Rendlesham Forest UFO – the flashing light

Was the flashing light really
the lighthouse?

Of all the questions that need to be answered about the Rendlesham Forest UFO case, the most significant has always seemed to me to be the following: what was the flashing light seen in the forest by the airmen on both nights?

This was the first aspect of the case that I addressed once the story appeared in the News of the World in 1983 October, and I was quickly convinced by the suggestion of local forester Vince Thurkettle that it was the Orford Ness lighthouse. Within days of the newspaper report appearing, I visited Rendlesham Forest at night with a BBC TV camera crew to interview Vince and film the lighthouse flashing as seen from the forest.

However, it was not until many years later that I was able to pin down exactly where Col. Halt had been standing when he saw his flashing UFO on the second night of the sighting (i.e. the early hours of December 28). The clue came from an online interview Halt gave to Salley Rayl on the Microsoft Network in 1997 May, by when he had retired from the air force and felt freer to speak. In this interview, the existence of which was brought to my attention by James Easton, Halt noted that the UFO had appeared closely in line with a farmhouse “directly in front of us”.

Armed with this new lead, I returned to Rendlesham Forest in 1998 October. Scouting around at the forest edge, I discovered something that I had not appreciated previously: the top of the lighthouse peeps through a gap between distant trees, and can be seen directly from only a limited area of the forest. This may explain why some visitors to the forest have failed to see the lighthouse. Remarkably enough, when I was positioned so that I could see the lighthouse through the gap in the distant tree line, the farmhouse lay right in front of me, in the same line of sight, just as Halt had described it as lining up with the flashing UFO.

The photograph I took on that occasion has been published in various places, but at that time the trees were still in full leaf and the crop in the field had just been harvested, quite different from the situation in the dead of winter when Halt and his men chased their flashing UFO across this field. To get a better idea of what Halt might have seen, I returned to the site on 2005 April 3 in the company of fellow researcher Dave Clarke when there was less foliage around, this time armed with a digital camera, and captured the view below. The upper image is the full-frame view with the lighthouse circled; the lower one is a portion of the same frame enlarged. These photographs demonstrate once and for all that the lighthouse was not “30 degrees off to the right” as Col Halt has since claimed (see next page).

Orford Ness lighthouse seen from the eastern edge of Rendlesham Forest in daylight. I took this photograph in 2005 April from the forest edge, looking east across the neighbouring field towards the lighthouse with the farmhouse in the foreground. I think that it shows us a daylight version of the view that Col. Halt had when he looked from Rendlesham Forest across the field towards the “winking eye” UFO. The tilled soil beyond and to the left of the farmhouse is what I take to be the “second farmer’s field” described by Halt (see below). For a wider-angle view of the field from the same position, click here.

Local resident Tony Nelson of Wickham Market has sent me a super-telephoto view of the top of the lighthouse peeking over the distant ridge, taken by him on 2006 December 9; to download it click here. Note on Tony’s picture a stretch of newly planted trees along the ridge which are starting to obscure the beam from the lighthouse, as I discovered on my most recent visit in 2007 December.

The farmhouse in my picture, at Capel Green, is identified in Jenny Randles’ books as Victor Boast’s house. The houses to the north of it (off the left of my pictures), Green Farm, are lower and among trees. The ground falls towards Butley River, two miles to the east. Beyond the river the ground rises again to a fairly flat ridge, with a gap between two stands of trees through which the white top of Orford Ness lighthouse can be seen. Although a shield blocks the beam of the lighthouse from the town of Orford itself, it does not extend far enough to block the beam from this part of the forest, as may be clear from my enlarged picture.

From Halt’s own description that the farmhouse could be seen right in front of them with the flashing UFO almost in line with it, I think I was standing pretty much where Halt’s patrol crossed the fence, which is particularly low and easy to step over at this point. As seen on a recent map of the area, my position was about the middle of the letter G in the name Capel Green. This point, incidentally, is somewhat to the south of the location given as the landing site in Jenny Randles’ books. On a photograph of the landing site reproduced by Georgina Bruni in her book You Can’t Tell the People, daylight is clearly visible between the tree trunks, which would not be possible if the site were more than about 100 metres from the forest edge. This puts its position at around 52° 05’ 20” N, 1° 26’ 57” E, although it could have been slightly further north if the gap in the distant trees was wider in 1980 than it is now. (There is now a nice picnic bench quite close to the location.)

Perhaps a better idea of the layout of the area can be gathered from this aerial photograph (click on it for a larger version):

I have labelled the landing site, the farmer’s field and the farmhouse. After walking across this field and past the farmhouse towards the flashing light, Halt mentioned crossing a second farmer’s field. This would seem to be the next field in line past the farmhouse which I have labelled accordingly. Comparison with the Ordnance Survey map shows this field is bordered by a brook which is apparently the “creek” which Halt, on his tape, reports crossing. (He and his men apparently fell into it, too.)

See the original image on Google Maps.

To show the complete east-to-west line of sight from the forest to the Orford Ness lighthouse, I have constructed strip charts from OS maps and aerial photographs downloaded from multimap.com:

Click here for a strip-chart map

Click here for the same area shown in aerial photographs

(Note: These are 260–400k files and are best downloaded to disk for opening with a graphics program.)

For further discussion of the identification of the flashing light, including the question of why Col. Halt thought the lighthouse was in the southeast when it was in fact straight in front of him, go to the next page >>

Content last revised: 2008 February.



					Return to main Rendlesham Forest UFO page



				Return to Ian Ridpath’s UFO page