Nick Pope, who spent three years investigating UFO reports for Britain’s Ministry of Defence and then three decades as one of the most recognizable voices in the field, died on April 6, 2026, at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He was 60. His wife, the anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss, said the cause was esophageal cancer, which he had disclosed in February.

Pope joined the ministry at 19. In 1991 he was moved into the department that looked into UFO sightings, where he was the only employee. He concluded that most reports were hoaxes, delusions or ordinary objects, with about 5 percent unexplained. He investigated a 1993 wave of sightings over Wales and England, and in 1994 he reopened the 1980 Rendlesham Forest case, reporting radiation readings seven to ten times normal at the site. “I started my tour of duty believing in aircraft lights, but I ended it believing in aliens,” he later wrote.

He left the post in 1994. His 1996 book, Open Skies, Closed Minds, was a bestseller, and he became a fixture on Ancient Aliens and TV news, and consulted on Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and an X-Files revival. He helped popularize the term UAP to shed the tabloid baggage of “UFO.”

In his last months he hoped President Trump would open the government’s files. If disclosure didn’t come, he wrote, he would be nearly certain there was nothing to disclose. He is survived by his wife and his brother, Sebastian.