LINKS TO MORE DETAILED DISCUSSION

Those who are already familiar with the case may wish to go directly to a more detailed examination of the main issues:

•  More about the identification of the Orford Ness lighthouse, including photographic evidence demonstrating its visibility from the forest and the question of whether Col. Halt saw it as well as the UFO.

•  More about the 3 am fireball that apparently sparked off the whole sequence of events.

•  Read the original written statements made for Col. Halt by the airmen who witnessed the first night’s events.

•  Watch a video clip of the lighthouse flashing in the forest, taken from my original BBC TV investigation.

•  More about the other lights in the sky seen by Col. Halt.

UPDATED •  More about the radiation readings.
•  More about the landing marks and the supposed tree damage.

•  More about the re-entry of the Russian Cosmos 749 satellite.

•  Was it a hoax that got out of hand?

•  What about the supposed radar sightings?

•  My transcript of Col. Halt’s tape recording of the sighting.

•  Read Col. Halt’s original memo to the MoD.


I would be particularly interested to hear from anyone who was on the base at the time and can add their own insights to the case.
<ian @ ianridpath.com>


DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

How much did the British government really know about the Rendlesham incident, and when? To find out, read the formerly secret file of the Ministry of Defence, now available publicly. Also now released is the Suffolk police file, which offers independent eyewitness accounts of the same sightings.

Why did the British government not investigate the case in any depth? Click here for its explanation.

A robust exchange of correspondence about the Rendlesham case between Lord Peter Hill-Norton and the Ministry of Defence, released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007, can be downloaded from the MoD website (click here).
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Introductory note:

The Rendlesham Forest UFO case has taken on the mantle of the “British Roswell”, but in truth it is a far more significant event than Roswell. There is scarcely any other UFO case anywhere which can boast such a large number of apparently highly credible witnesses on two separate nights, or such a wide variety of supporting evidence including supposed physical traces, an official memo confirming the events written by a high-ranking USAF officer, a report by local police officers who were called to the scene on two separate occasions, a real-time tape recording made during the second night of the sighting by the same USAF officer, and written statements made by the witnesses to the first night’s events. There are more TV programmes to be found posted on YouTube about this one case than any other, and it regularly appears on lists of ‘best ever’ UFO sightings. Yet much of the popular discussion of the case has centred not on the well-substantiated primary evidence mentioned above, but instead on various tales of doubtful provenance, some from individuals not directly involved, that emerged many years later once the Rendlesham mythology had become well-entrenched.

The article reproduced on the following two pages is an old one, but remains valid because it demonstrates where the case stood shortly after it became public knowledge in the early 1980s. The article highlights the main elements of the case and offers explanations for each in turn. It should be emphasized that none of the genuine evidence that has emerged subsequently has invalidated any of these explanations; rather, it has strengthened them. In particular, government documents released since 2001 confirm that the UK’s Ministry of Defence never considered the case worthy of a serious investigation, and we now also know why.

The article first appeared in The Guardian, a highbrow English newspaper, on 1985 January 5 under the title “A Flashlight in the Forest”. In this web version I have included a few bracketed asides to clarify and update various points, added some explanations to make various references more comprehensible to non-English readers, and included several illustrations.

The article was written before the release of the tape-recording made by Lt.Colonel Charles Halt describing the events of the second night as he witnessed them. I have placed on this website the latest version of my own transcript of that tape, compiled with the help of Col Halt himself, which corrects many errors contained in various other versions found in print and online.

In the years since the article first appeared in print I have been able to amplify various points, based in many instances on the additional information contained in Col. Halt’s real-time tape recording or his subsequent interviews. I hope you will find this a suitable balance to some of the more fanciful treatments of this case now in circulation.

The links at the left will take you to more detailed discussion of the main aspects of the case. These links are repeated at the end of this article.

CLICK TO GO TO THE ARTICLE >>

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Books and articles about the Rendlesham Forest UFO case:
Sky Crash by Brenda Butler, Dot Street, and Jenny Randles (Neville Spearman, 1984).
UFO Crash Landing? by Jenny Randles (Blandford, 1998).
See also Jenny’s chapter titled Rendle Shame Forest in The UFOs That Never Were (London House, 2000).
You Can’t Tell the People by Georgina Bruni (Sidgwick & Jackson, 2000).

Read Dr David Clarke’s 25th anniversary assessment of the case, originally published in the 2005 December issue of Fortean Times.

Wikipedia entry on the Rendlesham Forest Incident.



Content last updated 2009 June.

All original content © Ian Ridpath. All rights reserved.


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“UFO hunters will continue to believe that an alien spaceship landed in Rendlesham Forest that night. But I know that the first sighting coincided with the burn-up in the atmosphere of an exceptionally bright meteor, and that the airmen who saw the flashing UFO between the pine trees were looking straight at the Orford Ness lighthouse.”