From Booklist
If Pope is correct, Earth is currently in the middle of an interplanetary war. He claims that while he was stationed at the "UFO Desk" of Britain's Ministry of Defense, he studied UFO sightings as well as crop circles and cattle mutilations--all of which led him to the conclusion that the aliens are here, and they aren't friendly. He believes it is time the British government and the world in general rally to confront the invaders. The author openly compares himself to Fox Mulder of TV's X-Files in his struggles to bring forth the hidden evidence of the security danger to planet Earth. This work, which originally was published in England and was a best-seller there, is one for the true believers. Although numerous incidents are cited, actual evidence is lacking, and logic is often absent from the author's arguments. Nevertheless, the topic is perennially popular, and Pope's belief in UFOs will attract attention. Eric Robbins


From Kirkus Reviews
As a career civil servant with Britain's Ministry of Defence, Pope served a three-year stint in the early 1990s as chief investigator of UFO sightings in the United Kingdom. He began as a skeptic and ended up a true believer. This book, a bestseller in Britain, attempts to explain his conversion but does a poor job of it. Fully a third of the book is spent discussing what is by now a familiar litany of UFO-related phenomena: Roswell, Area 51, the US Air Force ``Blue Book'' of UFO investigations, etc. Pope's own work consisted mainly of investigating alleged sightings of UFOs, crop circles (huge, symmetrical designs mysteriously created in open fields), and cattle slaughters (aliens apparently like hamburgers). Slim as this investigative work is, and even though, as he himself admits, there is no proof of the existence of UFOs, Pope still insists that ``there is a war going on'' with aliens. To make matters worse, he contends, we aren't even aware that this war is happening. He also assures us that 95 percent of UFO sightings go unreported, though his only evidence for this is that private UFO groups have said so. Still, the book is blessedly free of the paranoia found in so much of the UFO writing done in the US. For Pope, the government of Britain is not engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the existence of UFOs (as some believe about the US government); it just hasn't bothered to do much investigating. He can also be lyrical, such as when describing the joy and wonder of visitors within a crop circle. But he can also turn around and be facile and trite. On the connection between aliens and ghosts he concludes, ``The spirit world is highly complicated.'' One would suppose this to be true. An odd, unconvincing statement of belief from a government official. (8 pages b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"The first book on UFO's from someone with inside knowledge and access to Top Secret material. The Ministry of Defence tried to stop this book."
--The Sunday Times (London)

Don't miss Nick Pope's The Uninvited: An Exposé of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon, available from Bantam Dell


Review
"The first book on UFO's from someone with inside knowledge and access to Top Secret material. The Ministry of Defence tried to stop this book."
--The Sunday Times (London)

Don't miss Nick Pope's The Uninvited: An Exposé of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon, available from Bantam Dell


Book Description
Terrifying abductions...Unidentified spacecraft...Secret alien autopsies...Government cover-ups...

It's real. It's happening. And a government insider has the chilling facts...

A Canadian geologist is blasted in the chest by the heat from a landed UFO, a grid pattern of the exhaust vent burned onto his skin... A Texas restaurant owner develops radiation sickness after her terrifying close encounter... Belgian F-16 pilots try to intercept a huge triangular-shaped UFO that proceeds to fly rings around their aircraft in a chase lasting seventy-five minutes...

It's not science fiction. It's science fact. Aircraft are being brought down or disappearing under mysterious circumstances. People are being taken against their will and forced to endure terrifying examinations. Cattle are found butchered and mutilated by lasers. In this chilling exposé of his years spent at the UFO desk of the British Ministry of Defence, Nick Pope opens up his actual government X-files and reveals the uncensored, undeniable facts to support his shattering conclusions...


Card catalog description
Nick Pope, a high-ranking official in Britain's Ministry of Defense for eleven years, was assigned from 1991 to 1994 to Secretariat (Air Staff) Department 2A - better known to insiders as "The UFO Desk." His job was to investigate and analyze claims of UFO sightings and to assess their threat to national security. In Open Skies, Closed Minds, Pope tells his story as the investigator for the government on paranormal activity and how his experiences there changed his life. He started out as a skeptic, and quickly became a believer... Pope reveals for the first time in this book the contents of the Governments "X-Files" residing in the deepest vaults of the Ministry of Defense. While there, he discovered that truth is much stranger than fiction and that indeed something bizarre is going on, something beyond human experience and something potentially hostile. He presents convincing arguments in support of the existence of UFO's by using cases that he has researched in an official capacity, and warns that extraterrestrial spacecraft are visiting Earth despite our skepticism.


From the Inside Flap
Terrifying abductions...Unidentified spacecraft...Secret alien autopsies...Government cover-ups...

It's real. It's happening. And a government insider has the chilling facts...

A Canadian geologist is blasted in the chest by the heat from a landed UFO, a grid pattern of the exhaust vent burned onto his skin... A Texas restaurant owner develops radiation sickness after her terrifying close encounter... Belgian F-16 pilots try to intercept a huge triangular-shaped UFO that proceeds to fly rings around their aircraft in a chase lasting seventy-five minutes...

It's not science fiction. It's science fact. Aircraft are being brought down or disappearing under mysterious circumstances. People are being taken against their will and forced to endure terrifying examinations. Cattle are found butchered and mutilated by lasers. In this chilling exposé of his years spent at the UFO desk of the British Ministry of Defence, Nick Pope opens up his actual government X-files and reveals the uncensored, undeniable facts to support his shattering conclusions...


From the Back Cover
"The first book on UFO's from someone with inside knowledge and access to Top Secret material. The Ministry of Defence tried to stop this book."
--The Sunday Times (London)

Don't miss Nick Pope's The Uninvited: An Exposé of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon, available from Bantam Dell


About the Author
From 1991 to 1994 Nick Pope investigated UFO sightings for the British government's Ministry of Defence. He continues to research and investigate UFO sightings and alien abductions in a private capacity. He is the author of The Uninvited: An Exposé of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"AND OUT OF THE FIRE WENT FORTH LIGHTNING."

And I looked and behold a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot; and they sparkled like the color of burnished brass . . . As for the likeness of the living creatures, this appearance was like burning coals of fire and like the appearance of lamps: it went up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning . . . Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of a beryl; and they four had one likeness; and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides, and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes around about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.
So runs Chapter One of the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, according to the King James Bible of 1611. Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi in the land of the Chaldeans saw visions of God "and the heavens were opened."

Old Testament stories are notoriously open to interpretation. Ezekiel goes onto describe the throne of God with its rainbow light in a conventional way, the sort of thing that Michelangelo would paint centuries later. Yet, even after we weight the balance of allegories, dreams, fantasies and hallucinations induced by religious ecstasy, and even after we remember that the Bible has undergone various translations from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English, there is something oddly mechanical about this description. The flame, the lightning, the wheels, even the curious movement of the vision--"they went every one straight forward . . . and they turned not as they went"--corresponds to many recent eyewitness accounts of unidentified craft landing. "As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes"--could this be the glittering circles of light emitted from the fuselage of "flying saucers?"

For centuries, humanity has been fascinated by the skies. The kingdom of the clouds, the arc of the rainbow, the myriad points of light in the night; all this has been woven by timid, poetic humans into an image of their own making. The thunder is God's barrels rolling around the empty sky. The rainbow is the symbol of God's promise never to send another flood. And in the darkness, starlight is the radiance of Heaven shining through the peppered curtain of the night.

What early humans did not understand, they were afraid of, and worshipped as a god. The rain, the sun, the moon, the stars, the thunder and the winds--all these perfectly natural phenomena were attributed to some sort of divinity. And, as our confidence and knowledge grew, we personalized the Heavens, finding animal and human likenesses in the constellations--the Great Bear, Orion the Hunter, the Seven Sisters.

And the Heavens controlled our destinies, so that momentous events on Earth were foretold by bizarre activity in the skies. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 793 describes "fiery dragons" over Northumbria. This was a decade when the Northern Saxon kingdoms were hit time and time again by Viking raids along their coasts. On 8 June of that year, lightning and whirlwinds ravaged the North. A torrent of blood fell on York Minster. The island of Lindisfarne was stormed and its monastery levelled by the marauding Northmen. In Ireland, two years later, dysentery, rabies and smallpox epidemics were heralded by an eclipse of the moon.

Over the Bavarian city of Nuremberg in 1561, eyewitnesses described a battle in the skies, echoing Milton's phrase of nearly a century later--"There was war in Heaven." Weird objects--circular and cylindrical--darted above the city's roofs. Perhaps this was an omen too, for Nuremberg was badly hit during the Thirty Years War, when Catholic fought Protestant for control of central Europe.

Shakespeare's plays are full of such incidents. In Julius Caesar, the playwright drew on the chronicles of Plutarch. Cassius, one of the conspirators soon to stab the wannabe Emperor, describes sights which echo Ezekiel: "and there were drawn upon a heap a hundred ghastly women, transformed with their fear; who swore they saw men, all in fire, walk up and down the streets . . . When these prodigies do so conjointly meet, let not men say, these are their reasons--they are natural; for I believe they are portentous things."

It is impossible now to interpret these experiences accurately. The bewildered Irish in the eighth century had to find a way to explain the inexplicable with very little scientific knowledge to help them. The people of Northumbria in the same period were terrified of the Vikings and their fear caused every little natural phenomenon to become distorted and exaggerated; it may even have given rise to the phenomenon in the first place. And Shakespeare, as a storyteller, needed to seize the imagination of his groundlings, who were hungry for supernatural coincidences. However, it is highly likely that the roots of these phenomena lie in the perfectly natural movements of meteorites or atmospheric conditions: comets, ball lightning, mirages or noctilucent clouds. What is certain is that the notion of inexplicable things from the sky is as old as recorded history itself.

The archaeologist Erich von Daniken, in Chariots of the Gods? and According to the Evidence has taken these unexplained sightings by the scruff of the neck and has created an intriguing theory--that of the "ancient astronauts." The gods--and the particular creed or denomination is irrelevant--were actually extraterrestrial hominids--"men from outer space"--and their visits to this planet in pre-history have been passed down through the generations in the form of religions, mythologies and folklore. Von Daniken cites the physical evidence for these visits too; from the perfect pyramids of Egypt and Peru; through the ancient Druidic circles of Stonehenge and Avebury; to the secret caves of Ecuador and the giant stone heads of the Turkish mountains. The evidence is circumstantial, but the question--"Was God an Astronaut?"--undeniably fascinating.

Dr. Jacques Vallee, in Dimensions, links unidentified flying phenomena with psychic phenomena. He once made the interesting observation that in one edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the entry for "unidentified flying object" appears between "unicorn" and "unified field theory." Singularly apt, because it places the UFO phenomenon between the realms of magic and science.

FROM THE PUBLISHER