CS: What is the opinion among the military? Is it that these crafts are from other countries?

CS: There is no cooperate view. On this subject there is a very general standing policy which is - the reason we look at UFO's is to look for evidence of threat to the UK. But ofcourse it doesn't say from where the threat comes... And ofcourse it has its root in the cold war and it probably did start out as looking for something a little bit more than Soviet aircraft, missiles, and things like that. But again, the standard answer you would get in parlament is that UFO's are of no defence significance, there is no evidence that any threat has been posted.

I disagree! So I say that, if you get a structured craft which gets through our airdefences and operates over our mainland of UK, that has got to be of defence significance because it raises serious concerns about the ability of the intruding craft, whereever it comes from, compared to the ability of our airdefence systems.

CS: Did you ever get the impression that you were not alone working with the UFO investigations? In sweden we have two governmental offices working with UFO's. One ordinary and one military that deals with defence-significance like airplanes or missiles etc...

NP: No, we don't differentiate. Anything that is unknown, even if they only belive it's an unknown prototype aircraft it would come to me. And I could call on various experts to help me.

CL: The military should be interested in getting qualified military personal working with this unidentified missiles and airplanes etc.?

NP: Well, we've all been looking at the same data. If I get an interesting case like structured craft or a missile I would send it to all our airdefence people for help and I would assume that they would come back to me and tell me. But generally I would feel that this whole business with prototype aircraft and things was a little bit of a red herring.
     Obviously, there are all sorts of wierd and wonderful aircraft that we have that you won't see at any airshow for years. But, if anything like that would be operating in our airspace we would know about it. I think that people think that countries send aircraft over eachothers airspace all the time without permission - it just doesn't happen. Even if we have had many aircrafts flying close to the airspace-border to see how fast we can scramble our airdefence and get fighters in the air, we don't send aircraft to boldly cross other peoples countries. That would be almost an intempted act of war! Even if it was an allie like an American, it would be a major diplomatical incident.

CN: How often do they ask for permission to cross another country?

NP: Aircraft are flying in and out all the time. But the people would test there own prototypes in their own country. I mean, if the Americans would have a very highly advanced aircraft, the thought of actuallly risking it on a transatlantic flight would be very fool-party.
     I mean, I would view my job there as almost being like a detective. I would try to eliminate all the things that it might be and then see what I was left with. And along the way I found explanations for 90-95%. There were people I could talk about the paths of satellites or whether any spacedebris was reentering the atmosphere, I could speak to the royal observatory at Greenwich about fireballs...

CS: Do you still have those contacts? Could you call those people today for information?

NP: No. It's not my official job anymore. So if I would call them I probably would be treated as just another member of the public. And I suspect that, cause I'm not too popular with some of the people at the ministry of defence that I would probably get less cooperation now.

CS: What about the person that took over your job...

NP: It's a woman. Called Kerry Feltpot. (?) And I get the impression that, too use a coin of frase - the X-Files has been closed down. They've gone back to the bad old days where they just send out standard letters and I think the investigation they do now is at absolute minimum.

CS: But that is not good for the military either!?

NP: It's not good at all! And to illustrate that we had a case about two weeks ago. There was a multiple witness­case with police witnesses, coastgurad witnesses and witnesses on an oiltanker out to sea. Simultaineously the object was picked up on at least three different military radars and we didn't even get our aircraft in the air to have a look!

CS: How do you know that it was picked up on radar?

NP: A coastgurad had spoken to an RAF radarbase and then the coastguard has said, quite openly, to the police that they've spoken to the military who confirmed that they had aquired a target on their radar. Maybe it was ground-clutter, but not really, when you get the thing on three different military systems and you have it correlated by numerous visual sightings as well...

CS: What would happen to a radar-tape like that? Did you keep any tapes after the investigations were concluded?

NP: Yes, some of them I kept somewhere in the office. There are some VHS videotapes that was labeled up with data from the night of, so and so.

CS: And they are evidence as much as forms?!

NP: Yes, although I come back to the fact that I never really got any radartape which did correlate anything. I never had an airdefence expert sitting down with me and going - Oh my god! That's a structured craft and its not one of ours! - you know. I had plenty of people saying to me - we get things on the radar all the time...

CS: But you never saw any of the "good data"?

NP: No. And they intend not to keep them either. They intend to think of them as other things. Again, they are thinking all the time of conventional objects. We have a balistic-missile early warning center at an RAF base, and somebody I know was talking to some of the people up there. And they said - sometimes we pick up fireballs on our system. They come on to the screen and they go across at thousands of miles per hour and...it's just it! As I ask them how do you know it was fireballs? They say -beacuase they go very fast! (laughter). You see, that's the attitude you got to work with. The challenge is to go to these people and say hang on! Just because it goes that fast and in a straight line doesn't have to mean it's a fireball!

CS: But there have been some interesting radar­cases. Were those tapes saved?

NP: I don't know. I've never seen those tapes but I have a sneaky suspicion, but unfortunately a lot of the old data has been destroyed.
     Until 1967 there was so few UFO reports, and there was so little interest outside of the UFO-lobby that the things were generally destryed. In 1967 there was a big wave of sightings and a search of public interest. And at that point people decided that this was a subject of sufficient public interest to justify keeping the files at the Public Records Office, and there was many researchers spending time and going back to find some quite interesting things! But I suspect that a lot of the stuff over the years has been destryed and I don't necessarily see that a the result of a big conspiracy, it's rather the result of a big bureaucracy.

CS: There is an Australian UFOlogist that has read all their airforcepapers and it showed that they never was very interested in the UFO subject. Is that common?

NP: Yes. Generally most peoples attitude is UFO's equals flying saucer equals a lot of fruitcakes...
     But there are some people within the military that say -Okey, there are a lot of fruitcakes, but put that aside cause there are some really interesting stuff here. And it does raise some interesting defence of national security issue. But again, it's a subject that doesn't intend to do your career much good...

CS: Did you work closely together with other investigators around the world?

NP: No. I was very limited in what I could do and my bosses felt that I was doing too much anyway. They just wanted me to have a quick look and say -Well, it could be anything. and put it in the file and send a nice letter. So, I was fighting a difficult battle anyway.

CL: Belgium had some quite interessting UFO-cases in 1989. Did you notice anything about them in England?

NP: No. The main Belgium wave was in 1990, but you're right about it started in 1989. On the 30th and the 31st of March 1990 where when they scrambled two F-16 aircraft to intercept a UFO.

CL: But you didn't have any connection with England?

NP: No. But then three years later we had a huge wave of sightings, on the very same night. This time it was all over Britain. It was an important wave of sightings and there was many independent witnesses from all around the country. Because it was quite late at night a lot of those witnesses were policeofficers on nightpatrol.

CL: Couldn't it have been some astronomical phenomena?

NP: No, because some of the people saw it at much closer quarters and saw that it was a structured craft including that it flew over two RAF-bases and it was seen on the second base to be about 100-200 feet above the ground, with a low humming sound firing a beam of light down at the countryside, and the light was tracking backwards and forwards.