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Rendlesham Forest
Britain's most famous UFO sighting is the Rendlesham Forest incident -
referred to in America as the Bentwaters incident. It took place in December
1980 over a series of at least two nights. Most witnesses were United States Air
Force personnel based at the twin bases of RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge, in
Suffolk. Witnesses included the Deputy Base Commander, Lt Col Charles Halt.
Nick Pope undertook a cold case review of the Rendlesham Forest incident in
1994, while working on the MoD's UFO project. He has written about the case
extensively in the media and discussed it on numerous TV shows.
In the early hours of 26 December 1980, military personnel at the twin bases saw
strange lights in the forest. Thinking an aircraft might have crashed, they went
out to investigate. What they found was a small triangular-shaped craft that had
landed in a clearing in Rendlesham Forest. Nearby farm animals were going into a
frenzy. One of the security police officers, Jim Penniston, got close enough to
touch the side of the object. He and another of the airmen present, John
Burroughs, attached sketches of the craft to their official USAF witness
statements. One of these sketches details strange symbols Penniston saw on the
craft’s hull, which he likened to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
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Jim Penniston's official USAF sketch of the UFO |
Jim Penniston's official USAF sketch of the symbols |
Two nights later, the UFO returned. The Deputy Base Commander, Lt Col Charles
Halt, was informed and together with a small group of men went out into the
forest to investigate. As they progressed, radio communications were subjected
to interference and powerful mobile generators (called light-alls) that Halt had
brought to illuminate the forest began to cut out. Despite his initial plan to
“debunk” the UFO sighting, Halt and his team then encountered the UFO, which at
one point fired beams of light down at his party and at the Woodbridge facility.
"Here I am, a senior official who routinely denies this sort of thing and
diligently works to debunk them, and I'm involved in the middle of something I
can't explain", he subsequently commented.
Charles Halt documented his encounter by recording his observations on a
hand-held cassette recorder. The 17 minutes of tape are widely available on the
internet. Halt reported the various incidents to the MoD in a memorandum dated
13th January 1981. Despite the innocuous title “Unexplained Lights”, the
document described the UFO as being “metallic in appearance and triangular in
shape ... hovering or on legs”. In what may have been either a typographical
error or a slip of the memory, Halt gave incorrect dates for both sightings,
recording each as having taken place a day later than was, in fact, the case.
The MoD’s investigation included an inconclusive search for radar evidence that
might have corroborated what was seen, but the error in the dates meant the
wrong tapes were checked. Of far more interest was an assessment of radiation
readings that had been taken from the landing site with a Geiger counter. The
readings had peaked in three holes in the ground which formed the shape of an
equilateral triangle, which had been found at the spot where the craft landed.
The Defence Intelligence Staff stated that the readings seemed “significantly
higher than the average background”. Their report suggested that the radiation
level was around seven times what would have been expected for the area
concerned. This was confirmed to Nick Pope in 1994 by the Defence Radiological
Protection Service.
Nick Pope undertook a cold case review of the Rendlesham Forest incident in
1994. His conclusions were that the original investigation had been fatally
flawed by procedural errors, delay, confusion over jurisdiction and poor
information-sharing between the MoD and the USAF. Nick Pope reached no
definitive conclusion on what took place and the case remains unexplained to
this day.
The MoD's case file on the Rendlesham Forest incident was released in 2001 under
the Code of Practice for Access to Government Information (the forerunner of the
Freedom of Information Act). This followed requests by a number of people,
including the late Georgina Bruni, author of the most comprehensive book on the
Rendlesham Forest incident, You Can't Tell The People. The key papers from the
MoD file can be viewed in the Documents section of this website.
Nick Pope has acted as consultant and contributor on several TV documentaries on
the Rendlesham Forest incident and has written feature articles on it for
several national newspapers and magazines.
A more detailed account of the Rendlesham Forest incident and the various theories that have been put forward about it can be found here.