The Rendlesham Forest mystery: ‘It’s the perfect storm of a UFO case’
In 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. “The irony was that when I was posted to the UFO desk, I occasionally had to go on television in my role as the department’s subject-matter expert and play down both the phenomena and the true extent of our interest and involvement in the subject.” His interrogator that night was Peter Snow. “What do you believe now that you didn’t believe five years ago?” Snow began. “Well, I came into the job as a sceptic, but the sheer weight of the evidence – the sightings, the radar evidence, all that sort of thing – convinced me that some of these things that we see in the sky and call UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin,” Pope said. “Extraterrestrial? What, craft with people inside?” Snow said, looking incredulous. “Well, craft of some sort? Certainly, that’s not to say they all are, of course. Most of them have conventional explanations. But, after rigorous investigation, we find that 5% or 10% absolutely defy any conventional explanation. And these ones, yes, it does look as if they may be some sort of craft from elsewhere,” said Pope. * * * Pope’s job on the UFO desk had been events-led; it could be very busy and then exceptionally slow. It was during these slow periods that he would pore over cold cases. One encounter jumped out at him. It had been reported in Rendlesham Forest by two American airmen on Christmas night in 1980. Rendlesham Forest is in Suffolk, England, outside RAF Bentwaters, an airbase operated by the US during the cold war. On that airbase in 1980 were several nuclear missiles. I’d come to New York to interview Pope for my book Chasing Aliens. If aliens are here, or have been here before, what do they want? Is it possible that they come in peace, or do they want to pillage the Earth like the invaders from War of the Worlds? The UFOs seen in the Earth’s airspace could be reconnaissance crafts feeding our weaknesses back to their mothership. Understanding their motives could be the key to finding them, I thought. When we meet on a sunny afternoon in Bryant Park, Pope is wearing a green stripy shirt that is at least two sizes too big for him. He tells me that unlike other UFO sightings, the eyewitness reports from Rendlesham were backed up by hard evidence. “It’s the perfect storm of a UFO case. It’s multiple witnesses, including military. It’s sightings over three consecutive nights. It’s physical evidence in terms of radar, radioactivity, ground trace indentations, scorch marks. It’s a case where we have declassified and released documents, which you can see at the National Archives and the Ministry of Defence website. So, unlike a lot of UFO documents floating around, there’s no debate about their provenance. They’re the real deal.” Pope’s research into the incident led him eventually to co-write a book, Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, with the eyewitnesses, Jim Penniston and John Burroughs, when he left the MoD. It was published in 2014. * * * The events of that night began when Burroughs, who was patrolling Woodbridge, near the base’s east gate, noticed strange blinking red and blue lights from the forest. Burroughs, along with his supervisor, SSgt Bud Steffens, clambered into a vehicle and headed out to investigate. As they reached a dirt track leading into the forest, a white light joined the red and blue ones. Both agreed they had never seen these lights on other aircraft. The pair rushed back to the guard shack at the east gate and dialled for backup. Penniston, a staff sergeant at the time, took the call and rushed to the scene with his driver, Edward Cabansag. Fearing that a plane had crashed, Penniston radioed Central Security Control for more details. The message that came back was that an unidentified object had appeared and then vanished from Woodbridge’s radar screen 15 minutes earlier. After a brief discussion, Steffens remained at the base, while Burroughs, Penniston and Cabansag drove back to the woods to investigate the lights. Even though there was no report of an explosion or any fire, the trio advanced into the cold, dark forest, expecting to be confronted with the wreck of a crashed aircraft and all the problems that came with it, but they found something far stranger. A week or so after meeting Pope, I speak with Penniston over a video call. He looks a bit like William Shatner, with thin spectacles on a broad face etched by wrinkles that seem to tell of a life of worry and deep thinking. It’s true, Penniston says, that he was called down that evening to investigate a possible aircraft crash. Air force personnel had seen something on radar and Heathrow airport reported that they had lost contact with a non-civilian aircraft as it passed over Woodbridge. Penniston explains that, when he met up with Burroughs, he took over as the on-scene commander. Penniston, Burroughs and Cabansag drove as far as they could into the forest before the roughness of the terrain forced them to continue the journey on foot. Cabansag remained behind, while Penniston, with Burroughs at his side, wove through the trees and scaled the berms before coming upon the lights minutes later – only they were dimmer than before. Abruptly, their radios began to break up. Penniston says he felt a weird sensation, like static electricity was crackling through his hair and on his clothes, then a blinding bright light burst into the night through the forest in front of them. Expecting an explosion, they flung themselves to the ground, but none came. Penniston rose to his feet and saw the bright light beginning to fade, revealing a triangular craft resting in a small clearing on the forest floor, multicoloured neon lights darting over its black opaque surface until they too dimmed and the only light remaining was emanating from underneath the craft. In Penniston’s book, The Rendlesham Enigma, he described seeing Burroughs “frozen to the spot” behind him, “with both arms down by his side, motionless. Although he was standing just outside the dome, or ‘bubble’, of light between us, he was also engulfed in a beam of white/blue light, which looked as though it was shining down from above him.” Penniston didn’t know why Burroughs wasn’t moving, but he thought fear may have paralysed him. Burroughs has few memories of what occurred after that first explosion of light. He has mentioned seeing a “red, oval sun-like object in the clearing”, but not the craft Penniston saw. For Burroughs, seeing the bright light, going prone and getting up again lasted a few seconds; for Penniston, the encounter lasted much longer. Penniston went to get a closer look at the craft. “It was hard getting there,” he explains on our call. “I mean, I was feeling like it was hard to move, like walking through a pool of water that was waist deep. I decided to go ahead and investigate until responding forces could get there.” He took out his notebook and sketched the craft while walking around it: “It was sitting above the forest floor like it was on landing gear, but I looked underneath and there was no landing gear. It was just beams of light. And where three of them were on the ground, you could see weird indentions. So whatever that technology was, it held the craft up.” Penniston drew this conclusion because he tried to move the craft, reasoning that even a car rocks lightly when you push it, but this was a dead weight. “I knew right then and there that it was technology we didn’t possess.” Penniston knew this because the air force base he was guarding housed up to 35 generals, plus research and development teams. As he waited for security at the base to get in touch, he decided to investigate more thoroughly. “Based on my height, I figured it was about six-and-a-half feet tall. It’s hard to tell, because the floor was uneven in the forest,” says Penniston. He circled the craft again and noticed what looked like a dorsal fin on its rear, at about 7ft off the ground, as well as several engravings, which looked like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, on its surface. Penniston says that when he touched the craft on first inspection, the surface felt warm and smooth, which he put down to the friction caused by air travel, but he says he later learned that it was the result of beta radiation. When he ran his fingers over the hieroglyphs, they felt rough, like sandpaper. He touched one of the glyphs and a bright white light flooded the scene again, blinding him, and a bizarre series of ones and zeros filled his mind’s eye. “What the fuck is this?” Penniston remembers thinking. “And I just lift my hand off and it stops. Immediately.” The white light began to fade and he regained his sight. The colourful streaks crawling over the vehicle’s surface had returned, so Penniston backed off and made himself prone on the forest floor. The craft began to lift slowly off the ground, moving through the surrounding trees, rising to the level of the forest canopy – and then was gone. Penniston thought what he had witnessed was impossible. The craft had none of the things that conventional wisdom tells us you need to fly: wings, flaps, rotor blades, air displacement. Plus, given the speed at which it winked out of sight, one would have expected to hear a sonic boom, but it made no sound. Burroughs, apparently no longer frozen to the spot, joined Penniston at his side. “It’s over there!” Burroughs shouted, pointing into the distance. Penniston didn’t know what he was talking about – the forest was pitch black. Burroughs took off in the direction of the coast and Penniston, who was feeling exhausted, reluctantly raced after him. They hurtled through the forest, vaulting several fences, until, pausing in a farmer’s field, they saw a light flashing in the distance. It was the beam from nearby Orfordness lighthouse, more than four miles away off the coast. “So, I knew that he [Burroughs] hadn’t seen it. I don’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t very helpful,” Penniston says. The craft was gone and Penniston and Burroughs returned to base in the early hours of Boxing Day. When Penniston got back, he was wired and unable to sleep, so he decided to look through his notes to try to make sense of it all: the lights, the craft, the strange symbols, the eerie silence. Maybe it was the time of night and the adrenaline wearing off, but he couldn’t collect his thoughts; the ones and zeros he saw after touching the hieroglyphs were still swimming in his eyes. “I started writing them down and the more I wrote, the better I felt. I went back to bed and slept all night.” * * * The stories of the lights and the mysterious craft caused unrest around the base. On the evening of 27 December, the deputy base commander, Lt Col Charles Halt, with his lieutenant, Bruce Englund, ventured into the cold evening to investigate the clearing where the craft had supposedly landed on Christmas Day. Halt brought his tape recorder along. What he captured that night is one of the most dramatic pieces of UFO evidence ever recorded. In the recording, which is available online, Halt can be heard walking around the three indentations in the soil alleged to have been caused by the craft’s landing gear. Halt and Englund have a Geiger counter with them and take radiation readings before shifting their attention to marks on the trees surrounding the clearing. “Each one of these trees that face into the blast, what we assume is the landing site, all have an abrasion facing in the same direction, towards the centre,” Englund says. Halt looks up at the trees around the clearing and sees an opening and freshly broken branches on the ground. “Some of them came off about 15 to 20 feet up. Some of the branches [are] about an inch or less in diameter.” After picking over the scene and getting spooked by a screaming deer, Halt, Englund and other unidentified servicemen notice a light in the sky. “You just saw a light? Where? Wait a minute. Slow down. Where?” Halt asks. “Straight ahead, in between the trees – there it is again,” Englund replies. “Watch – straight ahead … There it is.” “I see it too … What is it?” asks Halt, his voice rising with excitement. There is a long pause. “We don’t know, sir.” By this point, they have moved about 140 metres away from the landing site, into a farmer’s field. Halt points out a bird, but everything else is “deathly calm”. “There is no doubt about it – there’s some type of strange flashing red light ahead,” says Halt. “Sir, it’s yellow,” Englund replies. “I saw a yellow tinge in it too. Weird! It appears to be maybe moving a little bit this way? It’s brighter than it has been.” There is another long pause on the tape, then: “It’s coming this way! It is definitely coming this way!” Other voices on the tape, as well as Halt’s, describe pieces “shooting off” the source of the light. “There is no doubt about it. This is weeeeeird!” Halt says, breathlessly. Halt and his men cross into another field. He reports that they have seen up to five lights, all of which have become steady after pulsing with red flashes. “We’re at the far side of the second farmer’s field and made sighting again about 110 degrees,” Halt says. “This looks like it’s clear off to the coast. It’s right on the horizon. Moves about a bit and flashes from time to time. Still steady or red in colour.” Halt’s Geiger counter picks up readings registering at “four or five” clicks – a low reading, consistent with normal background radiation. “There’s definitely something there. Some kind of phenomenon,” Halt says. He then says he sees two strange objects on the horizon, shaped like half-moons, “dancing about with coloured lights on them”. He estimates that the half-moons, which become full circles, are five miles away and moving away. Then, suddenly the lights begin to race towards Halt and his men. In an instant, they are overhead, hovering erratically. Beams of light burst from the circular objects, hitting the ground. Halt laughs nervously. “This is unreal,” he says. Years later, Halt said they could hear chatter on their radios from his colleagues inside the base, reporting that the beams of light went down into the weapons-storage area, where the nuclear weapons were kept. Listening to the tape for the first time was like stumbling across a real-life UFO Blair Witch Project ; it’s just a shame they didn’t think to bring a camera. *** The day after his adventure in the forest, Penniston made this report: Received dispatch from Central Security Control to rendezvous with Police 4 AIC Burroughs, and Police 5 SSgt Steffens. Upon arriving at east gate directly to the east about 1½ miles in a large wooded area. A large yellow glowing light was emitting above the trees. In the centre of the lighted area directly in the centre ground level, there was red light blinking on and off 5 to 10 sec intervals. And a blue light that was being for the most part steady … when we got within a 50 meter distance. The object was producing red and blue light. The blue light was steady and projecting under the object. It was up the area directly extending a meter or two out … This is the closest point that I was near the object at any point ... Nowhere in the report did Penniston mention a triangular craft, lost time or the downloading of a binary code. Burroughs also penned a report of the events that night. Like Penniston, he described a bright white light and flashing blue and red lights coming from the woods; he recounted lying prone, but attributed this to movement in the woods and strange noises, including the sound of a screaming woman (later attributed to muntjac deer). Like Penniston, Burroughs did not mention anything about a craft in his official report, but he did include a sketch of what looks like a craft, with descriptions of the lights coming off it. In subsequent accounts, Penniston claimed that Burroughs was standing still throughout the encounter with the craft. “[He was] staring straight ahead and looked helplessly frozen to the spot … I yelled at him, but he seemed not to hear me … I couldn’t be certain if he was still cognisant and consciously aware of what was going on.” Penniston has also said that Burroughs has no memory of this happening. But what about Burroughs’ diagram? “This has always made me wonder about John’s memory. Why could he do this within 72 hours and today has no memory?” Penniston wrote in Encounter in Rendlesham Forest. There are reasons to believe the men’s official reports may have been coaxed out of them by their superiors to hide what really happened that night. According to Penniston, he originally wrote a four-page report, but was given what became the official report by military superiors, who ordered him to tell their version of the story if anyone asked. The report of Cabansag, who drove Penniston and Burroughs that night, is signed, but there is no date on the sheet. Cabansag has said he was ordered to sign it “under extreme duress”. In an interview in 2013, Penniston said he believed Burroughs’ statement was the only one that had not been tampered with. When Halt returned to base after his adventure in the woods, he was ordered to hand over the tape recording he had made. “I played the tape for the general and the staff,” Halt told the History Channel. “And the general, in his infinite wisdom, said: ‘Happened off the base. It’s a British affair. Case closed.’” Unsatisfied, Halt penned a signed memo a few weeks later, which detailed the events more fully – the patrolmen seeing the “strange glowing object in the forest” that was “triangular in shape” and “hovering or on legs”, the object disappearing and then being briefly sighted again. He then described what he saw: the depressions in the earth and the lights in the sky. The memo corroborates part of Penniston’s story, but there is no mention of him analysing the craft for 45 minutes while scribbling into a notebook. This notebook has become central to Rendlesham lore. Penniston, who left the air force in 1993, says he has had nightmares about that night ever since. He has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He says he thought nothing of the numbers in his notebook until 2010, when he was re-reading it for a documentary. One of the film’s producers noticed the ones and zeros while he flicked through the pages of his notebook and offered to decipher the code. In Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, the authors wrote that the numbers Penniston scribbled down could be interpreted as latitudes and longitudes for global landmarks. The numbers, they claimed, provided coordinates to famous buildings from antiquity, including the pyramids in Giza, the Nazca Lines in Peru and the Temple of Apollo in Naxos, as well as an area of woodland in Sedona, Arizona, known for its red-rock formations, and other locations of cultural and historical significance. They also claimed messages could be interpreted from the code: “exploration of humanity”, “eyes of your eyes”, “continuous for planetary advancement” and “origin year 8100”. There is a “consensus”, they wrote, that binary code “would be a logical way for either extraterrestrials or time travellers to communicate with us”. I don’t know what consensus they were referring to, or what group of people had reached it, but it’s true that the Seti Institute, a US non-profit focused on finding intelligent extraterrestrial life, believes that any communication would more than likely be achieved through a universal language such as mathematics. The authors’ wildest hypothesis was probably their linking of the code to the astrophysicist Ronald Mallett’s contested theories about time travel. Maybe, the authors argued, the craft was unlike anything else because it had come from the future, perhaps to warn humans about the dangers of the nuclear weapons stored at Rendlesham. The MoD maintains that the Rendlesham Forest incident presents “no defence significance”. *** There are sceptics who point to more mundane reasons for what happened in Rendlesham. According to Vince Thurkettle, who worked as a forester on the land at the time, the indentations on the ground could have been made by rabbits. “It was an absolutely normal glade in the forest with three rabbit scrapes – and they’re all carefully marked – that happened to be roughly in a triangle,” he told the BBC in 2020. And the broken branches? “Well, the forest is full of broken branches,” he said. Thurkettle said the burn marks Halt found on the trees were made a few days before by an axe owned by one of the forest rangers, meaning the trees were ready to be felled. But what about the lights that Halt and his men saw in the sky? Ian Ridpath, a British astronomer and UFO sceptic who has created a voluminous website dedicated to the incident in Rendlesham, argues that some of these lights were coming from Orfordness lighthouse and some from a meteor. The pieces “shooting off” that Halt mentions on the tape were an optical illusion caused by clouds distorting the lighthouse beacon, according to Ridpath. Halt and his men mention the lights appearing at five-second intervals, which matches with the beacon. Halt even says on the tape: “OK, we’re looking at the thing ... It looks like an eye winking at you.” The bright objects described towards the end of Halt’s tape – the ones that appeared as half-moons, then as full circles, which lingered and shot down beams of light? Simply stars. As well as Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, which was co-written with Pope, Penniston and Burroughs have written their own books on what happened that night. Their stories are contradictory, tangled and convoluted. Years after the incident, in 2006, Burroughs emailed Ridpath, telling him: “Penniston was not keeping a notebook as it went down.” Penniston denies this. Did Penniston make up stories of spaceships and computer code in the aftermath? “Obviously, in empirical terms, I can’t rule that out,” says Pope. “I think it’s more likely, if it didn’t happen as he says, that this is a memory that has somehow been implanted by virtue of hypnosis and drugs. And that this is a constructed narrative that he has been fed, and absolutely believes, because, in my experience, he’s a truthful man.” Penniston underwent hypnotic regression twice in the 1990s in an attempt to unearth memories he had suppressed. Regressive hypnotism is a controversial therapeutic practice that involves encouraging subjects to use their imaginations to take them back to events in their past that are the roots of their emotional trauma. It is more likely to implant false memories than unlock forgotten or murky events from one’s past. A false memory implanted by hypnosis might explain why Penniston is so adamant that he witnessed the craft. But here’s the kicker: Halt wrote his memo detailing the triangular craft a decade before Penniston went under hypnosis. So is Penniston just lying? Pope thinks it would be strange if he were, because he is not the hero of the story; he comes across more like a victim. I put it to him that some people can get ahead by painting themselves as victims. “They do,” Pope replies. “But to what end? What’s he really got out of this?” I think about this for a moment. Money? Pope shakes his head. Although his books have sold well, the royalties for Encounter in Rendlesham Forest were divided between him, Penniston, Burroughs, his agent and his lawyer. But Penniston and Burroughs often appear on TV documentaries; there is money in that. “Well, firstly, most of that is repeats. Secondly, I don’t know what he got, but, reading between the lines, I’d say somebody probably gave him an appearance fee of a couple of hundred dollars here and there. You know, that’s not much.” Pope didn’t think they were in it for the fame, either: while most people have heard of Roswell, virtually nobody has heard of Rendlesham, let alone Burroughs and Penniston. “Even if they thought they had something to gain, which I doubt, they must also have realised they stood to lose a lot in terms of the reputational damage,” he says. “People thinking they’re crazy, people thinking they’re lying, people thinking they’re dumb and they got fooled by a lighthouse.” I ask Pope if he gives any of the sceptical theories any credibility. He says he has been to the forest many times: “I’ve walked the ground. The beam from the lighthouse isn’t even visible from most of the locations because of the topography.” *** After I met Pope, I walked the tall streets of Manhattan and wrestled with all I had heard and read about Rendlesham. The story is extraordinary, like something out of a Marvel movie. Maybe it boils down to nothing more than a group of easily excitable Americans getting spooked by a deer, a lighthouse and some stars. But I found the witnesses’ stories compelling and I believe they saw real aircraft displaying strange characteristics. I don’t accept that stars, meteorological conditions and a lighthouse could fool people to such a wild degree. Halt has said he was well aware of the presence of the lighthouse and has pointed out that neither stars nor lighthouse beacons zip across the sky and shoot light beams down to Earth. And there’s more. There remains confusion about the levels of radiation the servicemen were exposed to over those Christmas nights. Burroughs claims he suffered from an illness after Boxing Day morning in 1980. He filed a claim with Veterans Affairs (VA) to receive disability benefits, but, when he attempted to get his military records, he discovered the government had classified them as top secret. Cheryl Bennett, an aide to the late senator John McCain, helped Burroughs obtain his records in 2015. She said getting information for him was like “pulling teeth” and one of the hardest things she has ever had to do. In 2015, Burroughs won a settlement from the VA, forcing them to pay for his medical bills, which he claims resulted from exposure to radiation caused by his encounter in Rendlesham. Burroughs’s lawyer, Pat Frascogna, said the settlement excluded “the bogus explanations put out there over the years” – the lighthouse and the astronomical phenomena. “We were denied access to records, mainly dating back to 1979, which we believe would have shown John had no health problems when he entered the air force, but that he developed heart problems and other ailments that arose from the incident.” To argue his case, Burroughs referenced Project Condign, a 460-page UK Ministry of Defence study that analysed more than 10,000 possible UFO sightings collected over several decades, many from military personnel. It was declassified in 2006 and asserted that several observers from the Rendlesham incident were “exposed to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) radiation”. Frascogna said: “Condign specifically mentions the incident and how radiation from UAPs could cause injury. John was able to furnish that document, and another dating back to the incident, when a radiation reading found levels to be significantly higher than normal.” This doesn’t agree with Halt’s Geiger counter, which found radiation levels to be within the range of background radiation. However, if the radiation was emanating from the triangular craft that Burroughs and Penniston had happened upon, why would Halt have recorded a high reading? The craft had vanished many hours earlier and, if it were emitting beta particles, as Penniston claimed, any radiation spike would have returned to normal shortly after it sped out of Rendlesham. Still, presumably the normal radiation readings Halt recorded wouldn’t have convinced the VA to cough up for Burrough’s medical bills, so did he have evidence we haven’t seen? Maybe we’ll never know. It’s a shame none of this was allowed to play out in court. Reacting to the settlement, Pope said: “After years of denial, this is official confirmation that what they encountered was real and caused them physical harm. This welcome development doesn’t give us a definitive explanation of the Rendlesham Forest incident, but it takes us ever closer to the truth.” Pope may have got slightly carried away there, as legal settlements do not necessarily mean the party being sued is liable or guilty. Often settlements are made to avoid the high costs of litigation. Adding to the sense that a legitimate incident occurred that night is the fact that when the MoD released 35 archives of UFO documents in 2011, the Rendlesham Forest papers were conspicuously absent. The BBC reported that the MoD received a request for its own records of the incident in 2000, but, when officials looked, they discovered a “huge” gap where defence intelligence files relating to it should have been. Peter Hill-Norton, a veteran of the second world war and a former chief of the defence staff in the MoD, who died in 2004, was a passionate believer in the defence significance of UFOs. He took the Rendlesham case very seriously. In an interview in the 1990s, he said: “The colonel on an American air force base, and a lot of his airmen, claim that something from outside the Earth’s atmosphere landed at their air force base. They inspected it, they photographed it, they took tests on the ground where it had been and found radioactive traces. There are only two explanations for what happened that night. One explanation is that it actually happened as Col Halt reported. The other is that Col Halt and all his men were hallucinating. Surely, to any sensible person, either of those explanations is of the utmost defence interest. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not the subject of rubbishing by deadline newspapers.” I think Lord Hill-Norton was right. The events at Rendlesham were not an isolated incident: members of the military around the world continually report seeing strange objects around their bases and warships, some of which house nuclear weapons. That’s not to say there is any conclusive evidence that points to guests from space. In February, Pope announced that he was terminally ill: “A while ago, following some digestive issues, I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Unfortunately, it’s Stage 4 and has metastasized to my liver. While I know that it’s kindness and hope that leads people to suggest healers and supposed miracle cures, and to say things like ‘fight it’, and ‘you can beat it’, I’m afraid my diagnosis and my situation leaves no doubt whatsoever: I can’t beat it.” Pope had been extraordinarily generous in making time for me over the years. I emailed him to express my sympathy and thanked him for all his help. When we met in New York, it felt as if we were kindred spirits, far from home in the middle of our own adventures. On 7 April, Pope died at home in Arizona. He was 60 years old and is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Weiss. Before he died, he posted: “The things I’ve done; the places I’ve been; the people I’ve met; and the secrets I’ve been privy to. I wouldn’t have swapped it for the world.” • This is an edited extract from Chasing Aliens by Daniel Lavelle, which is published on 30 April (Viking, £20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
