In Brief: Ufologist Nick Pope Has Died, Wife Says

Nick Pope, the former UK Ministry of Defence official who made a second career as a ufologist, died yesterday after a battle with cancer, his wife Elizabeth Weiss announced in a social media post Monday. "My heart is breaking -- Nick passed away this afternoon at our home," Weiss wrote. "The last few weeks of his life, even as he suffered, he managed to do a few interviews from home. I was so lucky to have met and to have married Nick. He was a wonderful husband. I loved him dearly." Pope was a fixture on the History channel program Ancient Aliens and served as the moderator for the series' traveling stage show. He appeared in countless UFO documentaries and wrote several books on ufology. Despite his popularity as a ufologist, controversy dogged some of his career claims after documents suggested Pope had exaggerated his Ministry role, portraying himself as the keeper of the UK's "X-Files" and a government UFO investigator, while the Ministry maintained he simply filed UFO reports part-time for a few years. Nevertheless, in his later career he proved one of the more reasonable UFO investigators, if not always the most critical. Pope was 60 years old.