Celebrity UFO Bollocks

There are some things you just can't seem to escape.  In my case, it seems to be UFO bollocks and Nick Pope.  I thought that, when he died earlier this year, we might see some abatement of the whole UFOlogy nonsense of which he was a key figure.  But, the other evening I caught a bit of The One Show on the BBC, with Bradley Walsh promoting (yet another) TV series he is fronting, this time about UFOs.  Now, I have nothing against Walsh, he seems a nice enough bloke (and difficult to avoid on TV these days), but my heart sank when he described Pope as one his 'heroes' and enthused over the fact that this new series would include one of the last interviews given by him.  All the usual cobblers about Nick Pope was trotted out: how he was part of the MoD's 'X-Files' and investigated UFO sightings in the UK, how he knew all about the cover ups and had access to those secret files.  As I've pointed out here before, this is all just so much horse shit.  The MoD has no 'X-Files', Pope did not investigate anything.  He was simply posted, for a couple of years, to the section to which public reports of UFOs were referred.  I once spoke to his successor on the desk, who told me that there were no investigations, simply a form letter of response sent out thanking the individual for contacting the MoD, but pointing out that the Ministry had no interest in investigating reports of UFOs unless they posed a clear threat to national defence.  The original letter would then be filed (more often than not in the bin if was really crazy).  Now, this guy had no reason to lie to me and we both held the same security clearances, (I met him on a training course when I worked for the MoD), so he had no need to withhold anything from me.

The security clearances are an important issue here, as, like myself and his successor, Pope was subject to the Official Secrets Act, which means that if he had ever used anything he had come across in his work which had been classified in any of his books or TV appearances, he would have been prosecuted under the Act.  As he wasn't, I think that we can safely assume that everything he wrote and said publicly about UFOs was utter bollocks. Because folks - and I can't emphasise this enough - Nick Pope was a bullshitter.  A charlatan.  A grifter who used his short time at that desk in the MoD to build a huge confabulation with which to exploit the gullible and weak-minded.  I've said all of this before and it is depressing that I feel the need to repeat it, but the cult of Nick Pope doesn't seem to have died with him.  Now, if it was just his usual followers - cranks and crackpots - still worshipping at his altar of falsehood and regurgitating his cobblers, I wouldn't really care, but when I encounter it on prime time TV - prime time BBC for which I pay a licence fee, at that - complete with celebrity endorsement, then I object.  I found the whole episode extraordinary, with Walsh declaring that it carried more weight when celebrities like him talked about UFOs than when 'ordinary' people reported sightings.  I'd say the opposite was true: celebrities are generally self-seeking egotists desperate for publicity of any kind, making me less likely to believe anything they say.  By contrast, if a regular, non-celebrity, person was to tell me about how they'd seen a UFO, then I'd be far more inclined to believe that they'd seen something, (something that could probably be easily explained by rational means).  None of this about whether UFOs or aliens exist, its about the fact that the whole field is riven with utter falsehood driven by greed and avarice.  I'm sure that people do see things that they can't identify.  But that doesn't mean that they are alien spaceships - in fact, I'd say that was the least likely explanation.  Nor do I exclude the possibility of alien life elsewhere in the universe - but I don't think that they are regularly visiting the earth giving anal probes to sad, lonely people.  That's just someone's sad sexual fantasy.