Three years prior to the extraordinary events at RAF Cosford and RAF Shawbury, similar objects were seen on repeated occasions in Belgian airspace in 1989 and 1990
The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies: Area 51
“Yes,” says Pope. “I approached the Belgians to get a comparison after their sightings. I phoned the Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Brussels and he spoke to one of the F-16 pilots who had been scrambled to intercept a Flying Triangle over Belgium back in 1990. Well, the Air Attaché reported back to me that the corporate view of the Belgian Defense Staff was that they did believe that they were dealing with a solid, structured craft. “Apparently, the word from the Belgians was: ‘Thank God it was friendly.’ If it hadn’t been, it was made clear to me that there was very little that the Belgian Air Force could have done anyway—despite the fact that the F-16 is no slouch.”
With the secret weapon angle disposed of as far as Nick Pope was concerned, what was his next step in the investigation? “There was only one place to go and that was up the chain of command and I briefed my head of division. He was notoriously skeptical about UFOs and generally made no secret of the fact that he thought that it was all a waste of time and resources. But he had been quite impressed by the Shawbury and Cosford events—even to the point of making some attempts to plot the course of the UFO.
“In fact, I recall him bounding into the office in a state of some considerable excitement when he thought that he had found indications of a straight-line track. I had copied some of the reports; but what he didn’t have was a batch of reports that had just come in and that painted a totally different picture.
“Well, I just thought that this needed to go up the chain of command. The main addressee was the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff; so what I did was to summarize the events on a couple of sides of paper and attach the original reports—the typed report submitted by the patrol sighting at Cosford and my own write-up of the RAF Shawbury sighting. “He took a few days to have a look at all the paperwork and then passed it back down the chain of command with a message that said: ‘This is extremely interesting. It is a genuine mystery but clearly you’ve made all the checks that we could reasonably make and it’s difficult to see how we can take this any further.’ And that was essentially where the matter rested.”
Today, does Nick Pope feel that the assessment of the assistant chief of the air staff was a fair one? “Well, yes and no. I felt extremely uncomfortable that we had a clear breach of the U.K. air defense region; and we had two Royal Air Force bases pretty much being over-flown by a structured craft and yet we had nothing on radar and absolutely no explanation. I applied our own standard line on UFOs and asked myself the questions: Is this of no defense significance? What if the craft had been hostile? What if a bomb-bay had suddenly opened up and it had attacked these bases? If that had been the case, and with the UFO not appearing on radar, the first we would have known would have been when the bombs were falling.
So, I came to the conclusion that this was of extreme defense significance. “I’m naturally suspicious of anyone that doesn’t declare their hand. And although there may be some very good reasons for them remaining covert, I think that from a military and defense point of view, you have to say that there is a potential UFO threat. “Personally, I felt that saying ‘Object Unexplained; Case Closed’ was not satisfactory. On the other hand, I had every sympathy with the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff; there was no faulting his logic. What else could he have done?
Really, it was an impossible situation. I can tell you, however, that after this, there were a lot more believers in the extraterrestrial hypothesis amongst the RAF and the MoD than there had been previously.” Given that the 1993 UFO encounters had a profound effect on a number of Pope’s colleagues, would it be fair to say that he, too, found his views on the subject altering? “Yes, they did, definitely. I don’t know if it was the single turning point that switched me from being an open-minded skeptic to a believer; but it was certainly one of the key events. In fact, if you were to ask me to take my best shot, I would say that this was the real article; this was extraterrestrial.”
While Pope’s conclusion was amazing, we should not forget that astounding 1989 encounter of Chris Gibson. The craft Gibson saw was identical to so many of the Flying Triangles that Pope and his colleagues investigated.
The fact that Gibson saw the craft being refueled over the North Sea is important: after all, the likelihood that a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker would have been pumping fuel into an alien spaceship over the North Sea stretches credulity to the very max!
It was not just at RAF Cosford that the Flying Triangles were making repeated appearances. In July 1997, the Staffordshire town of Rugeley was once again the target by mysterious activities. Omar Fowler, a Derby-based investigator, was given the details by the witness. “[His] attention was attracted by a noise similar to a high-revving two- stroke engine outside his home,” states Fowler. “He went outside in the darkness and saw hovering lights approximately one hundred and fifty yards away and one hundred and fifty feet up from the ground. [He] went indoors and fetched his binoculars and was able to make out the shape of a black helicopter in the vicinity of the lights.