so much for giving me this hour.
It's very kind of you.
If people want to go to a website where they can read all about you, what is yours?
NickPope.net.
I'm glad you keep him busy, Nick.
And thank you so much for all the help that you've given me over this last year and all the years that we've been speaking.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
The remarkable and very busy Nick Pope there.
Your thoughts on Nick or any of my guests here on The Unexplained, gratefully received.
Please go to the website, theunexplained.tv and send me a message from there.
I love to get your emails.
And more great guests in the pipeline.
Hopefully next time I record, it's not going to be quite so hot.
I feel like I'm having a sawda right now.
I've got to go and have a cold drink of water.
So until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection