Open Skies, Closed Minds: For the First Time a Government UFO Expert Speaks Out. - book reviews

Recently, in the United Kingdom, another book was published on UFOs. However, according to the media hype, this was not just another book about UFOs. According to an official press release, this book "blows the lid off the British Government's UFO secrets by exposing for the first time what they really know." And who should be in a better position to write such a book than Nick Pope, the man who from 1991 to 1994 was responsible for investigating and analyzing claims of UFO sightings for the British Ministry of Defence?

During this period, Pope worked for Secretariat (Air Staff) Department 2A -"The UFO Desk." Apparently, although he started out as a skeptic, he was forced by the sheer weight of evidence to acknowledge that extraterrestrial spacecraft really are routinely breaching the United Kingdoms air defences and that they represent a major potential threat to national security. In his new book, Open Skies, Closed Minds, he presents the apparently "irrefutable evidence" that has led him to this conclusion. It was therefore with great anticipation that I opened Pope's book a few days ago and began to read. My hands trembled as I turned the pages. The truth was about to be revealed. At last, a glimpse into the real X-Files . . . .

Okay, so I am exaggerating slightly. I had already been told by a friend who had read the serialization in a British daily newspaper that it was "just the same old stuff" as all the other books on UFOs. However, I had been approached by the producer of a TV talk show to provide a skeptical perspective on UFO claims for a program they were doing focusing on Pope's book, so I felt duty-bound to read it. As it turned out, my friend's description was totally accurate. I searched in vain for the "irrefutable evidence" that had been promised. What I found instead was a presentation of some of the classic UFO cases, plus some of Pope's own rather less impressive cases.

The book does actually give some real insight into the British government's approach to UFOs but not quite in the way that the book's publicity might lead one to expect. In the TV series The X-Files, the fictional Fox Mulder is often prevented from getting too close to the truth regarding UFOs by sinister government agents. It is widely believed by the UFOlogical community that the world's governments and military powers are all too aware of the reality of extraterrestrial visitors, and that they are engaged in a vast coverup to keep this knowledge from the public. UFOlogist Timothy Good is the main proponent of such a conspiracy theory in the United Kingdom, and he has written the foreword for Pope's book. A natural choice, it would appear.

There is only one snag. Pope, the man billed as "the real Fox Mulder," is convinced that the British government is not engaged in any kind of coverup. Far from it being the case that the government has vast amounts of detailed information on UFO technology, Pope is worried that the Ministry of Defence is so ignorant about "a phenomenon which is as real as toast." Good's foreword, therefore, argues that although Pope may be being honest about his lack of knowledge of a coverup, there is one anyway. If Good is right, then Pope is merely a pawn being controlled by unseen forces within the Ministry of Defence. If that is the case, why should we be expected to treat his revelations as any kind of a reliable guide to the UFO phenomenon?

Personally, I suspect that Pope is giving us an accurate account of just how seriously the British government takes the UFO threat. Contrary to the views of the conspiracy theorists, vast resources are not put into a sophisticated coverup operation. The job of dealing with UFO claims is allocated to a single person - and even that person has other unrelated duties! One part-time civil servant who has subsequently published a book on his activities and yet is still working for the Ministry of Defence is not really the stuff of elaborate conspiracy theories.

Interestingly, Pope seems to imply that the American government is engaged in a coverup. Many of the cases that he finds so impressive, in particular the notorious Roswell crashed-saucer claim, rely upon such a clandestine operation for them to be taken seriously at all. It is claimed that in 1947 a flying saucer crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, and that the debris, including alien bodies, was recovered by the military. The United States Air Force denies such claims, saying that the debris found was from a balloon being used in a then-top-secret military project known as Mogul and that no alien bodies were whisked away for autopsy. It follows that if a saucer really did crash, the United States government must be engaged in a coverup. What Pope never explains is why the Americans would feel it necessary to engage in a sophisticated, large-scale coverup while the British government is quite happy to virtually ignore the UFO phenomenon altogether. As with many of Pope's claims, his argument here just does not hold up. Skeptics feel that the reason conspiracy theories are so popular among UFOlogists is that they provide an excellent means of explaining the fact that no really convincing evidence exists.