I n 1996, Nick Pope wrote his first book. Open Skies, Closed Minds was a semi-autobiographical examination of well-known UFO cases mixed with his own research. Pope worked at the UK Ministry of Defence for more than two decades, from 1985 to 2006. For three of those years – 1991 to 1994 – he worked on what was known colloquially in the department as “the UFO desk”. The desk’s official name, the Secretariat (Air Staff ) Sec (AS) 2a, was responsible for assessing the defence significance of reported UFO sightings. To promote the book, Pope appeared on BBC Newsnight. The UK’s flagship news programme was famous for its adversarial interviews that left even the most formidable politicians and intellectuals looking like startled deer. Given the subject matter and the platform, this could have gone horribly wrong, but Pope held his own. “I wasn’t nervous, probably because I’d been media-trained by the MoD,” he says.…