by Char­lotte Gill
DAILY MAIL

UFO sight­ings and alien vis­i­tors tend to be solely the reserve of sci-fi movies.

So when a for­mer MoD chief warns that the coun­try could be attacked by extrater­res­tri­als at any time, you may be for­given for feel­ing a lit­tle alarmed.

Dur­ing his time as head of the Min­istry of Defence UFO project, Nick Pope was per­suaded into believ­ing that other life­forms may visit Earth and, more specif­i­cally, Britain.

His con­cern is that “highly cred­i­ble” sight­ings are sim­ply dismissed.

And he com­plains that the project he once ran is now “vir­tu­ally closed” down, leav­ing the coun­try “wide open” to aliens.

Mr Pope decided to speak out about his wor­ries after resign­ing from his post at the Direc­torate of Defence Secu­rity at the MoD this week.

“The con­se­quences of get­ting this one wrong could be huge,” he said.

“If you reported a UFO sight­ing now, I am absolutely sure that you would just get back a stan­dard let­ter telling you not to worry. ”Frankly we are wide open — if some­thing does not behave like a con­ven­tional air­craft now, it will be ignored.

“The X-Files have been closed down.” If these words had come from a sci-fi fanatic, they could be eas­ily dis­missed by cynics.

But Mr Pope’s CV — he was head of the UFO project between 1991 and 1994 — can­not be ignored.

When he began his job, he too was scep­ti­cal about UFOs but access to clas­si­fied files on the sub­ject and inves­ti­ga­tion of a series of spec­tac­u­lar UFO sight­ings grad­u­ally changed his mind.

And while Mr Pope says that there is no evi­dence of hos­tile intent, he insists it can­not be ruled out.

“There has got to be the poten­tial for that and one is left with the uneasy feel­ing that if it turned out to be so, there is very lit­tle we could do about it,” he said.

“If you believe these things are extra ter­res­trial craft then you can­not rule out that what is hap­pen­ing is some kind of covert reconnaissance.”

One inci­dent which per­suaded him of the exis­tence of alien life­forms was in 1993. There were reports of a “vast, triangular-shaped craft” spot­ted fly­ing over RAF bases in the West Midlands.

“Most of the wit­nesses were police and mil­i­tary per­son­nel,” he said.

“Hun­dreds of mem­bers of the pub­lic also had sight­ings over a period of sev­eral hours.”

In another inci­dent in 1980 at RAF bases in Suf­folk, staff inves­ti­gated a sus­pected plane crash after bright lights were reported com­ing from nearby woods.

They found a kind of lunar land­ing mod­ule stand­ing on three legs which then flew off. The indents it left in the ground were found to emit ten times the nor­mal lev­els of radi­a­tion. Mr Pope said: “These sort of inci­dents are why I got so frustrated.

“In my time I would brief the more inter­est­ing sight­ings up the chain of com­mand to peo­ple like the Chief of the Air Staff and would get the answer back that it was very inter­est­ing and I had clearly done a good job inves­ti­gat­ing it and that was it.

“Every one is a piece of a puz­zle but no one takes it seri­ously. There needs to be more resources and peo­ple who are pre­pared to look past the philo­soph­i­cal issues, look at the reports and inves­ti­gate them properly.

“Whether you believe these things are for­eign air forces test­ing pro­to­type air­craft or whether you believe they are some­thing more exotic, with the speeds and move­ments they are capa­ble of, it’s tech­nol­ogy we would very much like to get hold of.”

A spokesman for the Min­istry of Defence insisted that all UFO sight­ings were inves­ti­gated for “evi­dence to sug­gest that UK air­space has been com­pro­mised by hos­tile or unau­tho­rised air activity.”

She said: “Unless there is such evi­dence, the MoD doesn’t attempt to pos­i­tively iden­tify what was seen.”

Mr Pope is con­tin­u­ing his UFO research in a pri­vate capac­ity since leav­ing the MoD and is recog­nised as a lead­ing author­ity on UFOs and the unexpected.

He has writ­ten four sci­ence fic­tion books draw­ing on his expe­ri­ence at the MoD, and lec­tures around the world on the subject.

He has appeared on BBC News­night and Radio 4’s Today pro­gramme and has acted as con­sul­tant on numer­ous tele­vi­sion documentaries.