Rendlesham Forest UFO – was it a hoax?

In the summer of 2003 a former USAF military policeman at Woodbridge, Kevin Conde, claimed on television and in the press that the Rendlesham Forest UFO case was sparked by a practical joke he staged in his police car to frighten the guard at East Gate. “It was fertile ground for a practical joke, and practical jokes are a tradition in the security police,” Conde explained.

He made his claims in interviews with BBC TV and the Daily Mail, a newspaper ironically better known for promoting UFO sightings than questioning them.




	Kevin Conde – claims the Rendlesham Forest UFO sighting was caused by coloured lights on his police car. (Photo: BBC)

“There was this one guy at the back gate, and he was known as a bit of a problem – he was always seeing things,” Conde told the Daily Mail. “It always turned out that it was a star or something. So I decided to play a practical joke.

“I drove down the taxiway in my car. I stuck the spotlight on, after sticking red and green lenses on it. I then drove round in circles, in the fog, with the PA loudspeaker going, flashing my lights.

“It wasn’t a UFO, it was a 1979 Plymouth Volare [a standard-issue American police car].”

Conde returned to the US shortly after the incident and never heard about the famous UFO case until many years later.

As Conde’s claim has been widely repeated I shall discuss it briefly here, although it does not form part of my explanation.

Firstly, although there is no reason to doubt that Conde pulled the stunt he describes, there is considerable doubt over when it occurred. Conde himself cannot remember the exact date, but from his description of the circumstances, including the weather conditions, it seems that it did not coincide with the Rendlesham UFO sighting. Neither is it established that the guard he was trying to scare was one of those on duty at the time of the UFO sighting.

Conde says that he drove along the Woodbridge runway, whereas the lights reported by the security guards were in the forest. Additionally, Conde was evidently not aware when he made his claim that the sightings stretched over two nights and involved lights that were nowhere near the air base.

However, Conde did provide one significant clue when he noted: “It was a good stunt. Someone else could have repeated it. In fact, most good cop practical jokes did get repeated.”

Hence, although it is unlikely that Kevin Conde’s hoax was directly responsible for the Rendlesham Forest UFO, it remains possible that someone else repeated the stunt, this time outside the base, which could account for some of the unusual coloured lights seen in the forest by the guards at East Gate on the first night. But unless the real (presumed) culprit comes forward, this must remain speculation.

► Read Conde’s original statement sent to James Easton and myself in April 2001, over two years before his claim was reported in the press.

In 2010 November Conde left a series of public postings on the Justice for the Bentwaters 81st Facebook page run by Jim Penniston and John Burroughs in which he openly criticized the Rendlesham witnesses for their ever-developing stories. Conde said: “I was almost certainly the Woodbridge patrol or the LE flight chief the night of Halt’s expedition. All I remember was the laughing about the people seeing UFO’s. It was not treated seriously at all. It was a non-event when it happened, and the stories of the believers are the ones that have morphed over time. If the USAF did not make a big deal about it, it was because they were appalled that a Light Colonel would be so nutty as to take a bunch of security troops and some guys from disaster prep on an extended walk through the woods in a foreign country. The higher command carefully ignored it in the hope that it and LtCol Halt would just fade away.” For the full original exchange, including contributions by the equally skeptical officer in charge on the night in question, Lt Skip Buran, see here.