New Realities recorded on July 22, 2014
Summary
Alan Steinfeld interviews Nick Pope, a former UK Ministry of Defense employee who investigated UFOs. They discuss Pope’s background and how he discovered that some UFO sightings are inexplicable. The conversation centers on the 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident, detailing the evidence of a physical craft, the trauma experienced by US military witnesses, and the subsequent government cover-up involving interrogations and missing medical records. They also touch on the societal implications of first contact, the role of private aerospace corporations in holding UFO secrets, and Pope’s upcoming talks at the Contact in the Desert conference.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. This is Alan Steinfeld. And this program is really about the ongoing investigation of human consciousness and the evolution of a planetary civilization. And nothing speaks more to that than the situation about UFOs, unidentified flying objects, flying saucers, whatever you want to call these objects that have been seen in the sky for the last, I would say 60, 70, 100 years. And dealing with that, there’s a big conference that’s happening in Joshua Tree, California, August 8th to the 11th, 2014. And you can go to contactinthedesert.com for tickets. But tonight I have one of the people who’s been in the field a long time. He was part of the UK British government investigations into UFOs and he’s just written a very interesting book called Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, which was a major event that happened in a forest in England where a US Air Force and a UK Air Force base were involved. And Nick, welcome to the program.
Nick Pope
Thank you. It’s great to be on the show.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, just to start with a little bit more of your background. You were in which way working for the British government in dealing with UFOs?
Nick Pope
Well, I worked for the Ministry of Defense in the UK for 21 years. And for three of those years, I did a number of different jobs, but for three years, from 1991 through to 1994, I was responsible for researching and investigating the UFO phenomenon. I mean, it really was like the real-life X-Files. The media has called this job. And it was an extraordinary period of my life as a government employee suddenly finding myself thrown into this extraordinary subject. I mean, it really did open my eyes and I think opened my mind to a range of possibilities that I hadn’t considered before. And even though of course I’ve left that job a long time ago, I still continue my interest in this subject. How could I not? I mean, how could you walk away from something like this?
Alan Steinfeld
Right. I mean, how did you actually get that job?
Nick Pope
Well, you know, it was almost entirely luck. There was no kind of plan or no complex maneuvering. The policy, the career policy in the Ministry of Defense at the time was simply to move pretty much everyone every two, three, four years, either on level transfer or promotion. And it so happened that I was looking for a new job at just about the time that this vacancy came up. And in fact, it was during the First Gulf War. I found myself seconded from my normal peacetime duties into a part of the Ministry of Defense known as the Joint Operations Center. I was working in the Air Force operations room and I happened to be working to a particular manager and we got on particularly well and he was impressed with my work and he said, I’ve got a vacancy coming up. I know that you’re looking for a new permanent job after this. He said, would you like to come and do this particular posting? And I said, what’s the job? And he said, it’s UFOs. I looked at him with a sort of bemused expression on my face and said, what did you say? And he said, yes, it’s UFOs. And well, I decided it was far too intriguing to pass up the opportunity. I think in life you regret the things you didn’t do, not the things you did do. That’s my philosophy. So I took the job and it changed my life.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, it changed your life because you weren’t closed to it, but you weren’t aware of the depth, the level of events that have been going on really since, well, early 1900s, but 1946 onward. And then what was it that made you say, oh my God, there really is something going on here?
Nick Pope
Well, I think it was a combination of things. I mean, you’re absolutely right. I really didn’t know anything about the subject. I’d probably seen the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I can’t even recall whether or not I’d heard of Roswell. So I really came in not knowing the history of the subject. I probably had the preconceived idea that it was all aircraft lights and weather balloons. So day one, I sat down at the desk, I started to go through some of the old files, and gradually, as I delved back over tens of thousands of documents that the Ministry of Defense had amassed on this subject over the years, I kind of did a double take. I said, wait a minute, you know, sure, nine out of 10 of these sightings, maybe more than that even, 99%, turned out to be misidentifications of perfectly ordinary objects and phenomena. But over the years, the Ministry of Defense had got in its files a number of cases that absolutely defied conventional explanation. And where sometimes the witnesses were our own people. There were military pilots who had encountered these things, radar operators who tracked objects performing extraordinary speeds and maneuvers. There were photographs and videos that we’d occasionally been sent where the department’s technical wizards hadn’t been able to determine any sort of conventional explanation or any hint that these images had been faked in any way. And in fact, sometimes it was gun camera footage from our own military jets that had been chasing these things. So I think the more I looked into it, the more I realized that my preconceived notions had been completely wrong. And whatever the true nature of the UFO phenomenon, and I don’t know, I mean there are a number of different theories doing the rounds of course, but it’s not just aircraft lights and weather balloons.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, obviously not. If you just have one case where these vehicles are moving at a speed faster than anything humans have made, that would be enough to convince everyone that there’s something real going on. So when you come across these cases when you were working for the Ministry of Defense, why wasn’t that brought to the people in charge and say, hey, we got a real phenomenon here. Maybe he was and say, we need to tell the public, we need to tell the world that something real is happening. Was that said or suggested?
Nick Pope
Well, it was a difficult situation. But you were absolutely spot on in your question when you said, and it’s something that we constantly reminded ourselves at the Ministry of Defense. Essentially we said, it doesn’t matter if 99.999% of all these cases turn out to have conventional explanations. We said the believers only have to be right once. And it’s arguably the ultimate game changer. Now as to bringing this up the chain of command and telling the public, there was a problem with that. And you know, I was at the time a comparatively junior manager, so I didn’t have a huge amount of authority to make policy on this issue. But unfortunately, over the years, the Ministry of Defense had kind of gotten into the habit of falling back on what I call a lazy sound bite and saying that UFOs were of no defense significance. And of very little genuine interest. So cases where we had, for example, these things being spotted by military pilots, tracked on radar, they ran the risk of blowing our own public policy out of the water and making what we’d said for several decades just look out of date. And there was another problem too. No government, no Air Force likes to say we don’t know. And no government and no military like to even consider, let alone admit publicly, that there might be things in its airspace that it can’t identify but that in terms of capabilities significantly exceed everything and anything that we’ve got. Bottom line is it worst case scenario looks like we’ve lost control of our own airspace. Now that’s not a comfortable place for any government to go and it’s not a place they wanted to go.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, it may not be a place that they want to go, but it is a place that actually they are. You know, and that’s the reality. And of course, it gets back to the book you just completed, the Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, where there was obvious, from what I’ve heard and from the witnesses I’ve seen, the Americans involved in Rendlesham Forest. There was a real craft that came down and there was this encounter with a bunch of US. I don’t know if the British actually witnessed it, but that was an undeniable event. And of course it’s been covered up by the US government and probably by the UK as well. So talk about that in the book and that truly one of the most remarkable cases on record. And it needs to be brought out and I’m glad you’ve written one of many books that are already out there, but I think a crucial book. So please talk about that.
Nick Pope
Well, thank you. Yes. I teamed up on this book with the two United States Air Force witnesses at the heart of this encounter, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston. Now they were actually two of several dozen United States Air Force personnel who actually witnessed a UFO over a series of three nights in December 1980. Now these were United States Air Force bases but on British soil. And although there weren’t any British military witnesses, there were a number of local civilians who did see the UFO too. And what I think is extraordinary about this case and in many ways I think this is a UFO incident that is as impressive if not more so than the iconic Roswell incident. And indeed in a sense more important because sadly of course because of the passage of time most if not all of the primary Roswell witnesses have now passed away. So I think our chances of any major new breakthrough on Roswell are pretty small. But Rendlesham Forest, as far as I know all the witnesses are still very much alive and they’re now linking through Facebook and other social networking sites. This was not just lights in the sky. This was a landing. A small craft came down in a clearing. Strange symbols were seen on the side of this craft which were likened to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The craft left physical trace evidence. It was tracked on radar as it came in. It smashed branches off some of the trees. It was emitting such a high heat source that it scorched the faces of the trees around the clearing. And after it took off, when the landing site was investigated subsequently, radiation levels were found to be significantly higher than the average background. And that was an assessment not from UFO researchers but actually from the government. And there’s a paper trail of absolutely verifiable government documents, both British and American, underpinning all of this. The problem, and this is where we get into the whole business of cover-ups, the American government was absolutely painted into a corner on this because their public position to Congress, to the media, to the public was, hey, we’re not interested in UFOs. We don’t investigate this anymore. We haven’t investigated since the end of 1969 when Project Blue Book was closed down. But here we have not only United States Air Force witnesses seeing UFOs, but the Deputy Base Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt investigating, becoming a witness himself, interviewing some of the witnesses. And so what was going on was in a sense a direct contradiction to the US government’s official position on this. And that’s why it put them in an incredibly difficult position.
Alan Steinfeld
Well the official position is what you say. Of course there probably is an unofficial intelligence that is at work because when I heard Jim Penniston speak and not only did he touch the craft and get a download of zeroes and ones, but he was also interrogated by the Air Force and I think he said he was given sodium pentothal to see what his unconscious was actually aware of but then was never really conscious of what he told this investigation. Can you clear that up a little bit? Because I think in there is the obviously portrayal of what’s really going on there. You know denying, ignoring, and of course keenly interested in what really is happening with UFOs.
Nick Pope
Sure. Well you’ve mentioned one of the most interesting and actually one of the most controversial parts of this whole story. Jim Penniston got closest to this craft than anyone. He took photos of it that he was subsequently told did not come out, perhaps because of the bright light or perhaps because of the radiation, we don’t actually know on that. After he had shot off a whole roll of film, he sketched the craft and the symbols in his police notebook. And those sketches survive and we reproduce them in the book. They’re also fairly widely available on the internet. But the other point about all this is as you touched upon briefly, when he actually approached the craft and touched it, he it’s almost like a jolt went through his body and he received what’s subsequently been referred to as almost a telepathic download of ones and zeros, a sort of binary code. It’s been dubbed perhaps the Rendlesham code. And this binary message is extremely controversial, as you can imagine. And he pretty much forgot about this, got home a couple of days later, it was almost as if under a compulsion he wrote out 16 pages of ones and zeros in his police notebook and then promptly sat on it for decades. Didn’t really kind of give it much conscious thought, didn’t really realize the significance of this. And now of course it has come out and it’s really become I suppose the most controversial story in the UFO community at the moment and it really gets to the heart of the mystery I think.
Alan Steinfeld
But can you, I mean I know there’s lots of questions, but can you, I’m sure it’s been translated those zeroes and ones. Is there, is it in the book what it actually is saying, those zeroes and ones? What does that translate to mean?
Nick Pope
Yes. There have been a couple of attempts to decode this binary message. And the best that people have come up with so far is that it’s a string of latitude and longitude coordinates that actually match various sites of great significance to ancient belief and worship. For example, the Great Pyramid in Giza, the Nazca lines in Peru, the portal at the Temple of Apollo in Naxos in Greece. And one of the coordinates seems to match the supposed location of the mythical lost continent of High Brazil, which has sometimes been dubbed the Celtic Atlantis. Now as well as these latitude and longitudes, there is some text. And the interpretation of the text is, and this is a direct quote, exploration of humanity continuous for planetary advance, eyes of your eyes, origin year 8100. Now of course this has in many people’s minds opened up the intriguing possibility that what we’re dealing with here is not extraterrestrials but time travelers from the future. And this debate, what is it that we’re dealing with here, has really I think gripped the whole UFO community. Some people think it’s extraterrestrials, some people think it’s time travelers, other people think it’s maybe intrusion from other dimensions, and indeed some people think it’s what I guess you would call unknown unknowns, some sort of phenomenon, maybe intelligent, self-aware, but not necessarily anything we’ve really got words for, concepts that we can understand.
Alan Steinfeld
That is fascinating. And that is a major addition to the whole field that’s been sort of like going around in circles for the last 20 years or so. But is that some of the stuff you’ll be speaking about in Joshua Tree?
Nick Pope
That’s correct, yes. I’m actually, they’re certainly making me sing for my supper. I’m giving three presentations I think and sitting on three discussion panels as well. So I’m certainly giving a presentation on the Rendlesham Forest incident and I’ll be going into all the matters that we’ve discussed. I’m also giving a presentation which looks at the societal consequences of first contact. This is something that sci-fi writers have thought about for many years now and some people in the UFO community. But I’m going to discuss how perhaps governments and the scientific community as well as society as a whole might deal with this, what the effects might be on geopolitical issues, science, technology, religious belief, personal worldview. So that’s going to be another of the sessions that I’m going to be involved in speaking about. And I’m giving a third presentation on what I call deep politics and UFOs. And again I’m going to get into some of the issues of a cover-up that we’ve touched on in this interview. And almost what I call the Orwellian doublethink that some people in government had to really employ in considering this issue. In that on the one hand we had a public position, what Congress and the media and the public get told, but on the other hand we have a kind of flip side of that, that we do have highly classified intelligence studies going on. And we do have for example the possibility that, you know people ask who are the guardians of this secret? One possibility is that it’s been moved out of government and into the private sector which takes it further away from congressional scrutiny. It takes it outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. So I’m going to be looking at some of those rather tricky and controversial issues too. And I’m sitting on panels as well. The Contact in the Desert event is a mixture of presentations, workshops, intensives, and panels. I’ll be sitting on a panel looking at alien contact experience. I’ll be sitting on a panel looking at government cover-ups. And also a panel just called Anunnaki. And of course I don’t have to tell you how popular the kind of ancient astronaut theory is now. The program Ancient Aliens has really kind of brought this into a new focus.
Alan Steinfeld
And of course the major instigator of the ancient alien theory will be there, Erich von Däniken, who really started it all in the 1970s with his books on the ancient astronauts and the Nazca lines. And you know, before Erich von Däniken, a lot of this was not known. I don’t know if he’s right about everything, but he definitely brought it to the public and he’ll be a big part of this year’s event. I’ll be there, I’ll be hosting one of the stages, introducing the speakers, maybe moderating some of the discussions. So I think it’s going to be a really great event. Last year there were about 800 people, this year they might have close to a thousand people there. So um.
Nick Pope
Well yes.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, this is becoming the premier UFO conference in this country anyway, maybe around the world. But getting back to this idea about government cover-up and Rendlesham Forest and the event with Jim Penniston. When he was interrogated, it seemed like something, somebody was playing with his mind a little bit, at least that’s what I put together in his testimony. And whoever interrogated him was seemed to be part of that cover-up. Do you have any ideas or what’s your theories about that whole part of the case?
Nick Pope
Well the allegation is certainly that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations was perhaps the agency involved in some of these interrogations. But I think there are other people who suggest that it’s different agencies within the intelligence community. It’s very difficult to say for sure. But let me quote you something on that which I think gets to the heart of your question. This is a quote written not by a conspiracy theorist or by a UFO researcher, and I don’t mean those terms in a disparaging way, but I think it’s important to tell the listeners who this is coming from. This is coming from the Deputy Base Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt. And he wrote about this, Office of Special Investigations operatives harshly interrogated five young airmen, some of them in shock at the time, who were key witnesses. And then Colonel Halt went on to say, and again this is a direct quote from the Deputy Base Commander, drugs such as sodium pentothal, often called a truth serum, when used with some form of brainwashing or hypnosis, were administered during these interrogations and the whole thing has had damaging and lasting effects on the men involved. Now that’s an extraordinary statement for the Deputy Base Commander to actually come out and make.
Alan Steinfeld
But the thing is, who were the people that gave the sodium pentothal to Jim Penniston and others? I mean who was the intelligence behind that?
Nick Pope
We don’t know. And I think I don’t have to tell you how much power and authority the Deputy Base Commander has, and particularly when you compare his rank to the junior airmen and other NCOs who were the main witnesses. And yet even the Deputy Base Commander was apparently powerless to stop these people coming and going as they pleased. There are stories of unmarked aircraft coming in, personnel in civilian clothes just demanding and getting access to all areas of the base, any personnel they required. And it seemed that the normal chain of command were unable or unwilling to stop this. And this is why I think I mean the answer to your question is we don’t know. No one knows who these people were. We can speculate of course, and it’s the usual alphabet soup of agencies that people have suggested, NSA, CIA, MI5 or MI6 if it was British intelligence. But the honest answer is we don’t know. But whoever it was, they seemed to be able to operate with complete impunity and ride roughshod over all the usual processes and procedures that you would expect to be in place to protect the more junior personnel who had already been traumatized by being exposed to whatever it was that they encountered.
Alan Steinfeld
Well that’s the key it seems to the whole question is I’m saying you don’t know and I’m sure people don’t know. But if we did know and maybe Charles Holt does know more than he says, or maybe not. I don’t know what side of the story he’s on in your new book. But if someone knew who these plain clothes, unmarked craft were about, then we would get at the core of the giant cover-up that’s been going on really since 1947. So any ideas and what does Charles Holt suggest that these people are? I know you say those same agencies, but is there any evidence along those trails? The thing, the question of Rendlesham Forest is not so much the UFO, but it’s the coverup.
Nick Pope
Yes. I don’t want to speak for Charles Holt. I‘ve actually spent a fair bit of time with him since the publication of the book. We’ve been involved in a couple of new TV shows that will be coming out shortly on UFOs and specifically the Rendlesham Forest incident. He certainly believes that there is a highly secretive and extremely powerful agency charged with keeping this secret at all and any costs. But I don’t think he knows names and dates and locations. I suspect he knows more than he is saying in public, but as I say have spent a fair bit of time with him recently and I really do get the impression that he is as frustrated as anyone at, in a sense, the inability to get to the bottom of who these people are and what this agency is. My own personal suspicion, as I touched on a little bit earlier, is that this is actually in the private sector, and that I think might be why people in the military and indeed the government don’t have the handle on it that you might expect them to have.
Alan Steinfeld
Well maybe in the private sector, but it seems very strange that the private sector can come in and interrogate US Air Force officers as a private organization. That’s a little inconsistent. That doesn’t make sense to me.
Nick Pope
Well let me put it this way. Certainly in my own experience in the Ministry of Defense, when you go to the big defense and aerospace corporations, if you look at the executive board, you’ll see that it’s pretty much packed with retired military chiefs. And many of the people involved in the deep black project that some of these defense and aerospace corporations are working on have higher security clearances than many of us, most of us in government. So actually, it’s not quite as surprising as people might think that some of these corporations have this huge amount of power. And something else which might be of interest, a few times in the Ministry of Defense when we had a really highly classified and sensitive study, instead of carrying it out in-house, we would actually have a contractor do it. And it’s for the reasons that I mentioned earlier, it’s that it takes it further away from congressional or, in the British government’s case, parliamentary scrutiny, and it takes it outside of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. So actually, I know it’s counterintuitive, but I think it really is the private sector and these handful of ultra-powerful corporations that we need to look to. And I don’t have to tell you that when we look around the world, we live increasingly in a society where a handful of powerful mega-corporations have an annual budget which exceeds the GDP of many countries.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. But what I’m just curious what you think a private corporation would do with this information in this case. I mean, would they want it for their own technological development or what do you think?
Nick Pope
Absolutely. Make no mistake about it, the nation or, if it’s a corporation, the private company that first acquires this technology will be the dominant force on this planet for the foreseeable future. Now, if it’s a nation state, we could say politically, militarily, economically. But if you want a sort of dystopian vision of the future, actually the Alien movie franchise perhaps covers this quite well with the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, if I’m pronouncing that correctly. But increasingly, that’s the world we live in.
Alan Steinfeld
But that would make sense if it wasn’t for the fact that the Rendlesham Forest event happened in 1982? 83?
Nick Pope
1980.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, 1980. So what, now 34 years later, if it was a corporation, a private sector, what’s happened? What’s the development? Can we see anything as an output from that type of interrogation? Just as a hypothesis, I’m not saying that you have the answers. I’m just interested in what you think may have come of it.
Nick Pope
Yeah, I don’t know. If you look, for example, and I’m not linking this project to Rendlesham specifically, but for those that are interested, if you Google BAE, which is British Aerospace, and then Taranis, T-A-R-A-N-I-S, this is the next generation unmanned combat drone aircraft. And if you look at this thing, if you look at some of the publicity shots of it, you might as well be looking at the archetypal sci-fi image of a spaceship in a hangar. Now, my follow-up point is this. If that’s the sort of thing that they’re now publicly announcing, what is it that they’ve got that they’re not publicly announcing?
Alan Steinfeld
Right. Right. I mean, yeah, I get that. And you think then that there must be parts of the government that are well aware and working with this private sector. Was it all ultimately frustrating to you on a personal note? Because there you were with evidence, and still we’re just like a small club or a part of you see the same people at the same event. Maybe it’s growing, but ultimately we’re ignored. You know, there might be a thousand people in Joshua Tree in August. They will be ignored. The citizens hearing for UFO secrecy Steven Bassett put on in front of six former members of US Congress, they were basically ignored. I mean, we’re talking to ourselves. What is to come of all this? Do we slowly gain numbers? I’m just curious on your perspective.
Nick Pope
Well, that’s a really interesting question and perspective. I would look to history, and I would point to a number of points in history where a popular movement suddenly kind of reaches the tipping point. Something that for years and years and years just looked like a complete non-starter suddenly crosses the line, builds up the critical mass. And at that point, political leadership thinks, you know, we need to be on the side of the winners and change is inevitable. And a couple of examples that spring to mind, of course, are votes for women, civil rights, whether it’s abolition of the slave trade or more general civil rights with, for example, the Civil Rights Act and an end to things like segregation.
Alan Steinfeld
Or even the whole gay marriage thing that just went big in the US. That was quite a fringe thing.
Nick Pope
Indeed. Indeed. History shows us that these moments do happen and there is a time when the people can push against a door, and for years and years that door doesn’t move. But gradually, it opens a crack. And once you then get your foot in and shove, sometimes those doors completely open.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. I think that’s a really good point and you’re absolutely right. It just seems, maybe it seemed that way with the civil rights, banging on that door for years and years, going back to the 50s when people like Major Keyhoe and George Van Tassel, who had a place right out there in Joshua Tree, and people were coming forward and saying, look, stuff is real. And there were UFOs over Washington DC in 1952, and people have been banging against this door. And maybe it will move. I mean, I’m very committed to the truth coming out. And obviously, there is a truth that needs to come out. So perhaps we’re moving into really exciting times where the tipping point will happen. What’s your guess? Will this go on for another 20 years banging against the door or is the tipping point in sight, in your opinion?
Nick Pope
I don’t know. I sense a kind of quickening of the pace. I think you mentioned things like the Citizen’s Hearing on Disclosure and, of course, the Joshua Tree Contact in the Desert event. I don’t think it’s the case that these things happen and then have no effect. I think they do have an effect. But I think that effect is not necessarily going to be apparent at the time. I think it’s only, as it were, after the event, when we come back and write the official history of this, that perhaps other facts come out, and perhaps we see that some of these things did have an influence and a bearing. But perhaps behind the scenes, I look, for example, at the recent statements that have been made by NASA about just how close they think we’re coming to a scientific detection of extraterrestrial life. Now, of course, they’re very careful, they’re not talking about UFOs, they’re not talking about landings on the White House lawn. They’re talking about exoplanets and astrobiology. But I think it all helps. And I look at those statements, I look at the statements that, for example, the Catholic Church has made since May 2008 incidentally, but continuing to this day, about how there would be no doctrinal objections or problems with extraterrestrial life and indeed extraterrestrial intelligence. I see all of these things as maybe being part of the bigger picture.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, I think so. And I think you’re right, something seems to be building in this direction, and maybe something from outside this whole field will just wake people up to possibilities that they haven’t thought of before. We’ll see, all we can do is do what we’re compelled to do, what we’re moved to do as far as our version of the truth and what we see as a bigger picture. So does the Rendlesham Forest episode fit into this big picture? Of course, it’s pretty well known, but how do you see that contributing to this overall disclosure?
Nick Pope
Well, I think that because of something I mentioned earlier in the interview, namely the fact that most if not all of the primary witnesses to the Roswell incident have now passed away, I think that the Rendlesham Forest incident has now by default become the UFO community’s flagship case. And I almost literally lose count of the number of new TV documentaries that have featured the Rendlesham Forest incident in the last couple of years, and I know of at least two more in pre and post-production now. And so I think that increasingly, it’s going to be Rendlesham Forest, not Roswell, that perhaps is used to fly the flag for this subject. I think it’s only a matter of time, for example, before Hollywood comes calling and thinks, hey, you know, there’s been a TV movie on Roswell, it’s time we did Rendlesham Forest. And I think therefore that, you know, if you stop the average person in the street, even if they’re not interested in UFOs, even if they’re not a believer, they’ve probably heard of Roswell. I think in a year or two’s time, they will equally have heard of Rendlesham Forest. So I come back to this point, when if we do get a definitive resolution of this, when we then write the history of this, how it all happened, I think the Rendlesham Forest incident will be a key part of that story.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, I mean, it just seems to go deeper and deeper. It’s true. The first I ever heard of it was Peter Robbins’ book, Left at East Gate, but that was just the beginning I think of uncovering. And then, of course, Linda Moulton Howe, who will be there in Joshua Tree, did work with Charles Halt. So there does seem to be different sides of the story from what I’ve heard, as we wrap up, between Charles Halt and Burroughs and Penniston. There does seem to be a little controversy between those two sides. Is that true?
Nick Pope
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think it would be a very boring world if they all agreed. And yes, clearly there are some tensions there. I mean, anytime that you get different people perceive things and remember things and interpret things in different ways. And what you’ve got is three very strong characters, Charles Halt, John Burroughs, Jim Penniston, all with their own view on what happened and indeed on what should happen next to try and take this forward. So it doesn’t surprise me that there are some tensions. But I think if you go back, I mentioned earlier, for example, the civil rights movement. You had a number of different people involved in the civil rights movement with very different philosophies of how to take it forward. Consider the difference, for example, between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. But that doesn’t mean that ultimately there isn’t more that binds them together than sets them apart.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. But what is the big tension? I’m just curious if you want to share, maybe you don’t, between Halt and Burroughs and Penniston. What’s their point of contention there?
Nick Pope
Well, I don’t want to go too far into this because I think it runs the risk of betraying confidences and things. But I think one issue clearly is the rank. Colonel Halt was the deputy base commander, and there’s certainly a feeling that maybe there was a duty of care owed by the senior officers to the more junior ones. And clearly, I think you can always point to the fact that there’s always going to be tension between dealing with officers at the senior level and the more junior NCOs and airmen.
Alan Steinfeld
All right, I get that. That’s a very proper answer. I mean, of course they all agree obvious obviously something happened, there was a craft that landed. I think from what I’ve read and researched of the case that Penniston seems to have, I mean because he touched the craft and then was thrown to the ground, I think that’s what he said, and what he told me personally is he’s been traumatized ever since that moment. And he actually said he couldn’t go to sleep without taking sleeping pills every night because of the dreams he may have had. I think he said something like that when I talked to him. So I mean there’s trauma and there’s trauma around all levels of this encounter that are a big part of the question. Do you have anything to say about that and the level of psychological intensity that happens and has happened?
Nick Pope
Sure, I think you’ve only got to, as you clearly have, meet people like Jim Penniston and John Burroughs to see that over 30 years on they are still haunted and traumatized by this. Many people would say, and I think I would probably be one of them, that they are displaying some symptoms still of post-traumatic stress disorder. And I think that only goes to show, these are pretty tough guys, they’ve served in places like Iraq and various other operational theaters, these are tough dudes and they don’t scare easily. So when people like that are shaken up by an encounter like this, you can absolutely be certain that something truly extraordinary happened.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. And that gets to really the heart of what I’m interested in investigating. What is the trauma? The trauma could not have just been seeing a craft or maybe it was, but what do you hypothesize is at the core of this trauma of encounter in this case and in other cases?
Nick Pope
Well, it may be some memory that has yet to emerge. Of course, we discussed the allegations that a combination of drugs and hypnosis were used. Maybe actually even to try and scramble some of the memories, we don’t know. So it may be some fact that has not yet emerged that has been so traumatic. We shouldn’t also overlook the medical effects, and indeed we didn’t really have time to get into this, but as a result largely of the Citizen’s Hearing on Disclosure, one of the critical things that Jim Penniston and John Burroughs wanted was the release of their military medical records, which it transpired were lodged in a classified record section of the Veterans Administration. So perhaps the answers lie there. I mean, certainly there’s a classified British study which suggested that they had been irradiated by the craft. Indeed we know high levels of radiation were involved there.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, what I think I’ll just throw out my hypothesis is especially those people who’ve said they’ve encountered ETs. There’s a level of, let’s call it consciousness or a field effect that’s so different from our human perception that it is traumatic. And actually, Linda Moulton Howe at that citizen hearing talks about someone who witnessed one of these ETs telepathically downloading something that was so overwhelming to him that he passed out. And I think that’s part of the trauma and the post-traumatic stress that people suffer in these situations. It’s the encounter of consciousness. So I’ll just throw that out there.
Nick Pope
Yes, I think you may very well be onto something there. Dealing with something, encountering something that we simply have no frame of reference for may with many if not all people sort of just totally throw them out of kilter. We have no way to deal with something like that perhaps.
Alan Steinfeld
Exactly. And that’s so traumatic. Well, Nick, thank you so much for taking some time. I look forward to seeing you in Joshua Tree and going deeper into all the discussions you’re having there on these subjects and everything that you’ve been dealing with for the last 20, 30 years. Do you want to tell people how to find you, your website, and the book?
Nick Pope
Sure, my website is nickpope.net. People can find out about my government work on UFOs there. And the book on the definitive account of the UFO encounter in Rendlesham Forest is, of course, available on Amazon and all the usual book sites. And of course, details of my Contact in the Desert presentations can be found at contactinthedesert.com.
Alan Steinfeld
Yes. Nick will be there along with all the other major investigators in the field. Richard Dolan, Linda Moulton Howe, Stephen Bassett, Steven Greer. Of course, Erich von Däniken, Giorgio Tsoukalos from Ancient Aliens. I would say yes, go to the website, look up the speakers and come on out to Contact in the Desert, contactinthedesert.com in Joshua Tree, California. August 8th through the 11th. I’ll be there, I’ll be emceeing one of the stages along with a bunch of other people. We’ll have star watching, we’ll have night vision glasses. Have you ever looked in a night vision glass, Nick?
Nick Pope
Yes, I have, absolutely fascinating.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. So we’ll be out there looking at that. There’ll be a bunch of them out there. And I think it’ll be a great time. Thanks so much for tonight and I’ll see you out there, okay, Nick?
Nick Pope
I’ll see you there. I look forward to it. Thank you.
Alan Steinfeld
This is Alan Steinfeld for New Realities. If you want to reach me, go to my website newrealities.com or email me at newrealities@earthlink.net. Thanks for listening. Goodnight.