What Planet Am I On?

by Shaun Ryder

  ‘To me, as a young man,’ says Larry, ‘it just spun the world that I thought I knew upside down.’

  I ask him what is his own personal take on what happened that night.

  ‘My personal belief, thirty-two years later, is that they [the Air Force and other authorities] had equipment pre-set up here that was designed to bring in phenomena and other intelligence. Their plan was to contain this phenomenon and observe it under close quarters, with the Special Forces they had set up around the forest.’

  ‘So you believe they attracted these visitors?’ I ask.

  ‘I believe they, the government, the Feds, whoever, had the technology, which is beyond me, that could open the door to this phenomenon, so they could observe it. But this thing got out of hand. Maybe it was only supposed to be one night, but it turned into three, and I think they pissed this phenomenon off. That’s why it got too big and beings were coming down here.’

  Larry also reckoned the authorities had nuclear power present.

  ‘The nuclear power that we had was adversely affected by the phenomenon.’

  Something truly weird obviously happened that night in Rendlesham. But I find it hard to separate the fact from fiction, even with Larry. I like Larry, but he’s quite angry. He seems to be angry with the world, that this happened to him, and more than that, the way it had happened. There were two guys who, years later, had come out with their own version of the story, and he is particularly angry with them: ‘Why did they not say this at the time?’ They didn’t say anything for years and all of a sudden, twenty-five years later, they came out and said, ‘We touched the craft, and we got something, and they were time travellers.’

  But if these guys did keep quiet for ages, I can see they might do that because they were career military dudes, you know what I mean? Their dads were in the Air Force. Their dads’ dads were in the Air Force. It was a career for them. They weren’t just some guys who signed up to get the fuck out of Hicksville USA. They were from military families whose whole lives going back generations were based around the military. So it made total sense to me that they didn’t want to come out and talk about it. They were just closing ranks. That’s what the military does, isn’t it? Literally. You don’t shit on your own.

  ‘You know what it’s like, Travis,’ Larry says. ‘I know you’ve had people questioning what you say, and I know your head spins with it, or used to.’

  Larry actually thinks he was lucky not to get whacked because he wouldn’t shut up about the incident. And do you know what? Maybe he’s right. I know that sounds a bit Goodfellas, but the authorities were trying to shush him up for a long time. There were plenty of people back in the day who were linked to stories that were sensitive to governments and then happened to meet with ‘unfortunate accidents’. I think that sort of thing is less likely to happen nowadays, partly because it would be harder to cover up.

  But make no mistake; governments don’t like you going round talking about something that they want to keep quiet.

  Especially the US government.

  CHAPTER 11

  Meeting the Pope

  AS I MENTIONED earlier, I wanted to meet as many credible figures as possible during my mission, and Nick Pope was exactly the sort of geezer that I wanted to talk to. I’ve always had a bit of an issue with the way UFO witnesses are judged – the credibility of a sighting seems to depend on who sees it. If you or I spot a UFO, it’s unlikely many people will believe us, but it’s a different matter if it’s a large group of individuals working within the military or government. That makes even the sceptics sit up and take notice.

  Nick Pope is a very interesting dude because he’s a former member of the Ministry of Defence whose opinions on UFOs are taken very seriously indeed. I’ve seen him on TV over the years and read his book, and what I like about Nick is he isn’t supposed to believe. He first joined the MOD in 1985, and did a few different jobs before 1991 when he was appointed to Secretariat (Air Staff) Department 2A – which is a right mouthful, but basically to those in the know at the MOD, it was the ‘UFO desk’. His job was to investigate and analyse claims of UFO sightings and to assess their threat to national security. Little did he know that the job was going to change his life.

  It’s pretty obvious to me that he was chosen for the job because he was a safe bet. He was from a military background and his dad was in the secret service. It counts in your favour, doesn’t it, if you come from a military background and you’re almost conditioned to it from birth? He was also a UFO sceptic, which helped. Obviously they didn’t want to put some absolute UFO nut in the MOD job, giving them access to all sorts of secret files. So when the job came up, someone obviously went, ‘What about young Nick Pope . . . Popey’s boy? Let’s get him in. He doesn’t believe in all this stuff and he’s only twenty-one, he’s not going to go out and start mouthing off and causing us problems. He’s perfect. Give Popey’s lad a shout . . .’

  So Popey’s lad gets the gig because he’s one of their own, you know what I mean? He’s family, and he doesn’t really believe in all this stuff. And when Nick comes in on his first day, he has the attitude that it’s pretty much all bullshit. But then over the first year or two of the gig, he starts seeing all this evidence come across his desk that can’t just be explained away, and he’s like, ‘Whoa, hang on a minute, there’s actually some weird shit going on here.’

  Apparently some ufologists like Doug Cooper were happy to work with him and talk to him as part of official investigations. But some other ufologists saw him as ‘a sinister Man in Black type character’ and refused to have anything to do with him, as they believed the MOD and its staff were all part of a conspiracy to cover up the truth about UFOs.

  At the time, the MOD stated in public that it ‘remains totally open-minded about the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life forms’, but the staff reckoned there was no evidence to suggest that any UFO sightings posed any threat to the UK or that they were extraterrestrial. Nick clearly didn’t agree that all the UFO sightings he came across could be explained away that easily. He resigned from the MOD in 2006, saying the government’s ‘X-Files have been closed down’, and in 2009 the MOD announced that UFO sightings would no longer be investigated. By then Nick had already started giving interviews to the press about it all and speaking pretty openly about it. From starting out as a sceptic, he had become a firm believer in UFOs.

  For instance, on 9 November 2006 the Evening Standard newspaper ran an article under the headline ‘“Aliens could attack at any time” warns former MOD chief’. Nick Pope is quoted as saying that ‘highly credible’ sightings of UFO activity were just being dismissed by the MOD and the effective closure of the UFO desk was leaving the county wide open for extraterrestrial interference. ‘The consequences of getting this one wrong could be huge,’ he said, even though he believed that as yet there was no evidence of a hostile threat.

  In the article he acknowledges that reports such as a 1993 sighting of a ‘vast, triangular-shaped craft’ over Air Force bases in the West Midlands had convinced him that there was something out there that needed investigating. He also mentioned the Rendlesham incident in 1980.

  Since leaving the MOD, Nick Pope has continued to investigate UFO sightings and has become one of the world’s leading experts. He’s also published a bestselling book called Open Skies, Open Minds – For the first time a government UFO expert speaks out.

  Nick has agreed to meet up with me and suggests taking me to the National Archives to go over some of the most interesting UFO files there. I’ve seen the National Archives before on documentaries and I’ve always fancied having a poke around in there. Who wouldn’t? So it sounds like a great plan to me.

  We meet first for a brew in a posh little café in Kew, in West London, which is a bit fancy. I like Nick straightaway. I think he is a totally straight-up dude. You can tell that common sense had just prevailed with him. I find it hard to believe that some ufologists wouldn’t deal with him because
they thought he was some shady Men in Black dude. He’s just a normal guy, he’s hardly Tommy Lee Smith, you know what I mean? The first thing I want to ask Nick is what his feelings were about UFOs before he got the job.

  ‘When I started that job I was broadly sceptical,’ he explains. ‘I really didn’t know much about the subject. When I came out of the job after three years I had changed my mind. While I’m not a total believer, I certainly know that there’s more to this than misidentification or hoaxes, there’s something weird going on in our skies.’

  I ask him if he thinks governments take UFOs seriously.

  ‘Yes, they do. This is a serious issue. If there is anything unknown in your airspace, particularly if it’s been seen by pilots and tracked on radar, then the military and governments want to know what it is, so it doesn’t surprise me that governments all over the world have UFO departments.’

  I tell him about my first encounters that I had when I was a kid back in the seventies, and he says there was a huge spike in the amount of reports of UFOs to the MOD during that decade. I’m also intrigued to find out what was the most interesting case he came across while he was in the job on the UFO desk.

  ‘The most fascinating case I came across when I was running the UFO desk was the Cosford incident in 1993, when there was a wave of incidents over a few hours, including sightings at two military bases. There were lots of reports from military personnel and police. I spoke to the Met Officer at RAF Shawbury, the morning after, and his voice was shaking as he told me about a huge diamond-shaped UFO.’

  The Met Officer described to Nick how it had moved slowly across the countryside towards the base at a speed of no more than 30 or 40 mph. He saw the UFO fire a narrow beam of light, a bit like a laser, at the ground and then saw the light sweeping backwards and forwards across the field, as if it were looking for something. It sounds like a searchlight that you see on prison watchtowers in the movies. He heard an unpleasant low-frequency humming sound coming from the craft and said he could feel as well as hear it – rather like standing in front of a bass speaker. I’m not sure if the ‘bass speaker’ part of the story was the Met Officer or Nick Pope’s description. It made me wonder if one of them was an old raver. I couldn’t really picture Nick on the dancefloor at the Hacienda, but you never know! He might have thrown some shapes in his time.

  I’d heard about the Cosford case before and I am keen to know more about it. Nick had made a programme about it for Channel 5 in 2006, which was based on the original MOD files and was a pretty decent show for that channel, to be fair. Obviously the fact that a lot of the witnesses were officials and police made it a lot more credible in some people’s eyes. Nick says there’s a lot of info on the case in the National Archives, which holds copies of all the UFO reports ever filed and he says he’ll take me there now and show me, which is music to my ears. I can’t wait to get my mitts on some proper official reports. I feel like a proper investigator.

  Shaun’s X-Files

  The National Archives is the archive of the UK government and it holds over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use. The National Archives’ collection of over eleven million historical government and public records is one of the largest in the world. It includes everything from the Domesday Book to modern government papers and digital files, electronic records, photographs, posters, maps, drawings and paintings.

  When we get to the National Archives, Nick clearly knows his way round the place, which is great. It’s like having my own private expert guide to the nation’s UFO files, which is ace. It’s kind of pretty much what you’d imagine the National Archives to be like, just rows and rows of shelves full of files, like a massive, fuck-off library. When we get to the UFO section it makes me laugh that a load of the files have a big ‘X’ on the side. ‘Are these the real life X-Files, then?’ I joke with Nick.

  A lot of the stuff here is open to the general public for viewing, but not everything. Nick explains that some files that are now a hundred years old are still closed. What secrets are so dangerous that you can’t let the public know about them a century later? ‘What’s in those files?’ I joke with Nick. ‘Was Jack the Ripper actually a member of the Royal Family or something?’

  When we’re looking at the files and handling them, we have to wear little white gloves. I feel like Minnie bloody Mouse or one of those mime artists.

  The first files we look at are those on the Cosford incident, which happened on the night of 30 March 1993 and involved hundreds of witnesses. The episode began with two reported sightings in Somerset. The first witness was a copper who described seeing a craft that looked like two Concordes flying side by side. A group of Scouts had also seen the same thing. Later that same night, 200 miles north of the Somerset sightings, officers at RAF Cosford and RAF Shawbury reported seeing similar craft flying over their military bases. The fact that loads of military officers reported it obviously made people sit up and pay attention.

  Nick was in his job at the time at the MOD so all the reports of such incidents landed on his desk. By the time he got to work in the morning there was a bunch of reports already waiting for him.

  Shaun’s X-Files

  The 1993 Cosford incident is one of the UK’s biggest unexplained UFO cases to date.

  Unlike many UFO stories, the core collection of sightings – timed between 1.10 a.m. and 1.15 a.m. – tallied to a remarkable degree. Most described two bright white lights speeding towards the south-east horizon, leaving trails of luminous vapour in their wake.

  Nick pulls out a map that he drew at the time, plotting all the various sightings connected to the Cosford incident. There was a whole bunch of reports from various witnesses. Nick showed me one from the Met Officer at RAF Cosford and his description of the way the craft crossed the sky reminds me of my own encounter back in the seventies.

  Checks that were done at the time ruled out the possibility that it could have been military or civilian aircraft. Radar records were carefully scrutinized but they all drew a blank. As a result Pope cited this case as the turning point on his tour of duty – the ‘big case’ that led him to believe that extraterrestrials really were able to penetrate Britain’s defences at will.

  RAF Fylingdales – an early warning station in North Yorkshire that tracks satellites and ballistic missiles – told Nick that a Russian rocket had re-entered the atmosphere around the same time. But Nick didn’t accept that and wrote to DI55, the branch of the defence intelligence staff who handle this sort of sighting, telling them: ‘Whilst the decay . . . might explain some of the high altitude sightings, it does not explain the low level sightings. It also fails to explain [the] report of a low hum, or the report from Mr Elliott, the Met Officer at RAF Shawbury. The spread of timings and bearings of the sightings also argues against this decay explaining all of them.’

  I ask Nick what he reckoned happened that night.

  ‘I don’t know. To this day the whole incident is completely unexplained.’

  He’s a clever bloke Nick, so although he’s very open-minded, he’s not going to come out and say it was definitely a UFO or make wild suggestions without proper proof. He then shows me what he calls the ‘killer document’ on the case. It’s from the Ministry of Defence and says, ‘in summary, there would seem to be some evidence on this occasion that an unidentified object or objects of unknown origin, was operating above the UK’.

  That is an official report from the MOD almost admitting that they reckon there was an UFO in our skies that night. Nick agrees with me. ‘That’s an absolute fantastic line. It’s the nearest the MOD has ever come to saying UFOs are real, they’re in our airspace, but we don’t know what they are.’

  Bloody hell. I don’t think that line has been reported as much as it should have been. I’d never heard that from the MOD before. It was well worth coming to the National Archives just to have that one line from the MOD.

  I read it again to myself: ‘there would seem to be some evidence on
this occasion that an unidentified object or objects of unknown origin, was operating above the UK’.

  You’re not going to get more than that from the bloody MOD are you? That’s only one step away from saying, ‘Guess what, folks? UFOs are real and they’re here.’

  Shaun’s X-Files

  In 2012, nearly 7,000 previously secret documents detailing UFO sightings were released by the MOD. Access to these official papers is encouraging for people who believe they’ve encountered or even communicated with extraterrestrials. The documents were released after a campaign by Dr David Clarke, who had been asking the Ministry of Defence to release the files since 2003.

  Among the 7,000 files were documents detailing that:

  • Tony Blair was briefed on UFO and alien defence policy as he was so concerned about the disclosure of classified information on extraterrestrials when he was Prime Minister;

  • a Whitehall civil servant was paid to investigate UFO reports;

  • government officials believed aliens might be space tourists and suggested harnessing UFO technology for British defences.

  One of the most interesting files that the MOD released in 2003 related to an MOD officer. It doesn’t give his name in the file, but the officer claims that aliens might ‘come here for holidays’. Which made me laugh. Earth can’t be all that bad, can it, if aliens who have the ability to travel through space and visit different planets were choosing to come here for the holidays? Can you imagine an alien couple on their spaceship, debating where they’re going to go this year? He’s saying, ‘What about that new moon that’s just been discovered in Andromeda II galaxy? That looks pretty interesting.’ And she’s giving it, ‘Can we just go back to Earth again, it’s really pretty.’ He’d probably warn her that they were in danger of getting spotted if they kept coming back, but she’d still get her own way.