 But when you then look at what's left, the 5% or so, consistently over the years that couldn't be explained, views differed, appear to demonstrate advanced technology, and two things that were specifically mentioned were radio frequency energy and signature management. So we know, looking at the UFO data we have, that the capability is pretty darned impressive. Speeds, maneuvers, acceleration. Always have a plan B. Yes, yes. We used to say when I was in the military, no plan survives first contact. Yes, absolutely. Being a civilian employee of the MOD, I learned a whole lot of those from my military colleagues, including the famous saying, never get separated from your kit, which was shortly followed by the guy in question saying, oh my God, where's my laptop? And running back to the office we'd been in about 20 minutes ago. Yes, I could take that one stage further and say, getting separated from your kit is fine. Don't get separated from your sleeping bag. All right. So it's an absolute honour, Nick, to have you on the show. Over to you. How did you first take an interest in this subject? I was simply given this to do as a government job. I was a civilian employee of the Ministry of Defense. And as you know, as in the military, our civil servants get posted every few years to something completely different. And in 1991, the UFO job at the Ministry of Defense happened to become vacant at the exact time when I was due for a move in a situation where the line manager was someone that I'd already worked with in the Joint Operations Centre, where I'd been seconded into the Air Force Operations Room. So it was just almost chance that I fell into this topic. I had no interest in UFOs. I had no particular beliefs. I was simply assigned. This is going to be your job for the next three years. And when I say the job, what I mean is handling the policy for the topic and researching and investigating it to assess defence implications, if any, for the UK. What year was this, Nick? 91 to 94. Was that not also round about the time? If I remember correctly that the UK government came out and said that they shelled all their UFO files because there was nothing in it? Am I getting my wires crossed? Yeah, that was a little later. That was actually in 2009, when after decades of having had this programme, MOD did pull the plug as part of a better-than-eye, the usual series of defence cuts. But when I was there from 91 to 94, it was still going strong. And we'd had someone doing that job since 1953. So many, many different people over the years had been in this particular position and some after me as well. But you're right. They did eventually pull the plug, though rumours persist that they are still looking at it. And of course, with everything going on in the United States now, which we can come on to talk about, the MOD may well have to re-engage on this. Yes, I get a bit suspicious when they say they pulled the plug. It's a bit like the MK Ultra experiment in the USA, the CIA mind control exercises and operations, which clearly seem to have worked, that the notion that if you could control another human being, for example, a foreign leader or maybe a prominent celebrity figure, that you just go, oh, I'm not going to do that anymore. It's with the psychopaths that are in control of the planet. I find that incredibly unlikely. So when the British came out with that statement, I don't think we're ever going to know, are we? No, and I've heard from various well-placed defence sources that despite the public statements, people are still researching and investigating this on the scenes but outside of the scope of any formally constituted programme. So it's been done in the margins of other work streams maybe even contracted out to the private sector, which is something that the US government did. It's something we did back in the 90s. We had, at one point, we did an intelligence assessment of the phenomenon as a whole, and that we put out into the private sector through an existing defence contract. We modified it and put it out to one of the big defence corporations just to take it a little bit outside the system, a little bit of clear blue water between the work and the government, a little bit of plausible deniability, and of course to make it more difficult for people to get at it under the Freedom of Information Act. Yes, I haven't thought of that. And when you took on this role, Nick, was there any thoughts in your mind that you might actually witness an alien craft? No, I really didn't know what to expect. And government UFO research and investigation is, I think, different from what most people might think. I think people watching this podcast might think it was like an ex-files situation, running around, you know, weapons drawn in dark warehouses and torches out and things like that. In reality, it was much more headquarters-based, revolved around things like radar analysis, photographic and imagery analysis, Mazint, interviewing pilots, that sort of thing. So, no, I didn't have expectation of seeing anything or experiencing myself. And neither did I expect that at some point I would be taken to some RAF base and they would roll aside the hangar doors and say, there it is. And only for me to see, you know, what crashed at Roswell or something, but back-engineered and put together. No, I was not expecting that. And sadly, I didn't experience that. Wow. Yes. And was there an acknowledge... Was there an understanding at the time of the... within the government, I mean, of the difference between interplanetary craft or beings and interdimensional? Within the Ministry of Defence and wider, within the wider military and the intelligence community, there was no common view on what we were dealing with. I think there was a sort of intellectual understanding just from the previous decades of investigations that most of the sightings, of course, would turn out to be misidentifications of ordinary objects and phenomena. But when you then look at what's left, the 5% or so, consistently over the years that couldn't be explained, views differed. Some people were skeptical and they said, well, with just a bit more investigation, we might find a conventional answer. But others weren't afraid to sort of think about some of the more exotic possibilities. Some people talked about extraterrestrials, other people interdimensional. Some people said, what about time travellers from the future? Some people even took a religious view of all this and thought it was demonic. I mean, really, views within the Ministry of Defence, mirror views within society. There's a whole lot of skeptics, some believers, and people in between. So let's jump in a time machine ourselves, Nick, from where you were when you started to where you are now. And then it will be interesting to see how we get to this point when we then go back to the beginning of your story or your UFO story. What is your understanding now of the whole shebang? Well, I'm not one of these people who are going to sit and tell you I've got the answer and I've solved the mystery because I haven't. And I'm always wary when it comes to this subject of people, and I see them all the time. I see various sort of self-styled UFO experts sort of say, oh, this is what it is. And in reality, those of us who've looked at this from within government never say that. What we say is that there's no one single neat answer to this mystery. There's a whole range probably of different things going on, most conventional, some maybe not so. And as to what we're dealing with, I don't know. But I mean, a very good case in point is the report was just sent in the US from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the United States Congress. And most people have seen or that follow their subject an unclassified nine-page summary of this. There is in the system apparently an 18-page classified version. And this has mainly gone in Congress to both the Senate and the House. And it's mainly the Senate Intelligence Committee that is leading on this. And what they have been briefed and people can read the unclassified version for themselves. I mean, it's quite a bombshell. It says this is a real phenomenon, no one single cause, but detected across multiple platforms. So we have pilot sightings. We have radar operators corroborating this. We have forward-looking infrared camera videos of these things, most famously from US Navy jets. A lot of people have seen those videos. Electro-optical weapons seekers, former Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe talked about satellite imagery. And then critically, this report went on to say in a handful of cases, these UFOs appear to demonstrate advanced technology. And two things that were specifically mentioned were radio frequency energy and signature management. So that's where we are right now. After decades of this subject being viewed almost with a chuckle as some sort of conspiracy theory, science fiction, fringe topic, it has come out of the fringe and it's firmly in the mainstream with Congress in the US now taking this seriously and saying thanks for this preliminary assessment. We need more work on this because whatever we're dealing with, and this is the headline conclusion of the report, it's an air safety threat and a potential national security challenge. And we need to find out, is this Russia? Is this China? Or is it something else? And we don't know. I see. That's where the threat comes in if it's more of a human thing. Well, even if it's extraterrestrial, we still apply, and you've probably applied this yourself in your career, the threat equation of capability times intent equals threat. So we know looking at the UFO data we have that the capability is pretty darned impressive. Speeds, maneuvers, acceleration that seem to leave the cutting edge of our own aerospace technology standing, but the intent remains unknown and therefore we can't assess the threat, but as you know, it's hope for the best, plan for the worst. Yes. I don't believe in this nation state thing. I think it's all just, I think it's all a bit mythical that Russia are the bad guys this week and all, hang on, China. I'm not just, I'm not suggesting that big things aren't happening in those countries. I'm just sure if they had some space program that every single country in the intelligence agency in the world would know what they were. Well, we know we, when we did this intelligence assessment at the MOD in the 90s, we knew from intelligent sources that Russia and China and other nations too had their own UFO programs and they're probably asking the same questions that we were asking. You know, I, you know, in Russia somewhere there's probably a intelligence community analyst saying, I wonder if any of this is secret US black project technology, spy planes, drones, something not yet publicly declared. Yes. Well, I should tell you my, my experience of, of a UFO when I was about seven, we had some family friends they were slightly older so they would have been comprehensive kids and obviously I was in the primary school and one day there was a massive article in our local paper that these two teenagers they'd been taking their dog for a walk in the park and suddenly the dog started growling and barking up in the air. When they looked up there was this strange cigar shaped object and which only explanation for it was that it had to have been a UFO. And I remember reading this as a child thinking, Oh my God. And then when I spoke to my mama about she said, No, they just made it all up. They just opened up the newspaper and come out with this somewhat cock and ball story. So back to the serious stuff, Nick. So how did things, we'll talk about your story and then we'll cover such things such as possible propulsion methods and technology and well just what could this really be about? So what you settled into the role. What sort of stuff did you have to start doing? You talked about chatting with pilots. Yes, I know it's a huge cliche but there was no typical day in that office and I did have other duties too. I mean, just as nothing to do with this topic but just as a fun piece of information. One of the other things that I did while I was in the post is I was responsible for reading draft manuscripts of books written by military or ex-military people who had been involved in the Gulf War, the first Gulf War. And I was the guy or one of the guys with the black pens going, No, we can't have that in. Wow, let's talk about that because well, I'm not sure there's as much I can say but I looked for example at the air parts and now I was a civilian as I say but I was in an Air Force Secretariat division so I looked at the bits that related to air power in General Sir Peter de la Villiers book then I looked at gosh, what was that? Very kind of quirky written but Pablo's war I think that was one I remember then of course the two guys who were shot down Nichols and God, it's years since I've even thought about this frankly. Yes, tornado down. Yes, yes and my job wasn't to be a killjoy it was just to make sure that inadvertently no classified information had slipped in but I'm just really giving you a little bit of I guess Carla to say that there were other things I was doing in that job to a side and I had responsibilities for updating the NATO war books again on the airside so interesting times. Yes, it sounds like the same military office that's tried to censor this podcast in the past. Well and then of course as I think you've probably heard I'm probably going to get the joke wrong but there's the old joke that people used to say that SAS stood for special author service. Was there any talk then that some of these men was let's just say may not all have been what they what they seemed? Oh no no they were all I mean they were all you know heroes and people of the highest integrity and who had done their level best to make sure themselves that they didn't break any rules it's just we were the headquarters people who maybe had a sort of wider political perspective on this and we just acted as almost like a long stop to make sure nothing had slipped through you know you can get 99.9% of it right and make one little inadvertent slip and then you know once it's out you can't get the toothpaste back into the tube so that was what we were doing like you know people have this view of us being these kind of killjoy bureaucrats and things but we were really just trying to make sure for example that we didn't inadvertently give away something like the capability of an air defense radar system or something like that. Yeah and also you have to protect the individual so if you've got assets in another country that might still be there in danger you can't be saying that you know they lived on this street or this kind of thing. No and of course that's exactly what we're seeing right now tragically with the Afghanistan situation the debt that we owe to those who helped us that we haven't been able to get out. Yes absolutely an awful situation but then it's been awful for 20 20 years yes and that's another story so you're talking to these when you're not taking your red pen to these books with your black pen what are the stories that you're hearing? Well on the UFO side as I say there was no typical day so we got about 200 or 300 UFO reports each year mostly from the public but a reasonable proportion from police officers, pilots, other than military personnel so we would have to interview the witness take down all the information then start the investigation which would basically be a series of checks we knew for example where all the things that people misidentify for UFOs were operating so we would cross check the date, time and description with flight paths with military exercises or training with weather balloon launches with satellite tracks astronomical data and we would consult as necessary with the radar experts with intelligence community imagery analysts if we had photos or videos we would consult with meteorologists with astronomers and one by one we would explain away these sightings until we were left with the ones that we couldn't explain and then you have the kind of catch 22 situation that it's like a police investigation when you've investigated to the point where you can't solve the mystery it just sits there on the file as an open case but eventually you can't really put any more resources into it it just sits there until the point and that point may never come but until the point where some new piece of evidence a witness a document whatever it might be emerges so that was part of it the bread and butter of the job was doing the investigations but we also when this subject came up in parliament I would be the one as the subject matter expert I would be the one drafting the speeches the responses to the parliamentary questions whatever it was drafting that for secretary of state for defence or the undersecretaries whoever it was when the subject came up in the media as it obviously did a lot I would be the one drafting the key messages and the defensive lines to take and the background information for the press office and you know sometimes literally you'd have school kids writing in and saying we're doing a project on this can you help and of course in the interests of good publicity I would always do my best to help with things like that dig out some documents from the National Archives for example famously in 1952 Winston Churchill wrote a memo about UFOs and he said what does all this stuff about flying saucers mean what does it amount to what's the truth let me have a report at the time a kid wrote in and said we're doing a school project I would make sure they had that document and they would they would go to their teacher and say look this came from the Ministry of Defence and it's from Winston Churchill and they loved it so there was a fun part of the job too and then of course there's all the public correspondence which could be anything from serious questions we didn't at the time was too early for the Freedom of Information Act thank goodness but we had a lot of questions and we tried to be helpful when possible and we had a lot of accusations too of course to many many people they thought we were the bad guys handling the cover up and the conspiracy as they viewed it so we had to respond politely but robustly to that and can you give us some examples Nick of obviously I mean I'm guessing military aircraft can be mistaken for UFOs but what sort of things were the public reporting that turned out to be you know turned out to be legit or there was an explanation behind it well this was after my time but certainly in recent years many many UFO reports have been attributable to people letting off Chinese lanterns I can't recall exactly when the Chinese lantern thing became a big deal in the UK but the moment it did UFO sightings spiked quite quite rapidly but of course the danger then is you throw out the baby with the bath water and everyone says oh it's just Chinese lanterns and of course what they really should say is an increasing proportion of it was Chinese lanterns but we were never interested in those conventional explanations except when we could we wanted to get better identify and then discarding them so that we concentrate on the really interesting stuff now one thing that did cause one conventional thing during my time there that caused a lot of excitement was the virgin light ships airship and this was Richard Branson used to fly this thing and then loan it out to the TV companies so it would be filming big football matches at Wembley stadium and of course it would be for evening kickoffs it would be hovering over north west London and if you were in north west London you could see it it was an airship and it would say it on the side but if you were looking at it from several miles away we would find ourselves getting reports of brightly illuminated cigar shaped objects hovering over London lasers and search lights became a much bigger thing with outdoor pop events and rock festivals so people were using huge World War 2 style search lights but also much more modern laser systems that sometimes tracked around the skies in symmetrical patterns that sort of thing generated a lot of UFO sightings we so we had to be and satellites were becoming more prevalent there were more and more of them and that's a huge thing now of course with some of these what are they called Starlink ones particularly so we had to be ahead of the curve when it came to what was out there we had to know who is flying what when and where and what are the phenomena like astronomical things satellites meet your showers even the cycle of meteor showers we had to be on top of all that yeah so used to when you're in areas that don't have light pollution you can see lots of satellites and quite frequently at least one every 20 minutes you'll be tracking over I do I do wonder if people that buy into this flat earth theory understand that you can actually see the satellites and if they do and if they have seen what do they think they are indeed yes I'm just staggered that whole flat earth thing has come back and there's even a thing but I think it's one of two things I mean firstly like a lot of things it's probably just fueled by the internet and secondly I can't help but wonder whether it isn't the whole thing isn't some sort of either practical joke that's got out of hand or more likely maybe some sort of psychology study in belief let's do a control experiment where we put some stuff out there and see if it takes off and it has yeah I think the reality would probably be it's a Psyop designed to discredit anybody that questions the mainstream media narrative say for example you've got concerns over what you see in the news the public just write you off as a one of those flat earthers aren't you yes and of course we see that I mean the whole issue of Psyops and misinformation, disinformation, fake news I mean look how I mean I don't want to maybe we shouldn't go down this particular rabbit hole but look how the whole idea that COVID-19 even if it emerged naturally tinkered with in this so-called addition of function situation at the Wuhan virology lab and that whole thing was dismissed as some sort of right-wing nut job conspiracy theory until it wasn't and until President Biden asked Director of National Intelligence I want to report on this and as you know that reports just come in and it's inconclusive there are 18 different parts of the US intelligence community some of them think it's completely natural something that there was addition of function so one person's conspiracy theory is another person's questioning the narrative and I think it's a sad day when we stop questioning the narrative. You said it Nick most definitely I have a really simple if I say dipstick do I younger people know what I'm talking about you know my test to stick is really simple did you see it on the news yes then it's not true on that point then I'm interested to know so this office you work for what level of critical thinking skills did your colleagues or the executive at this office what did they have and if I can pitch an idea to you I mean were they were they in a position where they would question for it say the moon landings or was that was that taboo or was it all taken as gospel well that was that was really outside our brief as to what people thought about that privately I don't really know my guess would be that most people in the M.O.D thought you know did not think the moon landings were host maybe some did but it's not really something that came up I mean we didn't treat the UFO mystery as some sort of conspiracy theory we treated it and the way it's been treated in the U.S. right now quite correctly we treated this as a defence and national security issue there's something in our airspace we want to know what it is yes the reason I ask is when you move more towards the sort of quantum physics side and methods of propulsion this kind of thing then you start to realise that to actually travel through space you'd really need advanced technology I mean even what was the chat from Operation Paperclip the German Scientist even von Braun said to go to the moon you'd need so much if indeed it was possible you'd need so much fuel that at minimum just to get out of Earth's orbit you'd need a rocket the size of the Empire State Building this is Verne von Braun who's the father of the rocket program impossible and what I'm getting at is Nick is if the people in charge of your office aren't in a position to even question the official narrative on space I just wonder where sort of where it was all going well we did not make as much progress as I would have liked speaking directly to your point things changed in later years and particularly in the United States and the point you raised brings me very neatly to the subject of ATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Now as you know for years the US government said we're no longer investigating UFOs we haven't done so since Project Blue Book was closed down at the end of 1969 and there's no corporate interest in that then in December 2017 the New York Times ran a front page story to say that there had been this program called ATIP that they had looked at UFOs and that's when they also released the fact that US Navy pilots had seen tracked on radar and filmed on forward looking infrared camera video these UFOs and now here's where it gets interesting and ties back to what you said about quantum physics and propulsion systems the Defense Intelligence Agency obviously were asked hard questions about this by Congress Congress said hey you told us you weren't doing this and now we learn in the New York Times that you are what's going on so the DIA wrote to Congress in January 2018 saying yes we had a program called ATIP but it looked at and they tried to spin it next generation aerospace and weapon threats to the United States which sounds all proper stuff core defense business yes you'd expect them to be looking at that then they attached to that letter a list of 38 scientific and technical studies that they'd done under the ATIP contract if this was indeed all about next generation aerospace and weapon threats how many of those papers would you expect to be about Russia and China probably most of them with some maybe on Iran and North Korea and things like that none of them were about Russia or China they were all about exotic theoretical physics concepts there was a paper on anti-gravity there was a paper on invisibility a paper on stargates a paper on warp drive and a paper on wormholes this was all about the technology that you would need for interstellar travel and just in case anyone still thinks well maybe it was still about Russia or China but just really thinking ahead one of the studies was about the Drake equation and the only purpose of the Drake equation is to estimate the number of communicable civilizations in our galaxy so it was hidden in plain sight the letter to congress tried to dress this up as being about aerospace threats conventional ones but the reality and the attachment was that this was about UFO technology and so ATIP was the opposite of the program that I ran at the MOD instead of taking the UFO sightings and investigating them they took as their start point I believe the assumption that this was real and then asked the smart question well what technologies are involved in this and can we acquire them and there is some declassified paperwork that bears that out and says that that is indeed what we're trying to do and just to put it in perspective if you pointed the fastest space probe we've ever designed at the nearest star to our sun the nearest star to us aside from the sun it would take 75,000 years to get there so clearly there is a new physics involved here or a new understanding of the laws of physics, energy sources propulsion systems that we don't currently possess and there is a race going on to acquire that it's interesting to say propulsion because I'd say it's the other way around I'd say it's pulling what's the scientific name for pulling yourself to something that's all part and parcel of warping space-time because if you view as Einstein viewed space-time as a single entity rather than two separate things then a sufficiently massive, well any massive object will warp space-time to some extent and if you could control and dramatically increase that theoretical physicists believe majorly warp space-time and therefore it's like the old thing if you take a sheet of paper and you draw a point A at one end and point B on the other you then draw a line between them that's a long line but if you then fold the paper you can juxtapose those two points that's essentially what that technology would try to do yes exactly and people think it's science fiction but then as I say I can show them that the Defence Intelligence Agency has briefed Congress that they were working on that very thing now there's still of course a huge challenge involved in turning theoretical physics into something that can be engineered but the important point is that people are working on it and they're not sci-fi this isn't some sort of fringe conspiracy theory some people in government the military, the intelligence community the aerospace community are actively working on this to try and figure it out yes, it just makes so many questions and there's so many implications of that in itself whether they actually feel there's something out there or whether this is a budget siphoning off money from the public purse not mentioning any American companies in particular Nick, we talked about the sightings that were able to be explained can you give us some examples of the ones that either couldn't or in which you felt this actually really might be something sure, well, I mean gosh where to start, we had a case in August 1990 where two hikers in Scotland photographed, they took six photos of a diamond shaped craft in daylight with the sort of various landmarks in the background so that intelligence community imagery analysts could work their magic and triangulate and come up with some calculations about size distance from the camera, et cetera and this was looked at by the defence intelligence staff and this was looked at by Jarek, joint air reconnaissance and intelligence centre, now part of the defence fusion centre and this thing pretty much hovered there for some time and then disappeared up but straight up vertically so that was a pretty good one and we had for years an enlarged poster sized copy of the best photo on the wall until it disappeared in somewhat mysterious circumstances so that was a great case then we had, there was a case in 1993 where we had dozens if not hundreds of sightings on one night over a period of about six hours, large triangular shaped craft capable of moving from a hover high max speeds in an instant with no sonic boom, which was kind of curious a low frequency humming sound coming from these craft sometimes one of the military witnesses said it was so unpleasant he could feel the sound reverberating through his body as well as hear it huge, huge thing, hundreds of witnesses police, military, civilians hundreds of different parts of the UK there was a case in Belgium in 1990 where a similar craft flew over the countryside for some hours the Belgians scrambled two F-16s to intercept it because they were tracking it on radar the F-16s then acquired it on their airborne radar but the object broke lock multiple times and they never got to the bottom of it the official view from the Belgian Air Force and the Belgian Ministry of Defence was real, unidentified and thank goodness it was friendly because if it hadn't been frankly there was nothing we'd have been able to do about it and the cases go on and on there are hundreds of these sorts of things over the last few years has declassified and released about 60,000 pages of documents about all this, some of them had previously been at levels up to secret UKIs only Gosh what are the theories then on propulsion Nick? I think if you're that clever let's take the interplanetary travel as opposed to the interdimensional so for friends at home who might not be familiar with the terminology, I'm not pretending I massively am but I get the difference between interplanetary obviously travelling from another planet another solar system, galaxy what have you an interdimensional as in we're here in this dimension if we were to maybe tweak the frequency a notch we might enter another or a bit like the sort of maybe there's a crystal in another dimension and he's three seconds behind this one or there's an infinite amount of crystals committing an infinite amount of actions an infinite amount of dimensions etc etc so that one I'd have no dear about but for actual interplanetary travel I would imagine you would need to be able to manipulate the molecular structure of space yes, you would have to warp space time and however that was done that would involve vast amounts of energy which is one of the reasons why this is so highly classified because anything that involves high energy can almost certainly be weaponized so that's one angle of it I will answer that in more detail but I think it's fascinating and the whole idea of interdimensional intrusion ties in with the idea that you just mentioned about parallel universes and there are certainly some theoretical physicists who believe absolutely that there are an infinite number of parallel universes and a few years ago this would have been laughed out of court but people like the theoretical physicist are actively researching the existence of so-called hidden dimensions using for example the big particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider and again that's about slamming particles together to create new exotic particles very high energies and for string theory or for some branches of string theory you actually need multiple dimensions for the equations to work so watch very closely what happens over the next few years at the Large Hadron Collider because it may be that that particular science fiction as many believe is about to become science fact and some people believe that UFOs and maybe other paranormal phenomena more generally is indeed some sort of leakage across from different dimensions or from parallel universes but to take your other point if this is simply extraterrestrial technology and interstellar travel as opposed to say interdimensional or time travel or something like that then yes it would involve it's not just a faster rocket it's probably something with a radically different technology and you know optimists say we could figure it out but pessimists say probably not and they say look in a universe nearly 14 billion years old there might be civilizations out there with a billion years head start on us and their technology to us would be indistinguishable from magic I mean ask yourself that's it's nowhere near a billion years but a few you know a few thousand years if you could go back in time and show a stone age person your smart phone they just think it was a shiny rock and then you smash it into pieces are they going to be able to figure out what it what it does are they going to be able to replicate that technology and build their own of course not and then people say well maybe we could take UFOs and back engineer them and figure it out well maybe not yes and there's also the point that you know if these aliens with that advance that they could travel in this way this is just a theory a personal theory I'm pretty sure they'd realise that you couldn't you couldn't use fuel because when you take from mother nature you've got to be able to it's got to be sustainable and I don't mean sustainable the way it's being used in our current society because all our sustainable it's not really sustainable is it it's still involved digging up the earth digging out the minerals digging up the metals and the precious metals that are not just going to grow back like say for example a tree might and I just wonder wouldn't these aliens be so clever to know that that is not the way forward yes I mean they probably would have realised hang on guys let's just stay at home and get things sorted out here and if we go to that planet earth we're just going to give them this crazy radical idea and then they're going to those idiots are going to try and build their and they're kind of like destroying their planet at a very rapid rate well I think one of the interesting points about all this is that if if you believe that there are other civilizations out there there's almost certainly not just one other civilization out there but multiple civilizations perhaps billions or trillions in the universe so I think it's very difficult to say aliens would do this or wouldn't do that because there's probably such a variety that it's on a spectrum and yes one would hope that that a civilization would maybe try to solve its own problems before it becomes a space faring civilization but maybe not maybe I mean we we have the infancy of a space program I mean it's baby steps but it's still there I mean we're a long way from sorting out all our problems like war and disease and poverty and prejudice The big problem then is that we've been infantilized if that's right like we've been kept as children our whole lives and not allowed to develop into the right hemisphere of our brain which is your love, your kindness your empathy, your human understanding and because we haven't done that we're still in this we still live in this childish world of notions that oh my god you know this country wants to wage war with us and all let's go to that planet when you find enlightenment you realize that so much of that is just fabricated people don't hate each other they just don't I've traveled the whole world several times and you meet the odd idiot but most people just full of love for one another and I just think there's another dimension here that's not discussed and that is if we didn't live in what I call the left brain where we just believe what we see in mainstream media with full of anger, hatred, bigotry greed with slave to our kind of bestial desires rather than living in our upper self which is what the eastern philosophy is all about I think if we all found if we could find a way to break free from the chains or the indoctrination that was subjected to from birth in order to make us just greedy consumers that believe the mainstream media narrative so we keep the military industrial complex going we keep programs like NASA funded we keep these trillionaires in the greedy state of power of which they become accustomed to I think we'd find ourselves in a paradise where it's like what dude why it's perfect here so the point I'm getting to is if aliens with that advance they could travel through either space or time or dimension I'm pretty sure they've realized that there's no need to do that and that it's only going to lead to trouble I don't know I'm just throwing that out there because I like to think about such things I don't know I mean I think there is some research to suggest and I know it's counterintuitive but that actually we're getting less violent and more civilized and that yes I mean you get a distorted view of this through the media because as the old saying goes if it bleeds it leads but we've all seen and experienced acts of love of kindness of charity and I think it speaks to your point speaks to a wider question about the nature of altruism I mean true altruism not doing a good deed because we hope or expect we might get one back if doing it and I like to think as I say if there are a whole bunch of civilizations out there I like to think and hope that there will be some altruistic ones too but I don't think there's any getting away from the fact that curiosity the desire to explore and see what's out there is although sometimes it's motivated by the desire to acquire new resources often it is simply motivated by the desire to seek information and knowledge knowledge for knowledge sake, learning self-improvement to find more things of interest and diversity in the universe so I mean for example I often say that to advance civilizations out there a primitive emerging civilization like us is going to have nothing to teach them about science and technology but what if they were interested in the more abstract and personal things like art, literature, music poetry, things like that and biodiversity and in those circumstances there might be very good and high-minded reasons for travelling between the stars Yes another reason I mention it is that if they did have this ability to travel I don't know we say this far but like you say if you fold the bit of paper it's not far at all but I just wonder if they would do it in a way that just wouldn't take up any more of the universe's resources than is either replenishable or necessary hence this maybe the technology to travel this way doesn't require energy it requires something that we can't yet comprehend Yeah I'm sure you're right that if aliens were to arrive here tomorrow and land on the White House lawn I'm pretty darn sure they wouldn't be using chemical rockets or oil and gas or that sort of thing now a whole bunch of theoretical physicists far, far brighter than me doing some work to kind of figure out what kind of scientific understanding and technological know-how might achieve something like that but that's way above my level of intellect I'm afraid to move on I've written three things down here a little bit again another Psyop if you ask me that plays on the humans psyche again predominantly left brain psyche and that's the Mandela effect which I'm sure you must be familiar with yes like the fact that curious George the monkey has no tail Oh they haven't done that to him have they I think and yeah there's a whole bunch of them of course and the X files famously had an episode on it so yeah it's not something I've studied personally but it's a bizarre thing now is it just false memory and the fact that we like to remember simple spellings for example whereas in fact some spellings are more complex or is there something else going on I don't know but it's bizarre some people say it's you know something to do with we've gone into one of those parallel worlds or we've had leakage from another dimension other people say it's like a glitch in the matrix and of course for anyone who thinks oh the matrix is just a sci-fi movie there are a number of people who seriously believe that we are living in a simulation and I'll name no names but there are a number of fairly well known tech billionaires who are actively funding scientific research saying first of all I want to validate the matrix but then I want to bust out of it and see what's out there and talk to the people that made it and programmed it I mean I laugh but this is serious people do believe this and people are funding it right now yes so false memory syndrome is a thing isn't it we've all remembered that movie it's a movie movie film to our American brothers and sisters movie where you went yeah and that bit where the guy did that and your mate goes no no no he did that and you have this argument and you're just about about 500 pounds that it was the way and then you watch the film and you're like oh god oh my god so false memory syndrome is a thing but again this it's become a sigh up to alter certain things to fuel this movement this Mandela movement so friends at home if you wonder what the hell this is I'm sure many of you know what it is but it's just the way that some people swore that Nelson Mandela died in a certain year and when the facts he didn't he died years later but many people have this memory of seeing his coffin seeing the funeral and it was maybe say 1991 but of course he died he didn't die until much later but and then it it's drawn in all sorts of things like for example people not realising the Ford emblem has a little cross on the crossbar of the F and there are photos out there where there isn't that little cross so it kind of didn't always have this cross and yet the idea is yes it always kind of did but here's where it gets here's where I think it's been influenced by dark elements the same dark elements that want people to believe the earth's flat so that anyone questioning official narratives looks looks like a bit of an idiot and that's where for example Franco Colombo an Italian gentleman he was Arnold Schwarzenegger's best friend for all the bodybuilding years they both were there at Venice Beach lifting weights together both huge guys I was massively into at least reading about them if not trying to emulate them and of course it's an Italian name so it's a Latino of Latino origin so it's an O on the end Colombo now it's been doctored everywhere to be Colombo with a U which doesn't even really unless I'm ignorant of languages it doesn't even seem to be Colombo and if you try and find articles now or you try and find these books and stuff it's all Colombo I've never seen Arnold Schwarzenegger question about this by the way that would be an interesting one but then occasionally you get the odd bit of literature flags and no there's his name Franco Colombo that was his name Franco Colombo everyone knew it's Franco Colombo so my guess would be that someone is playing on people's false memory syndrome well if anyone's watching this and isn't quite clear what we're talking about I would urge them to look it up and there are many sites that list these are the top 10 or these are the top 20 examples and I would urge people have some fun with it go through them and I guarantee you'll be going hey wait a minute yes and some of them really get you I mean some are obvious for example people believe when JFK was shot in the automobile there was only four people in it or at least four people in the back that just couldn't be true because the senator was also shot wasn't he so there was Jackie, JFK, the senator I think it was his wife and then there were the two CIA drivers so there were six people and that it has to be five minimum because the senator was part of the subsequent inquiry wasn't he of the magic the magic bullet theory how it hit him and then it hit JFK because they had to explain this incredible scenario fictitious scenario so anyone say no there was only four people in the car that just couldn't couldn't be although I get it what they've probably done is they've seen a film where they've just had four people in the car or they've seen a museum exhibit which there are but they've just had the four people in the car but one that was really hard to take is the Jaws one in the James Bond film Moomraker where Jaws has come down he's crashed in this cable car after the cable's been severed and he's there throwing off this bits of cable car in the car I can't even remember where it was and the let's say it's Switzerland and this local Swiss girl arrives on the scene to help him and she smiles and then Jaws is big villain character with the metal teeth he smiles and everybody could swear the reason that they fell in love with this couple is because she had braces on her teeth and that was why they made the connection and of course if you check the film now she doesn't have braces on her teeth I'm guessing she probably never did but the fact that years later there was a suit there was an advert I think for a credit card in which the same character Jaws' character is paying for his shopping in this supermarket or store and the girl on the tail looks at him and smiles and she did have braces and so the idea is that that's implanted and I think it's very back into people's minds who watch the film Yes I don't know what to believe but it's certainly one of the most intriguing little puzzles and as I say I urge people to go to some websites and work through the examples themselves and see what you all think Now I have had the privilege of having him as a guest on my show James Bartley, are you familiar with James? I'm not You may have to jog my memory I'm going to put you guys in touch It's going to be a house on fire He's one of the world's leading experts not just on the whole UFO field but also of the abduction scenario James believes he was abducted as a child himself and by the time our episode is aired the episode I've just done with him recently should have gone out to and it's fascinating he's very open we discussed the for example the possibility of childhood trauma he was a military child his parents were in the military and I said possibly was your father away did you miss him, did you go to strange schools was this sort of thing and he was open to all he's a very, very lovely gentleman Where's he based? Oh I've got to get this right he's in the USA now our mixture of ancestry Filipino, Spanish, this sort of thing he's lived on Hawaii but yeah you know I did years ago back in the 90s I wrote a book about abduction but I have not really looked at that for years now I have been so focusing on these sorts of government and military UFO cases with pilots and radar operators and all the associated interest in Congress and that's probably why I've somewhat taken my eye off the abduction ball recently but it sounds as if I should dip back in Well yes I'd rather look for a plausible reason before I start going to something supernat I mean I think any sort of science based science minded person would do but like I said earlier I would never dispute someone else's story if I haven't lived it myself so it's interesting I don't know if it's because I saw a film that had this same theme where this I'm probably paraphrasing it but there was a child swore they'd been abducted by aliens or they were a young adult perhaps and then it turned out that they'd been subjected to horrendous abuse and that somehow their mind was trying to block out this horrendous abuse by coming up with this scenario that it wasn't abuse it was being abducted by alien craft and like I say I'm not suggesting here friends at home that that's the case but this is why we have these chants to consider all possibilities what has been your experience of that what kind of stories have you come across Oh I mean a huge range certainly there's a great quote in the movie post encounters of the third kind ordinary people in extraordinary situations and I think you can apply that to UFOs sure but you can apply it to these abduction accounts too I think as is the case with UFOs it's very unlikely that there is a single explanation that explains all these cases there are a multitude of different things going on at the one end of the spectrum let's not kid ourselves as with UFOs some people are just making it up you know through most probably just attention seeking then with some people you mentioned this yourself it may be that this is some distorted memory of some sort of childhood abuse physical, sexual, emotional some combination of that some of these experiences may be attributable to extremely vivid dreams or hallucinations some may be the product of some sort of mental health issue and as with UFOs there's sort of 5% of cases that you can't explain in those conventional terms there may be some of these cases that are something else and now I don't know whether that something else is physically taken on board a spaceship and all that supposedly comes with it I don't mean to make light of this I mentioned Mishio Kaku earlier he said something recently about a production in a light hearted way but it was a serious side he said next time someone gets abducted by aliens steal something off the ship so that you can bring it back and we can test it in a laboratory because there'll be things like isotopic ratio analysis that will definitively prove whether or not it was manufactured on Earth but you could get taking a court on Mars for bloody theft and those Martian prisons you don't want to end up in one of those no I've seen a sci-fi movie about that it was a light hearted remark but I suppose his serious point is we need something you see with the UFO stories we've got more than just the testimony we've got radar data we've got photographs and videos we've got Mazint on it but with the abductions frankly we don't have a whole lot more than just a bunch of stories and we need to find a way to kind of elevate it to the next level and also some UFO sightings I was watching a lecture the other day and the gentleman was pointing out how you can tell the difference between a government experimental craft and one that is just unknown so for example the Germans were supposed to have some fairly advanced technology do you have any idea how they I'm guessing they were just a best effort at trying to create a flying saucer but do we know how those were supposed to be propelled or not really there's a lot of I think false claims circulating about so-called Nazi flying saucers they were undoubtedly in many ways their aviation and aerospace technology was ahead of the Allies I mean the V1, the V2 in particular the ME-262 so in terms of jet fighters and rockets the Nazis were ahead but the point was they developed them very late in the war by a time in which the Allied bombing campaign could largely flatten places like Penemund where a lot of this was being developed yes the Nazis had a lot on paper but as for operational craft not so much now some of the so-called flying wing aircraft developed designed by the Horton brothers in Germany during the Second World War did arguably act as the genesis for aircraft like the V2 stealth bomber but I don't think they had quite as much developed as opposed to just theorised it's funny that isn't it the Horton brothers that they're doing their best to create our flying saucers on some far distant planet it's probably the Nanu Nanu brothers that have got their spanners out and they're working on something it all seems terribly human doesn't it when you put a name to these scientists well yes as above so below certain things I mean the laws of physics and the laws of chemistry seem to be the same in the observable universe so arguably any technological civilisation that emerges in the observable universe even though there's obviously a danger of anthropocentrism when it comes to figuring out what they would be doing and thinking there are probably some commonalities I mean on any rocky terrestrial in a planet probably the development of understanding how to harness and create fire is probably a prerequisite understanding and developing a written language so that information can be accurately conveyed from one person to another is probably a given the wheel and ultimately the jet engine simply because these things work according to fixed laws of physics and chemistry so there will be I'm sure some commonality and the other fascinating thing and I'll just give a quick overview of my understanding is both the Germans and of course the original rocket scientists who were in the desert out in California got to the point where they realised hang on we're not going to get a rocket into outer space using conventional thinking in traditional means i.e. going with the laws of physics as we know them I mean and so both parties probably started to explore the occult and I guess the thinking was well look if we're going to get something up there if we're going to make our I mean these are committed scientists absolutely want to achieve their aim but they're frustrated because they're mixing together some gas and some solid fuel the rocket's going up a bit but then it's just coming down again and this is why there's a fascinating history of the occult that runs through these programmes and I believe you can still see in the big space organisations today is that something you've ever come across Nick? Yes now I'm not sure I would agree with where you started out with that point because I would say there's a natural progression of technology that doesn't involve the occult but it simply involves our understanding of the laws of physics and our technological know-how to be able to exploit that increases so for example when you move from a propeller aircraft to a jet aircraft the rockets that did take us to the moon that does not use an occult technology that just uses a new technology as our understanding progresses That's if these guys well these were the guys that then went to form NASA weren't they so the German scientists and these Yanks I'm not sure I'm not saying that there isn't a strong thread of occult belief running through the establishment because there is absolutely I agree with that now whether it's produced tangible results or not I don't know it's certainly you can see in some of the symbolism even in some of the patches you can see for example an obsession with Egyptology that runs through a lot of this so for example the current sample return mission jointly being done by NASA and the University of Arizona is Osiris Rex and it's like the idea of Osiris is our god Osiris is our king Osiris is returning and you can see that in the names that they give and in the symbols that they use and it's not just that it's all over the place that part of it I agree with totally I just I mean I really think it's that I really just think they got to a point where their dreams are not going to become a reality so they just explored this other another avenue say personally if you're asking me I think kind of at witchcraft if we call it that is a bit mumbo jumbo I saw a lot of it in Africa funny enough and gosh didn't the locals in Mozambique well they believed all that stuff and it was interesting to see but yeah sure who knows I mean maybe at some stage there's going to be a synthesis of technology with the power of the mind and consciousness but those are subjects I'm afraid that are well outside my area of expertise I have not studied consciousness I have and believe that it may be the key to things that more conventional thinkers can only be done through fairly hard tech and I hope that's true and you hear people talk about the shamanic journey for example but again I'm afraid it's not my it's not my field yes of course it would obviously not mine either I think let's just say there's a few mind altering substances that really do make you question the nature of reality so things like DMT I'm guessing and this kind of thing you can see why it's tempting to explore consciousness as a way of travel I mean sure and Nick the funny thing I've got written down here can we talk about your television experience and you've advised on TV series and films yes well one of the things that I do now is I act as I do some consultancy work so sometimes on films someone will literally say well what should our spaceships look like and what should our aliens look like what sort of things are people reporting and experiencing and how would government really respond to this and sometimes that blends with spokesperson work where when the movie comes out I do some tie-in interviews and come out sci-fi blockbuster UFOs aliens and part of the publicity will be they'll speak to the actors and the director and things and talk about your experience on this movie but another strand of it will involve me and the media interviews will start with something like well in the week in which the new X-Files movie comes out we talk to someone who's run a real life X-Files program and it's just another strand of the kind of promotion of the movie a way of interesting people in the question of how much if any of what you see in this science fiction is or might be science fact so I've been lucky enough to be involved in a huge range of movies and TV shows and then of course I do TV news bulletins so for example I've been on shows like News Night and The Today Program when a news story on this breaks I've been on kids shows like Blue Peter I've been on chat shows I've been on the documentaries like Ancient Aliens and things and I know there have been a few jokes in the UFO community along the lines of you can't have a UFO documentary without Nick Pope in it well you can but I do seem to get my way in an awful lot of them and it's interesting and it's fun and I see my role now I've done this for the government so I see my role now as giving a sort of insider perspective on this and just trying to help kickstart a conversation which is being led in the United States frankly at the moment through some of the things we talked about the Navy videos and the report to Congress but kickstart a conversation on how this is a serious issue and it's not science fiction is fun but there is a reality here that deserves our time I mean after all what question would be bigger and more found than are we alone or not in the universe and maybe are we being visited and if we can talk about those questions and maybe find our way to some answers wouldn't that be great it certainly would my concern is is when you hear Fox News taking up the subject and their slant is we've got to defend the skies man are we not going to see a false flag operation in which we're told aliens have landed or they've blown up some public building and then we've all got to be terrified and give over more of our freedom to the trillionaire corporations do you think that's a possibility I'm not convinced I mean I've heard the theory and I've heard that maybe some sort of combination of Hollywood special effects and government Psyop might create something like that and then we get a space patriot act which as you say would sweep aside even more of our few remaining freedoms I'm not sure and I should say and maybe you're just being polite about it but in the interests of full disclosure I should say I have been accused of being part of that kind of threat narrative myself it's not true I'm simply trying to give an insider's perspective on how this topic is viewed in government and I mentioned right at the outset the capability times intent equals threat equation so that's all I'm applying but yeah I've been accused of that so if other people in the US like Lou Elizondo and Chris Mellon all I can say I mean you mentioned Fox all I can say is it's on CNN too and CBS and NBC and ABC BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and it's not a party political issue it's right, the media coverage of this is right on across the spectrum left right and centre you don't buy into the notion I think the same guy owns 98% of the media that we see is one individual in fact two corporations BlackRock and Vanguard have leading shares in every single company floated on the stock market so basically two companies can pretty much control the world trade I think when you start hearing these what I would call cheesy news outlets they say narrative I mean I know people's ears are pricking up at home where did we hear that before I really do think it's a possibility Nick that we're they're going to try and cast another one of their spells on us well all I can say is on a personal basis not guilty if you're the biggest threat that they could put forward in I think we all know we're quite safe Nick, thank you but yeah I mean there is this idea that I and a number of individuals predominantly in the US are deliberately promoting this threat narrative all I can say is it's not true but if anyone disbelieves it there's probably nothing that this denial will do so it is what it is I think that might be one of the I think the whole false flag alien invasion area might be one area where we might you and I might have to agree to disagree but then it would be a very boring podcast if we spent the entire time agreeing with each other like I say my jury's always out Nick on stuff I can't prove but I like to just consider sort of all the options especially with I'm just gonna say the history of the history of this planet let's move on though to the connection that has been suggested between alien species and indeed our own as in I wouldn't say into breeding but maybe some sort of into DNA or possibly a bit of breeding but with alien DNA quick synopsis for people at home so again feel free to correct me in the comments but we're talking is it the Nephilim and the Anunnaki and how these sophisticated beings from another place arrived on earth they implanted some of their slightly advanced DNA into primates or monkeys in order to create a slave race of which I guess that's us I know that there's people strongly fairly credible people strongly believe that the evolution thing is is not well is a lie basically and I just wanted to get your thoughts on it Nick well I think there's two sides of this first it is undeniably true that people have always seen strange things in the sky so the UFO phenomenon though we focus on modern events probably goes back to the dawn of time and ties in with so called ancient astronaut theory which you see most famously in TV shows like ancient aliens where it is alleged that we have been visited since the dawn of time and perhaps influenced by or inspired by extraterrestrials who we have mistakenly as and worshiped as gods that's one side of it I don't know about that then there's the second side which you may be more focused on the idea that there's been this sort of direct intervention that we have been almost seeded and part of a breeding program hybridization program whatever it might be frankly I don't believe that at all I'm actually rather a fan of conventional evolutionary theory I think the human a split was somewhere between five and seven million years ago anatomically modern humans emerged I think about 200,000 years ago and I don't I don't see any need for or evidence of alien intervention in that but as you say many people believe otherwise I don't know is it the missing link is where this is what we find it hard to bridge this gap don't we because we want concrete evidence and it just it kind of isn't there because of the missing links Well I think it's just because it's so difficult to find stuff I mean you know everything gets deposited and buried under different layers and then a lot of it's in parts of the world that are difficult to access and then we build over things and I mean it doesn't surprise me that we don't have that there are gaps in our understanding of things and rising sea levels of course have whether you believe it's natural cycle or you know given a boost by our own more modern industrial age activities but sea levels have been rising and covering up lots of the evidence of of course particularly of early human settlements but again that's not really my area of expertise fascinating though it is For anyone interested I strongly recommend checking out Jeffers channel from what I understand he's a very nice guy Robert he seems to feel that we've been a bit misled simply because the DNA chain doesn't doesn't pan out to one evolution he says human beings have very distinctly different lineage but of course the other thing Nick is and this is probably might be veering away from UFOs here but the advanced civilizations that seem to have gone before us of which now there's very little understanding except for things like the pyramids that are left behind and also some of these structures in South America I've seen some of these ancient buildings and literally the stonework is so perfect you couldn't you couldn't put a piece of paper between these huge blocks and some of these blocks away and 40 tons each so yes it all does it all kind of intertwines a bit and gets a bit interesting sure I know Graham Hancock and Robert Boval have done a lot of work into those sorts of theories yes fingerprint of the gods is a book that's well worth a read yeah absolutely Nick listen you've been absolutely wonderful some thank you so much for bringing your knowledge and your expertise what's I'd like you to give your books a mention if you would and also your website and we'll put a link below sure I've written a book on UFOs called Open Skies Closed Minds a book on alien abductions called The Uninvited a book specifically on the Rendlesham Forest just called Encounter in Rendlesham Forest I've written two science fiction novels Operation Thunder Child and Operation Lightning Strike about the RAF and MOD response to an alien invasion and I've written nothing to do with UFOs a thriller called Blood Brothers which is about a multi-agency team of special forces and intelligence community personnel hunting down terrorists in the UK that's my most recent blood brothers all of this and more general information about my government work on this subject can be found on my website which is nickpope.net and that also links to my social media and my Twitter is at Nick Pope MOD for Ministry of Defence Nick Pope MOD but it's all linked to from nickpope.net Brilliant a massive thank you again just Nick stay on the line until I hit the record button so I can thank you properly so our friends at home if you've made it this far massive thank you for staying with us if you could like and subscribe that would help I hope you've enjoyed this as much as I have I've tried to do my best here with sort of fringe knowledge and I guess the truth is out there