I led UK’s secret UFO division and a forgotten sighting still haunts me – HUNDREDS saw it, so why was it ignored? | The Sun

“We investigated and drew a complete blank.

“All the time I was doing my investigation, there was something niggling away at the back of my mind that I couldn't put my finger on. I knew I was missing something.

“Weeks later, a light bulb went off and I realised it’s the date. On March 30 and 31, three years earlier, there was a wave of sightings, again of a huge triangular shaped UFO over Belgium.

“The Belgians scrambled two F16 fighters to try and intercept this thing, which the airborne radar locked onto, but the UFO kept breaking the lock. It was playing cat and mouse with them.”

'More than coincidence'

The Chief of Staff of the Belgian Air Force, General Wilfried de Brouwer, personally investigated the UFO and ruled out stealth aircraft from other military powers, including the US.

“The official position of the Belgian government is that these sightings remained unknown,” says Nick. 

“The unofficial postscript was ‘thank goodness they were friendly, because if they hadn't been there was nothing we could have done’.”

Nick believes the matching dates are more than coincidental.

“Every now and then the phenomenon of UFOs does that to you,” he says. “It's almost like it’s toying with you.”

The unofficial postscript was ‘thank goodness they were friendly, because if they hadn't been there was nothing we could have done’

As well as being taken seriously by the UK intelligence departments, Nick believes the sightings would have been among the global incidents that were investigated by the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme (AATIP).

The top secret £17.5million unit, which ran between 2007 and 2012, features in the first episode of National Geographic’s new documentary series UFOs: Investigating The Unknown.

Through the testimony of first hand witnesses, the five part series looks into five decades of US government secrecy around the subject.

It includes the notorious secret desert base Area 51, and the unexplained malfunction of U.S. nuclear missiles after a sighting nearby.

'Tic Tac' incident

The opening episode includes intriguing footage of a “Tic Tac” shape spotted by two RAF pilots off the coast of Southern California in 2004.

Lt Commander Alex Dietrich and Commander David Fravor recall seeing a “churning” on the surface of the ocean as an unidentified object hovered over the water and then shot upwards at astonishing speeds.

Commander Fravor describes it as a “long cylindrical white object, with rounded ends, roughly 40 feet long, that looked like a giant Tic Tac. It was pure white. It had no windows, no wings, no visual signs of propulsion”.

He says the object was changing direction rapidly, like a “ping pong ball bouncing off a wall”.

Former US Army Counterintelligence agent Luis Elizondo reveals the ‘Tic Tac’ was travelling at speeds unachievable in the SR71 – the fastest US jet of all time – but was able to change direction in an instant.

“We fly the SR71 at 3,200mph and if you want to turn that takes over half the state of Ohio to do it,” he says.

“But these can turn instantly. And we’re not talking about 3,200mph, they have been recorded at 13,000mph. The question arises, how is that possible?”

Elizonda – who worked in the AATIP programme until it ended in 2012 – became increasingly frustrated with the government’s refusal to take sightings seriously.

He eventually resigned from the Department of Defence in 2017, over “excessive secrecy and internal opposition". In his resignation letter, he warned that “ignoring these threats is not in the best interest of the Department”.

Nick, who ran the UK equivalent of the AATIP programme from 1990 to 1994, says the secrecy of governments around the issue stems from “embarrassment”. 

“The US government portrays itself as the world's preeminent superpower, so to acknowledge that there are things in their airspace, whatever they are, that are faster and more manoeuvrable and run rings around fast jets doesn't play very well,” he says. 

“So there’s the embarrassment factor, and maybe a little bit of fear that either an adversary has made a quantum leap in development, which has left the US in a poor second place, or, as some believe, this really is extra terrestrial, in which case we're not at the top of the food chain anymore."

'Secretive'

He adds that the UK government is "just as secretive".

"Even when the Ministry of Defence had its programme, we consistently downplayed both our involvement and the phenomenon itself," Nick explains.

"We dismissed it as being of little or no defence significance and routinely sent out letters to the public saying, ‘We glance at these reports to see if there's anything of defence interest, but we don't do much else.’

"But behind closed doors, there were highly classified intelligence assessments, trying to figure out if it could be Russia or China or something truly exotic.”

The existence of the US programme was exposed by Elizondo after he quit, leading to demands for its reinstatement and more transparency from the government.

“It was embarrassing for them because publicly, they said for years that we don't have a programme anymore,” says Nick. 

“Since a programme called Project Blue Book closed in 1969, they had denied there was any interest in UFOs or AUPs – unidentified aerial phenomena – as they were renamed.

“Then suddenly, it was revealed that not only did the Pentagon have this shadowy programme called AATIP, but the US Navy had been routinely encountering these things for years and had got some on camera.

“Arguably, the US government was caught in a lie.”

In 2020 the US set up the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) which, earlier this month, reported to Congress that it was reviewing 650 incidents, but that there is no evidence that any of them are of extra-terrestrial origin.

'Game-changer'

Nick believes the shooting down of a Chinese “spy balloon” off the coast of South Carolina earlier this year is a game-changer for the military's approach to UAPs.

“I think it both helps and hinders,” he says. 

“Balloon sounds very low tech, but this was carrying immensely sophisticated, insidious signals intelligence equipment which, according to assessments released by the State Department, was attempting to hack into secure US military communication systems.

"But these things are very slow so nobody supposes spy balloons are the same things, for example, as we see in the 2004 Navy videos. 

“Some UFOs will turn out to be spy balloons, but that has blurred the lines and may be taking people's eye off the ball. 

“But where it's helped, immensely, is for years the military have had this conventional, one-dimensional view of monitoring airspace.

“They have filters on their radars and if it doesn't behave like an aircraft, they're not interested.

"They missed the spy balloon, which was spotted by members of the public, and the government only got involved when it made a local news station.

“As a result of that they changed the filters and they're picking up a lot more, so it's going to be interesting.”

'200 sightings a year in UK'

During his time at the MoD Nick says he dealt with around 200 sightings a year in the UK.

Of those, 80 per cent were easily explained, 15 per cent were lacking the information or evidence to investigate, and only five per cent were “weird, genuinely unexplained”.

“Typically they were sightings from pilots, police officers, military personnel, tracked on radar or where we had good photos or videos that intelligence analysts looked at and couldn't come up with a conventional explanation," he adds.

The UK programme closed in 2009 – but Nick now believes we are lagging behind the US.

“In the US there has been a 180 degree flipping of the narrative from fringe to mainstream,” he says.

“Five years ago this was all crazy conspiracy theories, sci-fi fantasy; now it’s discussed in Congress and NASA's doing a study. So at some level this is out in the open.

Five years ago this was all crazy conspiracy theories, sci-fi fantasy; now it’s discussed in Congress and NASA's doing a study… the UK is still playing catch up. We need to up our game

“But the UK is still playing catch up. We need to up our game because this is a global phenomenon and whatever we're dealing with doesn't just fly in the US. There are sightings all around the world, and many in the UK.” 

While UFOs and extra-terrestrials conjure up images of little green men with domed heads and huge eyes, Nick believes that if a spaceship ever lands, we’d be in for a surprise when we looked inside. 

“Almost certainly we would find AI, not an alien,” he says. 

“Even if they could work around the apparent barrier of lightspeed, the impact of micro meteors and gamma ray bursts means interstellar travel for biological life forms is very difficult. 

“But even here we are on the verge of creating sentient AI, so imagine what a civilization with a million years' head start has probably achieved. 

“I think there would be a secure radiation-proof metal box or sphere and deep inside that would be sentient AI. 

Even here we are on the verge of creating sentient AI, so imagine what a civilization with a million years' head start has probably achieved

“They would be coming here, hopefully, as scientists, explorers and anthropologists or even tourists – and not as conquerors.”

Nick remains “undecided” on whether the UFO reports are evidence of extra-terrestrial activity, but believes there is life on other planets.

“We don't yet have a smoking gun but we have a lot of interesting material,” he says. 

“I'm 100 per cent convinced there's life out there in the universe, and not just life but other civilizations. 

“As to whether we're being visited, I don't know. But I hope so.

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"Of all the explanations, it would be the most interesting. And let's face it, the world would be a more fun place with aliens in it than without.”

UFOs: Investigating The Unknown premiers on Tuesday 2nd May at 8pm on National Geographic UK.

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