[This story first appeared in CNI News, Vol. 2 No. 19 (Dec 16, 1996), copyright 1996 by Michael Lindemann. All rights reserved in all media.]

From 1991 until 1994, Nick Pope worked the "UFO desk" at Air Secretariat 2-A, British Ministry of Defense. His job was to assess UFO reports for any possible defense significance. In June of 1996, he published a book called "Open Skies, Closed Minds" whic h described his personal evolution as a UFO investigator and his views on the seriousness of UFO phenomena.

CNI News editor Michael Lindemann asked Nick Pope if he could pinpoint one event, or series of events, that solidified his belief that UFOs posed a serious challenge to British national security. He answered as follows:

"I think the moment where I really felt, 'Okay, this is it,' was a wave of sightings that occurred on the 30th and 31st of March, 1993. We had several hundred reports that came our way. Many of the witnesses were police. A lot of police in the southwest o f the country, in Devon and Cornwall, saw something. Repeatedly, I heard the phrase, "This was like nothing I'd ever seen before in my life." People were genuinely quite spooked.

"What was generally reported was two lights, flying in a perfect formation, with a third, much fainter light -- a triangle formation. It's difficult to say, of course, but the impression from talking to witnesses was that this was a triangular craft with lights mounted on the underside, at the edges.

"There was a family in Staffordshire who apparently saw this thing so low -- and they described it as either triangular or diamond shaped -- that they leapt into their car and tried to chase it. They didn't succeed, although at one point they thought it h ad actually come down in a field. It wasn't there when they got to it. They described a low, humming sound, very low-frequency, like standing in front of a bass speaker.

"This object, whatever it was, then proceeded to fly over two military bases. It was seen by the guard patrol at RAF Cosford, about three or four people, [who] made an instant report of this, obviously because it had flown over their base. They checked r adar. There was nothing on the screens, and there was nothing scheduled to fly. No military or civil aircraft should have been airborne in that area at all. They phoned the nearby base at RAF Shawbury, about 12 miles away from Cosford. The meteorological officer there took the call. He was a man with about eight years' experience looking into the night sky and then doing the weather report for the next day. so he knew his way around objects and phenomena. Now, to his absolute amazement, he saw a light in the distance, coming closer and closer. That light eventually resolved itself into a solid structured craft that he saw flying directly over the base, but at much closer proximity than the guard patrol at Cosford had seen it. He estimated that the heigh t [altitude] of the object was no more than 200 feet. Its size, he said, was midway between a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and a Boeing 747. He heard the low hum, too. He had not spoken to any other witnesses, except the Cosford people, who I don't t hink had reported the sound. He reported this low-frequency hum. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, he reported this thing throwing a beam of light down at the nearby countryside and fields just beyond the perimeter fence at the base. This light was tracki ng backwards and forwards, he said to me, 'as if it was looking for something.' The beam of light then retracted, and the craft moved off. It was traveling very slowly, I should say, probably no more than 20 or 30 mph. Then it gained a little bit of heigh t, and then it just shot off to the horizon in little more than a second.

"I launched a full investigation. I made all the usual checks, trying to track down aircraft movement, satellite activity, airships, weather balloons, meteorites, etc. I drew a blank -- with one exception -- and then put a report up the chain of command. The exception was a ballistic missile early warning sensor at RAF Fylingdales, in North Yorkshire. It is estimated that at some stage in the night there had been a rocket re-entry of, I think, Cosmos 2238, which might have caused a very brief firework d isplay in the high atmosphere. It's just possible that some of the vague sightings might have been explained in that way, although Fylingdales didn't seem very sure on whether [the satellite re-entry] was actually going to be visible from the UK at all. But, clearly, it wouldn't explain the sighting of the family in Staffordshire and, most importantly of all, the direct overflight of the military bases, particularly the meteorological officer's report. He had obviously seen a structured craft.

"This to me really [refuted] any idea that these things are of no defense significance. You had a craft which, whatever it was, had penetrated our defense region. It wasn't on our radar, and we hadn't got our air defense fighters out. So whether it was e xtraterrestrial or not, there was something which we all should have been very concerned about.

"The debate got bogged down in the search for Aurora, the alleged hypersonic replacement to the SR-71 Blackbird. We were chasing our tails trying to find out whether there was such a thing. We were asking the Americans, "Are you operating a prototype airc raft in our airspace?" That, of course, was nonsense. You simply would not do that from a diplomatic and political point of view. It would undermine the entire structure of NATO if you were putting things through someone else's airspace, particularly a c lose ally, without seeking the proper diplomatic clearance. But we had to ask. And the Americans, having had similar reports since the Hudson Valley wave [New York state, mid-1980s], had been quietly asking us if we had some large, triangular shaped objec t that could go from 0 to Mach 5 in a second. Our response was that we wished we did. This was the bizarre situation: that we were chasing the Americans, and the Americans were chasing us. Meanwhile, I suspected a third party was having a laugh!

"It seems to me there is a technology on display which goes beyond the cutting edge of our own. I'm interested in the UFOs seen by the police and military witnesses. I'm interested in the visual sightings backed up by radar. I'm interested in the militar y bases that are overflown by these things. These are not lights in the sky, not misidentifications or fantasy-prone individuals. This is a cutting-edge technology being reported by reliable, trained observers, and it is something that goes beyond what we can do. That suggests to me that if it is not ours, if it is better than ours, then the extraterrestrial hypothesis seems the best explanation."