Matt Beall Limitless
Former Head of Britain's UAP dept talks UFOs, UAPs, Disclosure, and MoD Incidents | Nick Pope #38
Thu, 30 Jan 2025
Join us for a fascinating conversation with Nick Pope, former UFO investigator for the UK Ministry of Defence. With decades of experience, Nick discusses the truth behind some of the most mysterious UFO sightings, including the infamous Rendlesham Forest Incident and the Calvine Incident. Hear his take on current UAP events, the evidence that’s out there, and what’s next for the world of UFOs.Follow Matt Beall Limitless: https://x.com/MattbLimitlesshttps://www.tiktok.com/@mblimitlesshttps://www.instagram.com/mattbealllimitless/https://www.facebook.com/people/Matt-Beall-Limitless/61556879741320/ Listen on: Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-6727221 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MattBeallLimitless Check out Nick Pope:https://x.com/nickpopemodhttps://nickpope.net/wpte19/https://www.facebook.com/nickpopeofficial Episode Timeline:00:00 Introductions10:12 A Career in the MoD31:38 Reality of the Situation51:38 Primary Evidence01:01:14 What evidence is out there?01:16:31 What makes you think we know?1:25:49 Current UAP Events1:49:49 What do you think it is?1:55:32 Rendlesham Forest Incident2:32:52 Calvine Incident2:51:33 Cosford Incident03:18:14 What is coming Next?03:21:31 Apocalypse COVID03:44:14 ClosingThe views and opinions expressed on this podcast are not necessarily the views of the host or of any business related to the host.
Chapter 1: What is Nick Pope's background in UFO investigations?
The thing that I am known for is the UFO job, which is a posting that I had from 1991 through to 1994. Probably the nearest equivalent to the job I was doing, you'd have to go back to the old US Air Force Project Blue Book. If disclosure was easy, we would have done it by now. There must be something that makes this difficult. A secret too terrible to be told.
There is a faction that believes that aspects of this phenomenon are demonic. He received what he could only describe as a sort of telepathic download of ones and zeros. He translated it from binary. There was a message, a list of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Our intelligence community imagery analysts looked at them. They said, this object is real.
So you're the reason we're all saying UAP. I am the reason. What do you see as coming next? Like, what's on the horizon? I think it's something where I would give people some advice. Buckle up, because we're going on one heck of a ride.
Well, good. Well, welcome, Nick Pope. I'm excited to have you here, man. Excited to start talking today about all the things. There's a lot of things we're going to get into, not just UFOs today, right? So probably focus on UFO, UAP, but then potentially a little bit on COVID. You're writing a book about that.
And then potentially a little bit on maybe some ancient civ stuff, if I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
Sure thing. Nothing's off limits. And I'm, I'm looking forward to this.
Cool. Cool. Well, tell us a little bit about what, first off, maybe what are you doing today? What's life like today for Nick Pope?
Life is busy, uh, which is good. I enjoy working. Uh, so obviously, uh, today here filming with you, which is, is great to come to Florida. Um, and do that.
It's cold though, man.
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Chapter 2: What challenges has Nick Pope faced in UFO disclosure?
I would go with the latter. And I mean, again, looking at some of the massive stone blocks, like the platform at Baalbek in Lebanon, to figure out that. And I was having this conversation with Travis Taylor, and he was saying that to lift something like that. And it's not, as you know, it's not Roman. The Romans kind of inherited it from the Sumerians, built on top of it. Yeah.
But you would have to build a special crane, specially constructed to hoist something like that. You'd have to design it and things. And yet people are saying, oh, yeah, it was just done with rollers and hoists and things.
It's like, come on, man. It's what we have, so it must have been what they used. It's what we know about, so it must have been what they used. Yeah, it's a silly argument. Well, good. Well, how did you get into the, I guess, first off, where did you grow up? Where, where, where are you from?
I'm from England, and as you can probably tell from my funny accent. It's fantastic. Well, TV producers say that an English accent is a superpower. It is, yeah.
It makes you appear ten times smarter than anyone else in the room.
Yeah, I'm not, of course, but my accent means I can get away with it. And people think, oh, he must know a lot. I'm like, yeah, just bluffing it.
Yeah, yeah, perfect, perfect.
But no, I was brought up in the UK and lived there until I was about 45 and then actually got married to a US citizen and moved over. I've been in the US since January 2012, but yeah, brought up in England and the Ministry of Defence
The MOD was what I jokingly call the family firm because my father worked there as a government scientist, actually an aeronautical engineer, but he went on to be director of the Royal Aeronautical Establishment at Farnborough where they have the air shows and actually retired as deputy chief scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defence. And he'd always encouraged me
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Chapter 3: What are the primary pieces of evidence for UAP?
Did you feel like they were testing you early on in your career in order to see if you were going to be ready for the UFO job?
I'm not sure I would characterize it like that, but I would say that from day one I was absolutely being tested and I joined for a while what was called Midit, which stood for... Gosh, let me think what it did stand for. Method of identifying and developing internal talent. And it was a kind of fast stream. There were several fast streams. Some were not as fast as others.
But I went into this thing called Midit. So, yes. They do try to identify people who they hope will be high flyers, invest in them in terms of giving them good training opportunities, but also posting people to challenging areas where you will, for example, have responsibility...
at a younger age than most, for example, whether that responsibility is managing a team or whether it's managing a particular area of the department's business or both. And so I was challenged And again, well, you're a CEO, you know the value of identifying and then developing your internal talent. So I think people are at their best when they're pushed.
And when I became a manager myself, as I rose up the chain, I was always a believer that people worked best under pressure, when you challenge them, and that sometimes if you've got someone who... I don't know, you... There are two ways that their career goes. Take a chance on them. Promote them. And I did that a couple of times.
I found people who, you know, I was lucky enough to work with some brilliant, brilliant people, some of whom had been sort of languishing at a lower grade. And I thought, here's someone who's just not – they're not on the face of it necessarily doing – Why not? Because they're not being challenged. Bring them up a grade or two. And I worked with some amazing people who had that situation.
And I was challenged like that very early. Now, I don't think that was necessarily... a prerequisite for the UFO job, but it certainly came in handy.
Yeah, gotcha, gotcha. And you were in that UFO job for three or four years, you said? Three years. Is that about what you expected going into it, that you would be in there for about that period of time?
It is almost exactly what I expected. At the time, three years was pretty much average. And I was in the junior managerial grade. And by that time, I was hoping to get to the next grade up. And I thought, if I do three years here and I do well... I will be in the running for a promotion to the grade of what we called HEO, higher executive officer. And that's exactly what happened.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the UAP to UFO rebranding?
And I've met people like Lou Elizondo, of course, who had that investigative and policy role in relation to UAP sitting in the Pentagon. So yeah, the similarities and differences.
Okay. So what were, so it was public facing. So it was essentially, it was primarily declassified. It was, you were able to speak about this publicly?
Yes, I can. And that's a question people often say, well, am I a whistleblower? And I'm like, no, absolutely not. I can, I can talk about things publicly. that are unclassified and things that have been declassified. So I'm absolutely not a whistleblower and would never discuss any classified information without lawful authority. So we got 200 or 300 UFO reports each year.
And of course, you know, UFO is the language that we use to the public. UAP is what we use. said internally. There's an interesting story about that. Even back then you were saying... We were saying UAP. UAP, really? Now the history, the term UAP, I... I think some researcher turned up a US document going back to 1948 that used the phrase, but it fell out of use.
We resurrected it in the early 90s in the UK Ministry of Defence, and we resurrected it very deliberately and purposefully to rebrand the subject. And we did this because the subject had attracted so much pop culture baggage that we couldn't get it treated seriously. The stigma. Yeah, exactly. And I'm not saying with the public. I'm saying internally because we treated this...
as a defense national security and safety of flight issue. But we often struggled even with our own command structure to get the resources because people would just say, oh, UFOs. So we sat down, I sat down with my opposite number And we deliberately planned a rebranding.
Because to give you an example, if you wanted to go and brief SecDef and say, I'd like 20 minutes of SecDef's time to talk about UAP. you'll maybe get a meeting. If prior to the rebranding, if you'd say, I'd like to go and talk to SecDef about UFOs, it would be, I'm sorry, his schedule's full at the moment. So we used UAP. Then what happened was that in about...
2011 so after i had left the ministry of defense and i i was just doing freelance work i got a call asking me to come over to washington dc and i sat in a room with some fairly influential people including a former chief of staff of of a former president of the united states
a former cia director um i'm not going to name the names but you and and listeners can probably figure out who those individuals might have been because they have commented on on this topic And I briefed them on history of the UK government's program, some of the flagship cases like Rendlesham Forest and the Calvin incident. And then I briefed them on the rebranding of... UFO to UAP.
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Chapter 5: What does Nick Pope think about current UAP events?
Yeah, I've heard this. There is a narrative going around that, you know, a small group of high-profile Republicans has blocked some of this. That is not entirely a narrative I agree with. Firstly, out of... Well, firstly... They didn't block disclosure, which is the narrative coming from some parts of the UFO community.
They blocked the Schumer-Rounds Amendment, which was to have gone into the current National Defense Authorization Act. And it did have multiple UAP-related provisions. But one of the reasons that was blocked is it's not necessarily that these people are in tight with Lockheed and Lockheed are gatekeepers for this. I don't know whether that's true or not.
One of the reasons there was opposition to this was that there was, for example, a principle of eminent domain there. written into this and it said that if any of this technology is in the private sector, government is then mandated to come and take it back. And the UFO community were kind of supporting this, like it was a good thing. And a few people were saying, well, wait a minute.
You know, it sounds like a good thing, but really it's a little bit farcical. It's like the government saying, please, can we have our spaceship back, if that's what you believe, that somebody somewhere has...
crashed or landed craft and and of course that is a narrative we've heard from whistleblowers and i'm sure we'll get into that but but the idea that you would want to if if you push the ufo community on this and say well wait a minute are you really saying that that you want this to
given back to the very people that that you believe have been gatekeepers of this secret for nearly 80 years i.e the government like and you're saying that this is a good thing quite apart from the fact that as somebody who tends to take a quite a libertarian view on on a lot of
I'm not that keen on the idea that the government should come and take our stuff, whether it's your house or whether it's NHI craft or artifacts or whatever it is that we've acquired. So I don't agree that... that this has been blocked for quite the reasons some people think.
Well, good. Yeah, it's such a difficult topic to really understand. And it's because there's so many perspectives and there's so many narratives and stories and ways that people are presenting the information. And we just... And I'm not an expert on it, which is why I wanted to talk to you and get your thoughts on everything.
But I do attempt to follow the phenomenon as much as possible and understand what's going on. And I guess I end up kind of attempting to... I just end up falling on the side of the whistleblowers, like the people who are actually in the program or in and around the program, the people who have access to understanding what's going on.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of a 'secret too terrible to be told'?
think we've moved from that to a it is but what is it kind of and and again to go back to your previous question none of this i think would have happened without that rebranding from ufo to uap because that was no no congressional representative was was gonna touch this it was like a third rail but
But the moment it was UAP and Defence National Security and Safety of Flight, all these people felt able to grip it and started asking questions. And when they started asking questions, they turned up the fact that, yeah, despite the denials, they're... had been and were programs.
And so, yeah, both the Senate and the House, the armed services committees, the intelligence committees, the oversight committees pushed and are still pushing and found some of these people. And I've met to pick up this point about the whistleblowers that you mentioned. Now, I've not met David Grush. And people say, oh, well, it's, you know, skeptics will say it's secondhand information.
Well, wait, you know, I have met Jay Stratton a couple of times, two or three times. And the reason, I don't think this is fully appreciated. The reason David Grush... to 40 people about this isn't because he was doing some sort of side project or had some personal interest. Jay Stratton, when he was heading up the UAP task force, gave him that job. He said to David Grush, go into...
all 18 constituent parts of the US intelligence community. I mean, he was already in the IC, of course, at more senior level than people seem to realize, I think. Jay gave him that tasking. He said, go into all the nooks and crannies, find out who's doing this, what program or programs do we have and go talk to these people. And so that's what happened. But absolutely, these people are patriots.
These people are heroes, I think, but they're heroes because for the most part, as far as I'm aware, they are not, which I would condemn, leaking classified information. They are going through the process and they are saying, look, if I'm going to do an interview or something or if I'm going to write something, I will go.
to DOPSA, the Defense Office of Pre-Publication and Security Review, because even if you are sort of sitting in the intelligence community and you're thinking, hey, the public have a right to know, You need to know who the subject matter expert is and then what is the damage assessment if that is leaked. Because, of course, people say, oh, it's a great thing to tell the American people this.
But the moment you tell the American people this, you also tell the government in China and Russia and... North Korea and Iran and anywhere really. So you do have to be careful, particularly if we are dealing with advanced technologies. Almost anything can be weaponized, particularly if it's something that generates large amounts of energy.
And if what we're talking about is what people think it is or might be, if it does come from a non-human intelligence, whether that's extraterrestrial, interdimensional, whatever it is, one of the few good assumptions you can make is it's going to be to do what it does, to get here from there. in a way that we can't. It's going to somehow generate a lot of energy, and that can be weaponized.
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Chapter 7: How does societal perception of UAP change over time?
So he got a kind of quick little, you know, oh, hey, look, I've got a story about this guy that no one else has got. But if he'd done the truly honorable and... deeper, more principled journalist thing, he would have arguably had an even bigger story. What is it about this guy and his narrative that is causing you to try and pull my strings and make me run a story throwing shade on this guy?
That's the more interesting story. And absolutely, nobody gets near testifying in Congress without a whole bunch of people vetting them to say, is this person who they say they are? Did they do what they said they did? Yeah. Or not. And again, I'm not going to name names, but I remember when the David Grush story came out.
Now, I've obviously long since retired from the UK Ministry of Defence, but I still do have obviously contacts. I spoke to, I think, when the David Grush story came out, my first question is, is this guy for real? Yeah. In that week, I spoke to three individuals with backgrounds in the US intelligence community.
And all three of them said to me not only, oh, yeah, this guy's for real, but also, yeah, I know Dave. And it was like, yeah, I know Dave. And so I got that confirmation pretty much from day one.
So, I mean, he's telling the truth, right?
He is telling the truth, absolutely. Now, obviously... We still need a smoking gun. We still need... I mean, he, by his own admission, has not seen this hardware, but he has spoken to people who said the program is real, the craft are real, and the entities are real. And I believe that... Other people at even more senior level in the intelligence community have made statements confirming that.
I'm not sure if those statements have yet been broadcast. I know obviously people do films and interviews all the time. it's a little bit of a dance with the Pentagon getting clearance for this, but I believe that people at even higher level in the intelligence community are, have, or have said, we have craft, we have bodies.
I don't know yet whether that has been broadcast or what the context is, but those statements are out there. And I mean, yeah, short of actually, you know, people, getting in a room with some of this stuff and getting hands on it, it's kind of difficult to say what more some people would ask than very senior people in
the government, the military, the intelligence community who have had the policy responsibility for this saying it's real. And skeptics say, oh, well, David Grush, for example, never got his hands on a craft. I mean, to give a kind of, some people might say silly example, but I think it's a direct read across.
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Chapter 8: What are the different theories about the nature of UAP?
Yeah, and at the time, I think a lot of people We're very skeptical. For sure, for sure. Still are. Yeah. That said, obviously, who pushed that story out? George Knapp.
Yep.
George Knapp certainly has a lot of contacts in the intelligence community, worked directly with people like James Lukatsky, senior... intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency, probably one of the people who was responsible for setting up OSAP initially, which morphed into AATIP.
So when you actually draw the connections between this and realize that the person that pushed out the Bob Lazar story actually had, George Knapp had the story about AATIP long before the New York Times published Okay. And when he knew that it was going to be published, George said, well, I could do this.
And I had that story because he knew Harry Reid very well, of course, who, again, on the political side was responsible for setting this up. And George did a very noble thing, actually. He was talking to a lot of the people involved with this program and they said, George, yeah, you could run that story and in a fair world, maybe you should, you had that story, but with the greatest of respect,
It will make more of an impact, which is what we want if it goes in the New York Times. And George sat on his hands and very nobly kind of, because he believed, still passionately believes in the subject. And he was like, this is bigger than me. And he did, I mean, I think, you know, for a journalist who has a story of, of that impact and yet agrees that that was a big thing.
And nobody that really, I've done some freelance journalism, nobody that isn't in that world can really ever know how big a thing he did there.
Yeah. Yeah. Probably not many people would do that. And yeah, it shows a lot about his character and his desire to have transparency and truth and disclosure.
His character, his integrity, absolutely. Yeah, for sure.
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