Proof shredded – but the truth is out there, insists UFO investigator

THE government’s former senior UFO investigator has revealed how the most compelling evidence for extra-terrestrial life he had ever seen was shredded by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

Nick Pope, who worked for the MoD for 21 years, said the photograph appeared to show a “metallic” spacecraft, 25 metres in diameter, in the sky over the village of Calvine, near Pitlochry in Perthshire.

Military jets in the background may have been escorting or pursuing the UFO.

Mr Pope, who ran the government’s UFO project from 1991 to 1994, said the photograph was removed from his office before “mysteriously” disappearing.

He said that when he challenged officials about its whereabouts, they claimed they had no record of it.

The Calvine incident occurred on 4 August 1990 when two men saw a large diamond-shaped object hovering for about ten minutes – during which time military aircraft made a number of low-level passes – before it shot upwards at great speed. One of the men took six colour photographs of the daytime incident.

In 2009, declassified state files revealed how the government briefed ministers and launched a top-level investigation into the incident.

“There was a photograph taken at Calvine, and this was easily the most compelling UFO photo I’ve ever seen in my life,” Mr Pope said.

“It went to the technical specialists at the Defence Intelligence Staff and elsewhere. Their results of the analysis were that this was the real thing – it wasn’t a faked photo. Now the interesting postscript to this story is that I actually had a copy of this. It was one of the things blown up on my office wall when I was at the UFO project.

“One day the head of division took it down and locked it in a drawer because he didn’t think we should be displaying something like that.”

Mr Pope said when the MoD released its UFO files, the photos and the copies that had been on his wall had disappeared.

When he asked where they had gone he claims he was told “we have no record of where this went”.

Mr Pope admitted his claims could send conspiracy theorists into “an absolute frenzy” and conclude the MoD had shredded possible UFO evidence.

However, Mr Pope said there could be a more mundane explanation for the photo’s disappearance.

Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland’s Tales of the Unexplained, to be broadcast on Thursday, he said: “I suspect that certain people thought that this was some secret prototype aircraft, a next-generation stealth that maybe nobody should be seeing and maybe somebody quietly put it through the shredder and thought they were doing us a favour.”

Last night a spokesman for the MoD said they were unable to comment as the unit dealing with possible UFO sightings had been disbanded around four years ago.