The Calvine UFO Incident | Nick Pope

My name's Nick Pope. I used to work for the British government. I worked for them for 21 years at the Ministry of Defence and for much of the early 90s I was responsible for researching and investigating the UFO mystery. I'm here at this conference to talk about one of the most interesting cases in the British government's UFO files, the Calveen incident. This was a case where two hikers were out walking in Scotland and they saw a large diamond-shaped craft hovering a short distance above the ground and they took some photographs and then this object shot off to the horizon at incredible speed. Now they contacted a national newspaper and the journalist took the photos and was writing up a story, but then things got very interesting and effectively the whole story was killed. The photos disappeared, the hikers who had seen this object and taken the photographs never spoke out again and have never been traced and for many years there was a blown-up copy, poster-sized copy of the best photo on my office wall, on the office wall of the UFO project in the Ministry of Defence and then when the Freedom of Information Act came in, one of the things that people were expecting and looking forward to was, well, we're going to see this photo that everyone's been talking about and they didn't. It disappeared and the Ministry of Defence said we have no record of this photograph. What survived was a poor quality photocopy of a line drawing, a tiny little black and white thing. What was missing was the huge full-size colour spectacular image, the best UFO photograph ever taken, the only UFO photograph ever taken that has survived a proper scientific analysis that declared this was a genuine image. There was no trickery, this was a real object and it was big and we in the Ministry of Defence did not know what this was. My best guess as to what happened, as to why this photograph disappeared, why the witnesses dropped off the radar, is that rightly or wrongly, senior officials in the Ministry of Defence, in military, intelligence, believed that they had encountered some secret prototype stealth aircraft or drone, maybe American, maybe British, and that this was highly classified and that they felt therefore that this should not be made public. Now, I know from my position in the Ministry of Defence and from my contacts in military intelligence that this was not an aircraft or a drone. We didn't have anything like that, neither did the Russians, the Chinese, so I think that was a false theory. But I suspect that the people that were responsible for the photograph disappearing genuinely believed that this was a secret prototype of some sort. So I think even though what they did was unfortunate, I understand why they did it. I think they did it out of loyalty to the UK, loyalty to one's country. The Ministry of Defence is inherently a secretive organisation. The default position is to say nothing. However, there was a fundamental culture change and it was a real culture shock to us all when the Freedom of Information Act came into force. The UK's Freedom of Information Act came many, many years after the American Freedom of Information Act. So this was something of a surprise to us, but it was Prime Minister Tony Blair who brought in this particular piece of legislation. I think that it affected the Ministry of Defence more than most government departments. I mean, as I say, we are an inherently secretive department of state and there are many exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act. Defence, national security, intelligence. These exemptions are far more likely to apply to the Ministry of Defence than to other government departments. Agriculture, fisheries, food, those sorts of things. So a lot of what we did was top secret and remains top secret, but things are changing. The Freedom of Information Act has fundamentally, I think, shifted the debate about a lot of this. Whistleblowers and the internet, social media, mean that we live in a fundamentally different world to certainly the secretive government world that I certainly was used to. And this does mean through genuine legal declassification under FOI and through less proper processes like whistleblowing, but it does mean that information that a generation ago would have never seen the is now coming into the public domain and we live in a new world and it's an interesting place. The chances of us being alone in the universe are vanishingly small and also the chances of one other intelligent civilization in the cosmos are as unlikely as the vanishingly small chance that we're alone. So likely what we are dealing with is a universe teeming with life, a huge variety, much of it unintelligent, but some intelligent and civilizations. The reason I say this is that when one looks at evolution and natural selection, what we find is that in terms of survival strategies, well, you know, if we look at the only model that we have, planet Earth, and we look at survival strategies, some animals get to be strong, some get to be fast, some are well camouflaged, but some are smart. And intelligence seems to be a very good survival strategy. And one would suspect that it's, I think, a reasonable assumption that a universal law of natural selection and evolution, that intelligence would arise elsewhere in the universe and would evolve. And in a universe 14 billion years old, it's interesting to speculate what a civilization, say, look at the difference between us and the Romans, 2,000 years, and we've come from, you know, the gladiators and the circus maximus through to stealth fighters and space probes and nanotechnology and computers and social networking just in 2,000 years. Imagine a civilization in a universe 14 billion years old that's, say, a million years ahead of us, 100 million years, even a billion years. What would they be like? Would they even bother interacting with us at all? Or would it be, as one scientist said, like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a chimpanzee? And we're the chimpanzees. So I don't know. There is likely a big universe out there with a whole bunch of civilizations, some biological, some post-biological. We may well be dealing with artificial intelligence because, again, that seems to be, you know, when one looks at the process of evolution, that seems to be something that we're moving towards and the next, you know, 20, 50 years may be pivotal there. As to why governments would keep any of this secret, I mean, well, there's two questions. Firstly, why isn't there the archetypal landing on the White House lawn? Why don't extraterrestrials interact with us? Well, you know, partly that may be because we are just the anthill that somebody may try to avoid stepping on but may not necessarily want to sit down and talk to. But the other thing is, to a genuinely advanced extraterrestrial civilization millions of years ahead of us, there may be very little new and exciting in the universe. There comes a point, I suspect, a sort of ceiling, a cultural, scientific, technological ceiling, where just about everything that you can discover and invent, you've done. To such a civilization or civilizations, new and emerging civilizations like us here on planet Earth might just be the last interesting thing in the universe and therefore the very last thing that you'd want to do is contaminate that newness by interacting. It's the anthropological argument that if you're observing animals in the wildlife, you don't interact with them. You kind of put yourself in a hide and that's what we do if we want to do a documentary on lions and, you know, whatever. And this might be the same situation. We might genuinely be observed but by a civilization that does not want to interact with us because then you get that cultural contamination and the very thing that makes us unique and interesting then disappears. You get a sort of homogenization of cultures across the cosmos that ceases to be interesting. But, you know, to advanced civilizations, questions like, you know, who are these people on planet Earth? Where are they going? What's their journey going to be? That's interesting. That's exciting. And I can understand why they don't land on the White House lawn. Now to flip the question the other way around, you know, that explains I think the extraterrestrial secrecy if that's what we're dealing with. The government secrecy in a sense is much more simple. The answer is essentially that no government ever likes to say we don't know. All of our societies and our power structures here on planet Earth are essentially, you know, it's the pyramid structure. At the top of the pyramid we have our leaders whether they're, you know, presidents or kings or whatever we call them. We have our leaders, our elite, and at the base of the pyramid we have, you know, the greater numbers of ordinary people just living their lives. For that power structure to persist, leaders need to project an image of strength, authority, power, knowledge. And for those leaders, for those elite to say we're dealing with something here in the UFO phenomenon, but we don't know what it is. It's better than us. It's faster than us. And, you know, we send our jets up to try and chase them, but they run rings around. No government could ever come out and say that because what that really says, the message is we are not in control. We are not at the top of the food chain. And as I say, no government, you know, which persists by projecting its power and authority, no government is going to say that. They can't. They won't.