Operation Thunder Child

The official response to a UFO sighting is usually to determine whether it was an aircraft, a weather balloon, an astronomical object or somebody discovering that Venus looks peculiar after closing time. In Operation Thunder Child, the sightings multiply, aircraft are scrambled and the explanations become increasingly difficult to fit inside the usual reassuring paragraph. Britain’s defence establishment is forced to consider the deeply inconvenient possibility that unidentified flying objects are unidentified because they were not made here.

As UFO activity becomes more frequent and openly hostile, the Cabinet Office, Joint Intelligence Committee and Permanent Joint Headquarters begin coordinating the Government’s response. Radar operators, intelligence officers, scientists, pilots and politicians attempt to establish what is happening while observing the traditional requirements of official secrecy: nobody may know anything, everybody must prepare for everything, and each department must remain suspicious that another department has known the answer since 1947.

The crisis escalates from unexplained encounters and alien-abduction reports into military confrontation. Aircraft pursue impossible targets, governments exchange incomplete information and Britain discovers that its closest allies may have agendas of their own. When an extraterrestrial craft is finally captured, along with evidence that cannot be filed as swamp gas, the authorities face the practical difficulties of containing alien technology, examining its occupants and deciding precisely which secure committee ought to conduct humanity’s first conversation with another species.

Contact is established, but the resulting dialogue does not produce the simple answers anyone hoped for. The visitors’ actions, motives and previous dealings with humanity raise disturbing questions, while revelations from inside the machinery of government make it increasingly difficult to distinguish allies from collaborators, secrecy from treachery and defensive planning from the opening stages of war. The truth may be out there, but it has arrived with superior flight performance and no obligation to answer follow-up questions.

Nick Pope gives the novel an unusual procedural authenticity. He worked for the Ministry of Defence, ran the British Government’s UFO project and drew upon experience of crisis management, defence planning and military operations. The result is less a lone hero defeating the invasion with a stolen spaceship than an institutional thriller in which radar tracks, intelligence assessments, Cabinet briefings and rules of engagement matter almost as much as the aliens. Earth’s survival depends upon committees, which is perhaps the most frightening element in the book.

The title nods towards H. G. Wells’s valiant warship Thunder Child, but this is an alien-invasion story refitted for the late twentieth century: stealth technology, modern fighters, classified installations, political distrust and a bureaucracy obliged to develop a policy on extraterrestrial incursion before lunch. Remarkably, the manuscript itself had to undergo official government security clearance before publication, lending a pleasing extra layer of suspicion to the claim that it is only fiction.

Fast-moving, detailed and unsettlingly plausible, Operation Thunder Child is ideal for readers who like their UFOs accompanied by genuine military terminology and their conspiracies administered through the correct departmental channels. It is followed by Operation Lightning Strike, in which the limited confrontations develop into the rather less containable prospect of all-out war.

Published by Simon & Schuster in 1999, this copy is in Very Good condition. It has been examined, cleared for public release and shows no visible evidence of alien interference.

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