ALIENS, UFOs and death rays sound more like the stuff of science fiction than the subjects of top-secret government briefings... but I know from my 21 years at the Ministry of Defence that our leaders take these threats more seriously than they let on.

I also learned from my time there that UFOs are real. And I should know, because my job throughout the nineties was to investigate them.

7 Nick Pope worked as a UFO researcher for the British government Credit: Nick Pope

World UFO Day fell last week, and it was very clear that the usual scepticism and ridicule had been replaced with a far more serious tone.

This may be helped by the fact that details recently emerged of MoD documents showing the UK government’s interest and involvement in UFOs - and suggesting that we had spent 50 years investigating the possibilities of developing alien technology.

I worked on these files and came out of retirement to help with the MoD's release project - the decade-long declassification of top-secret papers - which concluded in January.

And while the Official Secrets Act binds me for life, now that the government itself is releasing more details of my old MoD job, I can give people an insider’s perspective on what we really got up to.

United States navy pilots encounter bizarre UFO in video released by US the Department of Defense

From UFOs almost crashing into planes to alien abductions

The bottom line was that we knew UFOs were real, but we didn’t know what they were.

The majority of UFO sightings could be explained, but around five per cent remain mysterious.

The cases that concerned me most were the near-misses between UFOs and commercial aircrafts - there are several such cases in the MoD's UFO files.

7 This shot, taken in 2005, supposedly shows a passenger jet narrowly dodging collision with a UFO Credit: Mercury Press

7 Two 'UFOs' were filmed speeding past a helicopter before hovering over a dramatic crash site in southern France, in 2014 Credit: Jason Gleave

What was much more fun was the other weird stuff that came our way simply because there was nowhere else in government to send it: crop circles, claims that people had been abducted by aliens, ghost sightings and people who claimed to be psychic and volunteered their services to British intelligence.

But is it really true, as the latest declassified files suggest, that we were racing against the Russians and the Chinese to acquire alien technology and develop some sort of super-weapon?

Not quite, but the reality is almost just as bizarre.

7 Credit: SOURCED

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Keeping the secrets of the job MoD employees are allowed to say where they work, so I didn't have to lie to anyone about that. However, we had to keep things bland, and imply our jobs were boring and routine - which is tough when you spend your day dealing with this kind of thing. It helped that the MoD was the family business. I joined because my father, the MoD's Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser, suggested I might find the work interesting. That turned out to be a huge understatement, but it was only once I'd been formally recruited and undergone rigorous security vetting that I got a real idea of what it all involved. Those of us involved in UFO research downplayed the true extent of our interest, and never let on that civil servants like me were trying to make sense of what we were dealing with. We never spoke too openly about the possibility any of the UFOs were from somewhere other than Earth, but we remained open-minded and certainly didn’t rule anything out.

Death rays and communists

As ever in the MoD, we were interested in what the Russians and the Chinese were up to.

We were aware, in particular, that the Russians had put quite a lot of effort into researching and investigating not just UFOs, but parapsychology – telekinesis (moving objects with the mind), psychic phenomena and similar things.

We viewed all this in terms of threats and opportunities, and one opportunity was the possibility that "novel military applications" might result from a better understanding of UFOs.

7 Supposedly, there have been a number of near misses with UFOs and passenger planes, like in our mock-up Credit: SUN

This was connected with a view that UFOs might not in fact be objects but rather the result of changes in energy in the atmosphere. This raised the intriguing possibility of channelling the energy and developing a death ray.

If that was the opportunity, the threat was that the Russians and the Chinese might beat us to it.



Pilots vs aliens

All the while, the Americans were conducting their own research.

Last year, after years of denying there was any US government interest in UFOs, the Pentagon admitted they’d been investigating sightings after all.

The Pentagon's UFO project was known as AATIP – Advanced Aerospace (or Aviation, depending on who you ask) Threat Identification Program.

7 This UFO sighting also supposedly came from a US Air Force pilot

When you can’t even be sure of the name of a government project, you know you’re dealing with some pretty secretive stuff.

The point is, they did a very clever thing by not mentioning "UFO" anywhere in the title, and as a result, Congress, the media and the American people were completely in the dark until the story broke, and some declassified videos surfaced of US Navy jets chasing UFOs.

7 This white object was one of the UFOs recorded by US Navy Pilots

We still don’t know much about AATIP, and it may take Congressional hearings to resolve the issue. Either way, if anyone was laughing about UFOs before, they’re not laughing now.

Not that those of us who have looked at this subject from within government were ever laughing. We knew better from our own experiences, which tie in to the latest bombshell revelations.

We knew that RAF pilots saw UFOs, and occasionally chased them. We had gun camera footage which looked pretty similar to the declassified videos from the US Navy.

United States navy pilots encounter bizarre UFO in video released by US the Department of Defense

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Radar operators tracked these things from time to time, and the speeds and manoeuvres were astounding.

We told Parliament, the media and the public that UFOs were of "no defence significance", but this was a meaningless soundbite designed simply to get people off our backs.

And while we may not have been in a race to acquire extraterrestrial technology and alien weapons, as some conspiracy theorists are suggesting, it was certainly as spooky and surreal as anything you’ll ever see in The X-Files.