Rendlesham Forest UFO case - explained
Rendlesham Forest UFO case
THE ARTICLE THAT FIRST EXPLAINED THE
SIGHTINGS
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In December 1980, something remarkable was
said to have occurred outside the US Air Force base at
Woodbridge, near Ipswich in eastern England. News of the event
leaked out slowly, finally hitting the headlines in October
1983: “UFO lands in Suffolk – and that’s
official”, screamed the front
page of the News of the World, a popular
UK tabloid.
The story was sensational. It told of a
group of American airmen who were confronted one night with an
alien spaceship in Rendlesham Forest, which surrounds the air
force base. According to the story, the craft came down over
the trees and landed in a blinding explosion of light.
The airmen tried to approach the object,
but it moved away from them as though under intelligent
control. The following day, landing marks were found on the
ground, burns were seen on nearby trees, and radiation traces
were recorded. There was even talk of aliens aboard the craft,
and allegations of a massive cover-up. It had all the
ingredients of a classic UFO encounter.
The News of the
World’s informant was a former
US airman. He was given the pseudonym Art Wallace, for he
claimed that his life had been threatened if he talked [note:
his real name is Larry Warren, as everyone now knows]. Yet here
he was freely giving interviews to newspapers and television.
While his fantastic story might be doubted,
it was impossible to shrug off a memo written by the deputy
base commander, Lt. Col. Charles I. Halt, to the Ministry of
Defence, which was publicly released in the United States under
the Freedom of Information Act. Halt’s memo, reprinted in
full here, is not as
sensational as Wallace’s story, but it is prime
documentary evidence of a type rarely encountered in UFO cases.
UFO researchers in Britain could scarcely
believe their luck: this was The Big One, final proof that We
Are Not Alone. The News of the World paid £12,000 for the story. A subsequent
book about the case, Sky Crash by Brenda Butler, Jenny Randles, and Dot
Street, described it as “unique in the annals of UFO
history...the world’s first officially observed, and
officially confirmed, UFO landing and contact”. Cable
News Network made a documentary about the case.
All that evidence, backed up by the word of
the US Air Force, could not possibly have a rational
explanation. Or could it? I have my own detective story about
the Rendlesham Forest UFO.
Soon after the News
of the World story appeared, I
went in search of local opinions about the case. I made contact
by telephone with a forester, Vince Thurkettle, who lives
within a mile of the alleged UFO landing site [he now lives in
Norfolk]. Immediately I was brought down to Earth. “I
don’t know of anyone around here who believes that
anything strange happened that night,” he told me.
So what did he think the flashing light was
in Rendlesham Forest? I was astonished by his reply.
“It’s the lighthouse,” he said.
That lighthouse lies at Orford Ness on the
Suffolk coast, five miles from the forest. Thurkettle plotted
on a map the direction in which the airmen reported seeing
their flashing UFO, and found that they were looking straight
into the lighthouse beam.
Could this really be the answer? I visited
the site with a camera crew from BBC TV’s Breakfast Time
programme. On the way there, the cameraman was sceptical about
the lighthouse theory. I didn’t blame him.
It was past midnight when Vince Thurkettle
took us to the site of the alleged landing, and it felt spooky.
The area had by now been cleared of trees as part of normal
forest operations, but enough pines remained at the edge of the
forest to give us a realistic idea of what the airmen saw that
night [see photo below].
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Night light: I took this photograph on my second visit to the forest, in 1983 November. The Orford Ness lighthouse is the bright yellow-white light at right of centre, seen between trees that were still standing at the edge of the forest, although the area in which I was standing had by then been cleared. Two other whitish lights left of centre were on a building or buildings in the valley, which I did not identify at the time. At far left are two red lights on tall aerials on Orford Ness itself, which are easier to see on a larger version of the above photograph.
On a separate page you can see other
photographs of the area taken
during my visit in 1983 November, including a daytime view of
these same trees.
Sure enough, the lighthouse beam seemed to
hover a few feet above ground level, because Rendlesham Forest
is higher than the coastline. The light seemed to move around
as we moved. And it looked close – only a few hundred
yards away among the trees. All this matched the airmen’s
description of the UFO.
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So startlingly brilliant was the beam that
the television cameras captured it easily [see still frame at left].
The formerly sceptical cameraman was convinced. My report was
shown the following morning on Breakfast Time, much to the
dismay of UFO spotters and the News
of the World reporter.
The lighthouse theory soon had its
supporters and its detractors. But there were still too many
open questions for the case to be considered solved. For
instance, what about those landing marks?
Some weeks later [in 1983 November] I
returned to Rendlesham Forest in search of answers. The landing
marks had long since been destroyed when the trees were felled,
but I now knew an eyewitness who had seen them: Vince
Thurkettle. He recalled for me his disappointment with what he
saw.
The three depressions were irregular in shape and did not even
form a symmetrical triangle. He recognized them as rabbit
diggings, several months old and covered with a layer of fallen
pine needles. They lay in an area surrounded by 75ft-tall pine
trees planted 10ft to 15ft apart - scarcely the place to land a
20ft-wide spacecraft. [note: this is one of the various
estimates of size that have been made. Witness Jim Penniston
says the object was “the size of a tank” although
Halt’s memo described it as 2-3 metres across].
The “burn marks” on the trees
were axe cuts in the bark, made by the foresters themselves as
a sign that the trees were ready to be felled. I saw numerous
examples in which the pine resin, bubbling into the cut, gives
the impression of a burn [see photos
below].
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Slash and burn: Cuts made by foresters on pine trees of Rendlesham Forest give the impression of burn marks. Photos taken in 1983 November.
Additional information came from other
eyewitnesses – the local police, called to the scene by
the Woodbridge air base. The police officers who visited the
site reported that they could see no UFO, only the
Orford Ness lighthouse. Like
Vince Thurkettle, they attributed the landing marks to animals.
The case for a landed spacecraft was looking very shaky indeed.