His Life

Nick Pope (1965–2026) was an author, journalist and broadcaster who ran the British Government’s UFO Project, and was widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on UFOs and the unexplained.

Born Nicholas George Pope in London on 19 September 1965, Nick was the son of Geoffrey George Pope, an aeronautical engineer who directed the Ministry of Defence’s Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, and Rosemary Pope. He was educated at Lord Wandsworth College in Hampshire and joined the civil service in 1985, aged 19.

Nick worked for the Ministry of Defence for 21 years. From 1991 to 1994 he was posted to the department best known as the “UFO desk”, where he researched and investigated the UFO phenomenon to assess its defence, national security and safety-of-flight implications. During this time he conducted trend analysis on UFO sightings and a cold case review of the Rendlesham Forest incident. His work earned him the nickname “the real-life Fox Mulder”. His final MoD posting was to the Directorate of Defence Security, and he left the department in 2006.

Nick wrote six books. Open Skies, Closed Minds (1996) and The Uninvited (1997) came straight out of the MoD years. Operation Thunder Child (1999) and Operation Lightning Strike (2000) were science fiction, both put through government security vetting before they could be published. Encounter in Rendlesham Forest (2014), written with John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, is the fullest account of the case he reopened at the ministry. Blood Brothers (2021) was his last, an action thriller about counter-terrorism in Britain, written as fiction because the work behind it was classified.

All six are collected on his Amazon author page.

He became a familiar face on television worldwide, appearing regularly on Ancient Aliens and many other news programmes and documentaries, and acted as consultant and spokesperson for several UFO and alien-themed films and TV shows. In 2024 he joined the Ancient Aliens LIVE tour across the United States.

In October 2010, Nick struck up a conversation with an American academic in the lobby bar of the Fairmont Hotel in San José. Elizabeth Weiss was a professor of anthropology at San José State University, a skeptic by training and by temperament. The press had been calling Nick the real-life Fox Mulder for years. He started introducing Elizabeth as the real-life Dana Scully. They married sixteen weeks later, during a UFO conference, and eventually settled together in Tucson, Arizona.

Nick spent his last months at home in Tucson, working through a list of British sitcoms with Elizabeth and laughing, by his own instruction, as much as possible. He kept giving interviews from the house, still curious, still willing to talk, almost until the end.

He was diagnosed with stage 4 oesophageal cancer in July 2025. It had already spread to his liver. He died at his home in Tucson, Arizona, on 6 April 2026, aged 60.