This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 17, Issue 2-3, from 2006.

To the devoted connoisseur of skeptic-versus-believer debates, the argument over the Rendlesham ‘UFO’ of December 1980 looks like turning into a classic of its kind. The latest phase (October 2003) of this decades-long guerrilla campaign revolves around the suggestion – and it was only a suggestion, not a ‘claim’ – by the former USAF law enforcement officer, retired Senior Master Sergeant Kevin Conde, that while on patrol at Woodbridge he played a prank that may have been the cause of one feature of the case.

Briefly stated, Conde – then a Technical Sergeant – adapted a USAF police car’s fancy lighting system to throw a brilliant display of coloured illuminations into a misty sky, and so could have created the impression that mysterious beams of light were being shone not up from, but down onto the Woodbridge base from above.

It seems possible that Conde perpetrated his jape at the same time Lt Col Charles Halt and his party were stumbling around in the dark in Rendlesham Forest. If so, these exchanges, on the tape-recorded commentary that Halt made at the time make sense:

LT COL HALT:
Now we’re observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground.

M/SGT BALL:
Look at the colours … shit.

LT COL HALT:
This is unreal.

[Break in recording]

LT COL HALT:
3.30: and the objects are still in the sky, although the one to the south looks like it’s losing a little bit of altitude. We’re turning around and heading back toward the base. The object to the sou … the object to the south is still beaming down lights to the ground.

[Break in recording]

LT COL HALT:
0400 hours: one object still hovering over the Woodbridge base at about five to ten degrees off the horizon. Still moving erratic and similar lights beaming down as earlier.

Interestingly enough, two other witnesses – local residents – saw coloured lights moving around in the region of the East Gate at the same time. James Easton has noted (in a post to UFORL email list, 1 September 2003):

In UFO Crash Landing?, Jenny Randles documents a witness, Sarah Richardson (only 12 at the time), who reportedly watched enigmatic ‘light beams’, when Halt was making a similar observation. … At the time, she was at her mother’s home in Woodbridge. It was between 1 and 3 am into Sunday, 28 December.

From (Mum’s) house you could see the river and the forests and the bases. You could hear the revving of the engines. You became familiar with all the spotlights and other activity.

This night was different. Three bands of light appeared over the woods to the side of the runway … They were star-like and they were bright, coloured red, blue and yellow … the oddest thing was the colour changes. Blue, green, yellow and so on.’

Jenny also notes that on the same night, local garage owner Gerry Harris claimed to have observed near [the] East Gate, and apparently emanating from within the forest, ‘three separate lights’ which sometimes ‘moved around in circles’.

So Conde’s practical joke, or one like it, looks like a good explanation for that small but otherwise puzzling aspect of the case.

I mention all this simply to give Kevin Conde his due locus standi in the Rendlesham affair. Inevitably, if now perhaps to his chagrin, Conde was drawn into what one can only call an argy-bargy on the Internet with Georgina Bruni, author of the True Believer’s Bible on the Rendlesham incident, You Can’t Tell The People (Bruni, 2000), over his possible part in the events of the second night. Equally inevitably the question of a ‘cover-up’ arose in the course of the exchange. In responding to that idea in an email to Georgina Bruni dated 17 July 2003 (quoted in a post to the UFORL email list of 20 July 2003), Conde wrote:

Knowing the USAF as I do I am still convinced that if the USAF was covering anything up, it was a vice base commander leading a search for UFOs off base accompanied by people responsible for guarding nuclear weapons. The fact that senior leadership did nothing to Halt can be attributed to their desire to keep the situ-ation low key. Relieving Halt would have made a splash, especially if he threw a public fit, coupled with a lack of firm evidence. They may have believed he was a wacko, but could not prove it.

In April 1998, when my brain was still able to keep track of the various claims and counter-claims in this case, I became intrigued by this question of USAF personnel wandering around on duty, en masse, in the Suffolk woods. It struck me as strange that they should feel free to do so. I lifted the electric telephone, and spoke at length with the RAF and British Army press officers at the Ministry of Defence. I didn’t mention the Rendlesham case. I merely asked, à propos any RAF base leased to the USAF, where the USAF’s territorial responsibility ended and who would defend the perimeter if it were attacked.

The answers were interesting, for they suggested that Lt Col. Halt had put himself in a potentially embarrassing position. They were:

• USAF responsibility starts (and ends) with the fenceline of an RAF base leased to the USAF.
• Beyond that, i.e. outside the base, responsibility for security rests with the local police.

That’s the strict legal position: No less a person than Mr Plod himself is in charge. Imagine the scene. Hordes of Red Army Spetsnaz troops parachute into the Suffolk countryside as Soviet ICBMs rain down on Birmingham, Manchester, Stowe-in-the-Wold, Charlton Marshall, &c.

For those unaware of the term, ‘Spetsnaz’ is an abbreviation of Spetsialnoye Nazranie – ‘troops of special purpose’. As one authority explains (John Keller):

Although Spetsnaz units may be used for other purposes during peacetime, their primary role is to carry out strategic missions during the final days prior to war breaking out and in war itself. These wartime tasks would include: deep reconnaissance of strategic targets; the destruction of strategically important command-control-and-communications (C3) facilities; the destruction of strategic weapons’ delivery systems; demolition of important bridges and transportation routes; and the snatching or assassination of important military and political leaders. Many of these missions would be carried out before the enemy could react and some even before war had actually broken out.

Faced with such an outrage, the protocol, at face value, would go as follows. The US base commander complains to the RAF base commander, who passes on American expressions of distaste to the local police who, duly incensed at the Soviets’ offence of armed trespass, request (in suitably clipped tones) the Army to give military aid to the civil community. Note that formula: the strict legal and constitutional position is that the British military would come to the assistance of the police and thus to the defence of the British sovereign, her subjects, and her realm – not to the aid of the US military per se.

This ritual may seem quaint and curious, even Byzantine, to those unaware of the delicate constitutional position of the British Army. This swears to serve, and is commanded by, the sovereign. But it exists only by consent of parliament, which annually enjoys the opportunity to decline to raise taxes to support it.

The arrangement has its roots in the causes of the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of the 17^th century, and revolves around the British distaste for standing armies, which historically have been seen as potential instruments of regal tyranny. As part of a series of safeguards against the politicization of the Army on the one hand and the abuse of power by the Crown on the other, the separation of military and police powers is taken rather seriously by the British. And consequently, as will become clear, it is important to the ‘Rendlesham Incident’ and the nature of any cover-up by the authorities.

Wars and Rumours of Wars

It’s not hard to see that the intricacies of the British constitution could create problems, unforeseen in the 17^th century, for those wanting to defend an American air base against a common enemy. But in the interests of pragmatism much may be done by way of laws, leases and treaties when a country enjoys an unwritten constitution. Even the egregious Nick Pope, devotee of an ET interpretation of the Rendlesham incident, recognizes as much in a post to UFO Updates (Re: More Bentwaters Information, 30 August 2003):

The legal position with regard to United States Visiting Forces (USVF) is complex, and there are a number of different laws and treaties governing what USVF personnel can and cannot do in the UK. The general rule is that US jurisdiction ends at the perimeter fence, though there are a number of circumstances where it would be quite proper for on-duty USVF personnel to go off-base.

One such circumstance is certainly the defence of the base. USAF security police are also trained as infantrymen, fulfilling the same role as the RAF Regiment does on a British air base. As Kevin Conde explained it in a post to the UFORL email list (21 July 2003):

In the event of real tensions, and the belief that the Russians were coming, we would … have operated freely off base. The exercises that have figured into some of this controversy are an example. The majority of the hard core ‘combat’ occurred off base. When in the air base ground defense mode we knew that if we waited until we had Russians in the wire we were already too late. It was our mission to go off base and engage them as far from the flight line as possible.

In the prelude to what turns out to be a shooting war, the preliminary stages from political crisis to outbreak of hostilities generally take a long time. According to Lord Birdwood’s account of a briefing at the House of Lords, by the mid-Sixties it had been calculated that an international crisis would pass through some 40–50 discrete stages before an exchange of nuclear missiles became inevitable.

During that time US bases in the UK would have ample opportunity to prepare their defences. This would happen even despite the probability that they might be the object of pre-emptive nuclear strikes rather than of invading paratroopers. And there is nothing in law to prevent the British Army or police from requesting assistance from the USAF in undertaking precautionary defensive moves. Indeed, given the habitual overstretch of British forces, this is the obvious thing to do. Any necessary diplomatic niceties would, in one form or another, have been observed long before any shooting started.

Such US exercises as occurred off-base would also have been cleared with everyone concerned in the proper order, including the British police. Constitutionally, ‘clearance’ would, after all, take no more than a telephone conversation with the local Chief Constable to become legal – that officer is sufficiently autonomous – and thereafter it’s up to him whom else, including no one, he might choose to tell about it.

One circumstance in which it is legal and most definitely moral for US forces to move beyond base perimeters in formation is to deal with downed aircraft. I suspect that the responsibility of USAF police for finding downed aircraft is also covered in the leases and treaties to which Pope refers, and involved some kind of standing licence to cover such emergencies. In any case, in such a circumstance, it would clearly be mad to have to go through a diplomatic rigmarole before getting rescuers to twisted metal and roasting flesh.

If anyone wanted to go nosing around the PRO again, or use such FOI as we have in this furtive little country, there is the starter for a bit of research. Just what were (and are) the arrangements, agreements, contracts or treaties by which (even allied) foreign troops could go into action on British soil?

But on the second night of the Rendlesham saga, the night Lt Col. Halt went poaching in the woods, there was no such triggering misapprehension about downed planes to inspire (or justify) an off-base expedition. According to Halt himself (interview for Strange but True?, UK ITV, 9 December 1994),

The duty Flight Lieutenant [Bruce Englund] came in, and he was quite shaken, and insisted upon speaking to myself and the base commander about a matter of utmost urgency. He said, “It’s back,” and I said, “What’s back?” and he said, “The UFO is back.” I assembled a small team of experts and we set off in the forest, ready to debunk it.

Two points emerge from this revelation. In the first place, it suggests a high degree of psychological priming among the airmen involved in favour of some anomalous occurrence, deriving (one presumes) from reports or rumours of the events of the previous evening. In fairness, Englund may

have been using the term ‘UFO’ in the strict technical sense in which it’s employed by aviators and air traffic controllers. But Halt’s retrospective claim that he “set off in the forest, ready to debunk” the UFO suggests that he, at least, didn’t take the term in that sense. Second, Halt’s formulation here fits the traditional template of believers’ rhetoric – the claim to have started as a sceptic but to have been slowly converted to a belief in a favourite anomalous or paranormal phenomenon by the overwhelming nature of the evidence, etc.

The intention, conscious or otherwise, of this ploy is to endow both the evidence and the adherent with authority; but implicitly, it depends on the fragile notion that personal ‘authenticity’ and experience outweigh the forces of logic and rational examination.

Be that as it may: given Lt Col. Halt’s position and responsibilities, it would be surprising (or anyway depressing) if he hadn’t been apprised of the subtleties of the British constitution. At the very least he should have known enough to be aware of the possible consequences of going for a mass hike off-base, on duty and in uniform. Sqn Ldr. Moreland, the British base commander, should have known that better than anyone. US forces overseas are subject to local law for crimes committed on the host’s territory and, legally speaking, Halt and his men were trespassing.

Even under the law of trespass as it stood at the time, had they caused significant damage in the forest, they would have been committing an offence, albeit minor, and could have been prosecuted. For diplomatic reasons it is perhaps unlikely they would have been hauled up before the local beak, but it is not impossible. Either way, one can see a public relations problem.

On the face of it, this may seem rather a minor issue, but really it is not. I believe Kevin Conde has quite accurately pinpointed the nature of such ‘cover-up’ as there was, and the key to it is this question of territory, who was responsible for what, and the natural and legal obligations of the guest nation (the USA) to respect the laws and constitution of the host (the UK).

Halt’s disregard of British customs and conventions should have been vexatious enough by itself to have caused his commanders and his hosts to want to keep his aberrant behaviour out of the public eye. It could hardly have mitigated their dismay that he blatantly flouted US law into the bargain. Under the Posse Comitatus Act (18 USC 1385, originally proposed in 1878) the US military has no power to enforce, or to assist in enforcing, civil law, except in certain rigorously defined circumstances entailing a prescribed protocol not unlike that obtaining in the UK. For the background to the Posse Comitatus Act, see Bonnie Baker, ‘The Origins of the Posse Comitatus’, originally published in the USAF magazine Airpower.

Military law enforcement officers have no jurisdiction outside a ‘national defense area’ except over troops in uniform. Later clarifications of the Posse Comitatus law prohibit direct participation of Department of Defense personnel in law enforcement including searches. Kevin Conde (in a personal communication to the author, received 2 October 2003) notes that:

Halt, and every other military member, is briefed routinely on the prohibition against attempting to act off base. … By definition, the area of and surrounding a military aircraft accident site is a national defense area, and we can and do exercise authority within that area. This goes back to my contention that only in the case of an aircraft crash would we immediately go off base and act as if we were in charge, because we were. … Halt had no excuse – he could not have done what he did in the States, and doing what he did in a foreign country is much worse, and he knew that.

Even if it could be argued that Halt was not precisely in breach of the US law, he was certainly mocking its spirit. And that calls his competence severely into question.

Red Peril, Red Faces

This interpretation of the ‘cover up’ at Rendlesham is borne out by various accounts Halt himself has given of what happened when his senior officers learned of what he had been up to and listened to his tape. One version is in James Easton’s article in this issue. According to another version (Dillon, 1997), Halt maintained that when one of the US Third Air Force’s staff officers enquired “What do we do now?”,

You could have heard a pin drop and then somebody answered. “This occurred on British soil so let’s turn it over to the Ministry of Defence,” [Halt] said.

Halt was told of the decision to hand the matter over to the British MoD and he had no choice but to inform them of the incident. He asked if they wanted a complete report of the events, personnel involved and measures taken, but all that was asked of him was a concise memorandum that detailed briefly what happened over those three [sic] nights.

“I was very surprised but I attended to it,” [Halt] said. The summary was taken by Squadron Leader Donald Moreland, British Commander at the adjoining RAF/USAF base at Bentwaters and sent to the Ministry of Defence. And so forth [sic] was born the notorious Halt memo[.]

Halt’s apparent incomprehension is incomprehensible, and remarkably naïve, if his version of events is accurate. What else but a stunned silence might have greeted his tape recording of his caper out of bounds? Of course no one wanted the lurid details.

It is not clear how much of the rumour surrounding the Security Police’s various sylvan expeditions reached the ears of that staff meeting, but its members would surely have been unnerved had they heard the various tales of firearms being taken into the forest (and even discharged), or the story from the first night’s events – so sublimely vulnerable to a Chinese whisper – that Sgt Jim Penniston had the mistaken impression that his cohort John Burroughs was still armed, so that “When we got close to whatever it was, Penniston thought I was armed and told me to open up on it.” (see James Easton’s post Re: Rendlesham Revelations, to the UFORL mailing list, 24 October 2003).

USAF police routinely carried Smith&Wesson Model 15 Combat Masterpiece revolvers with a 4in barrel, loaded with military ball ammunition. British law is quite straightforwardly draconian about carrying firearms in public places without due authority, not to mention armed trespass. More to the point, sections of the British press would have had hysterics at the mere thought of the US military wandering about the countryside, tooled up, and carrying live ammunition.

Looked at from a certain point of view, Halt’s famous memo can now be seen as a disguised apology, or rueful admission and explanation of why he had abandoned his legal responsibilities. He did indeed have “no choice” but to explain himself, bizarre as that explanation was. It says something about the lack of political nous of the campaigning Left that when the Halt story hit the News of the World in 1983, CND and its fellow-travellers missed the opportunity to raise hell about the ease with which USAF officers could be deflected from their duty.

The relevant authorities’ response in 1981 to news of Halt’s foray should also be viewed in the general political context of the time, and against the backdrop of the presence of nuclear weapons at the Woodbridge/Bentwaters complex.

At the end of 1980, there were US hostages still held in Iran (for whose release, on 21 December, the recently self-installed ayatollahs had demanded $10 billion), and the Iran–Iraq war was in its opening stages; there was an IRA mainland bombing campaign in progress; the USAF base at Greenham Common was infested with ladies protesting against stationing US cruise missiles in the UK, while there had recently been a rise in militant anti-nuclear protest in general (for instance, the Sharpness incident of 8 July); the Soviets had renewed jamming of Western radio broadcasts to the USSR; Poland was in upheaval, threatening the integrity of the Soviet empire, and there was a real possibility of invasion by the Red Army; the Gang of Four was on trial in China; and Ronald Reagan, whose rhetoric promised an end to détente, had just been elected President of the United States.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 17, Issue 2-3, from 2006.

Any sighting of something strange in the sky or, better still, something that comes from the sky, lands on the ground and appears to leave unresolved physical evidence, is bound to generate human interest. It is no surprise that the events in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk in December l980 have attracted the attention of everyone, from the media to the sceptics. That is, of course, because of those magic letters U.F.O. which characterise the nature of such a thing.

As it is presented to the public this case is a major challenge to those who disbelieve in UFO reality and a major coup for those who consider UFOs to be of global significance. It is not unreasonable to find it presented as Britain’s best ever case – but only if one takes its nature at face value. And in UFOlogy that is the most dangerous thing that you can do.

UFO stories attract the media in levels that are quite disproportionate to their scientific value and those who report them rarely have much grasp of what constitutes useful evidence (otherwise they would be reporting the Hessdalen, Norway, lights where spectroscopic data have been obtained of what seem to be intriguing plasma-like phenomena). But in UFO-reporting terms plasmas are boring. To most folk, ‘UFO’ is synonymous (though wrongly) with ‘alien spaceship’. It is in truth merely an acronym for ‘unidentified’ (not even ‘unidentifiable’) ‘flying object’, but such a fact is usually lost amidst the hype and screaming headline copy.

The media, of course, are there to tell a story and sell newspapers or attract viewers. They have a simple maxim that dogs virtually all UFO reporting. “Man sees aliens in spaceship” is news. “Man sees what he thinks are aliens in spaceship but it was really something explicable” is not – unless it has a good human interest angle that can be cobbled together around it. Perhaps the man was a defrocked vicar or a US military commander. Then any old sighting becomes news because of that factor alone.

Many UFOlogists, especially when chasing what they consider to be the ‘big cases’ fall prey to these same motives and subconsciously switch off from any desire for explanation. It is true that they want answers. But they want the answers that they have already fixated upon before even beginning an investigation. Most UFOlogists are enthusiasts, interested because they believe UFOs reflect something very important – nearly always extra-terrestrial visitors (even though in reality the evidence for this is remarkably scant). As such they rarely investigate a case to any objective degree or expect to find a different kind of answer. And when they do it becomes a non-case – not part of ‘real’ UFOlogy.

Yet, solved cases are the success stories for a UFOlogist (the unsolved ones are really their failures) and it is amazing how few seem appreciative of the processes involved in what turns a seemingly impressive close encounter into an IFO (Identified Flying Object) – or, indeed, the scientific value of examining such evidence.

A big case to most UFOlogists is a weapon in a war being fought with the powers that be, to get them to admit a truth – normally considered to be that the world’s key nations know that UFOs come from outer space, are engaged in some kind of surveillance operation but are afraid to admit to this stunning reality. Again, the evidence for this is very hard to detect and, in my view, considerably outweighed by that which demonstrates how the authorities have only ever practised a cover-up of ignorance as opposed to hiding guilty secrets. They do not know the truth behind UFOs, any more than we do, but suspect it not to be about extraterrestrials simply because the accumulated evidence comes nowhere close to demonstrating that.

In addition, many UFO enthusiasts see a big case as a powerful asset against other UFO enthusiasts. It sells copies of magazines, attracts people to conferences and lectures and gets them to join your group and not some rival society. These are important issues within the UFO movement, which is hardly ever geared up to pursue the scientific truth behind UFOs as you might expect. Rather it exists to perpetuate its own existence.

Think about it. If UFOs were ever properly understood, or revealed to be phenomena of interest to atmospheric physics, psychology or sociology (and all three are indeed intimately involved in the equation) then UFOlogy effectively commits suicide. It hands over the responsibility to people outside of the realms of the UFO Community.

Hence there is an inbuilt reason why UFOlogists actually do not want to solve its biggest mysteries. Many sincerely do not even realise how insidious is this factor at work.

Sceptics, on the other hand, are usually only attracted to UFO cases after they enter the public domain, maybe years after first investigation by UFOlogists (as with Rendlesham). By then these cases are already massively tainted by the way they have been ‘processed’ by the UFO community and ‘reported’ by the media. Inherently, sceptics desire to explain away what has taken place, on the assumption that UFOs are per se explicable phenomena and so this outcome is a certainty with any particular case.

This is biased, but less wrong than the approach adopted by a majority of UFOlogists (because the vast majority of UFOs are indeed actually IFOs and so amenable to explanation if well investigated). However, this perspective often fails to embrace even the possibility that some UFO cases might offer scientifically interesting data (as in my view they do).

Moreover, sceptics also often base conclusions on various false premises, which can result from not working with the raw data but from stories that have already been contaminated by the psycho-social factors that underpin every aspect of UFOlogy and are frequently hard to distil from a complex case years down the track. This is true, for example, with crop circles, where the massive cottage industry of circle faking is normally all that sceptics see, unaware that behind it lies a mildly interesting atmospheric effect that seems to have been at work for centuries.

Alien abductions are another good example, where in my view the widespread but disastrous tactic of hypnotically regressing witnesses wrecks the evidence before one can even start to examine it. Yet there is an intriguing root phenomenon that probably has nothing to do with aliens but offers scientific interest nonetheless; it is swamped by the noise generated by the hypnosis that tends to be all that sceptics see.

I regard it as my proudest moment in British UFOlogy when I got the national group BUFORA to ban the use of hypnosis on all its cases in a move for which sceptics have never given credit, even though when it happened 15 years ago it was hugely prescient even by sceptics’ standards. The decision was based on the problems generated by the evidence. Any true scientist would have made the same decision.

Rules of Engagement

It is extremely difficult to remember the cardinal rules of UFO investigation when you get caught up in the excitement of a big case. But they are vital.

Firstly, 95% or so of all UFO sightings have prosaic explanations as 55 years of research has long established. These include cases that start off looking very interesting and run the gamut from mere lights in the night sky to allegedly landed UFOs with aliens nearby. Since the odds are stacked so greatly against any specific case being a ‘real’ UFO it is absolutely essential that a UFOlogist approach each case with the assumption that it will ultimately be solved. Unhappily most UFOlogists fail to understand this consequence of statistics and start with the expectation that it does not have a rational answer.

Secondly, you should always start off with the simplest possible explanation, then move on to look at other mundane, if somewhat more obscure options, and only at the end be dragged kicking and screaming into the belief that a case is unexplained – i.e., a ‘real’ UFO. It may turn out to be unsolved (in my view some cases are) and even of scientific interest (ditto in my estimation), but you have to fight to prove that by eliminating simpler options first. Although, as you must follow where the evidence trail leads, identification of the ‘simplest explanation’ can often be problematic in itself.  Often, however, one answer may suggest itself as a possibility for initial exploration.

Also, you need to avoid the lure of the ‘unimpeachable’ witness. Simply because someone is a policeman, or a colonel or a government minister, does not make them any less likely to mistake an IFO. But UFOlogy offers frequent statements such as “This case is strong because the witness was a trained observer”. Sadly, no UFO case is strong merely for that reason – not unless its intrinsic evidence is even stronger. Human perception (via a prince or a pauper) is always fallible.

Finally, never say never, with regards to an explanation. It can take months, years or decades to solve a case when the pieces of the jigsaw slot into place. No case is forever immune to explanation however strong it seems. There is always the prospect that something will emerge to make its nature obvious years down the track.

UFOlogy is littered with cases like that and the book that Dr David Clarke, Andy Roberts and I wrote together (Randles, Roberts & Clarke, 2000) is full of them. Any UFOlogist who assumes that a case is a genuine UFO because it has not yet been solved is failing to do their job. A UFO remains a UFO only so long as it continues to be unexplained. That status is constantly on borrowed time. No case is ever unexplainable.

Rendlesham

When the events in Rendlesham Forest happened I was still in my 20s and relatively inexperienced. Although I had been a member of BUFORA (the British UFO Research Association) for a few years I was not to take on the role of their Director of Investigations until some way into the Rendlesham story.

I first heard about the case in late January l981, less than a month after it happened. My source was a writer of a book about mystery disappearances (Paul Begg) who had by chance befriended a British civilian air traffic controller in a Norfolk pub. Knowing of my interest in UFOs Paul put the story onto me. The man was concerned for his job and required strict anonymity, but clearly took what he had heard seriously.

He reported that fellow officers at his base (Eastern Radar, Watton) had tracked an anomalous target over East Anglia the previous month, a story he knew about only second hand, not being on duty that night. But he was present when USAF intelligence agents some weeks later came to take radar tapes for analysis and in doing so gave a quite extraordinary justification for having such permission.

The intelligence officers said that a UFO had been reported coming down into Rendlesham Forest (approximate location of last sighting of the radar image just after Christmas) and that airmen from the twin NATO bases of Woodbridge and Bentwaters had gone out and confronted it. A senior officer had even left a base party and had a close encounter. Many aspects of the Rendlesham story as we now know it to be (including the alleged physical traces, the live tape recording of events and electrical interference on radios and arc lights) all featured in the story as told to this radar officer by the USAF intelligence staff.

Faced with such an extraordinary report from a witness who would not go on record and whose story was partly second hand anyhow I was at a loss. I did not have the resources to travel hundreds of miles from my home in Cheshire to investigate (having just left college and not being a car driver). Moreover, I could hardly implicate my witness by being too explicit and discrete calls brought no confirmation of this story from any of the bases involved.

I did ask two trusted colleagues from my circle to make other enquiries. One was Peter Warrington, with whom I had just published a book (Randles & Warrington, 1979) and with whom I later wrote a UFO article for New Scientist that led to a further book (Randles & Warrington, 1985). Peter had many contacts in the radar industry (indeed because of these we had just solved a major radar case, widely reported in the media, during which a British Airways crew allegedly saw and tracked a UFO on a flight to Portugal). But he got nowhere chasing the alleged radar tracking around Rendlesham and considered it likely to be a dead end.

The other person that I involved was Kevin McClure, a UFOlogist noted for his skills at investigating rumour propagation (his booklet on the UFO sightings during the Welsh religious revival is a classic example; McClure, 1979). I suspected that rumours were going to be a factor in a case involving thousands of airmen at a tight-knit base. But again Kevin never got very far and soon wrote this case off, much as I was then starting to do. It looked like an unproven collection of anecdotes.

What I did do was attempt to get some sense out of the MoD. At the time I was engaged in a campaign to persuade them to release their UFO data to the public, suggesting a scientific agency or university (something for which UFOlogists have accused me of treason since recently the MoD released a few of my letters that got into the Rendlesham file, although there were others that were presumably filed elsewhere and remain unreleased). However, I got no help from the MoD between early l981 and early l983, leaving me to choose between natural bureaucratic lethargy or the suspicion that they were not answering any of my straight questions about this alleged event because they had something to hide.

It is often not appreciated by the sceptics (and it rarely comes out in any media documentaries about this case) but the early days of UFOlogy’s involvement were not characterised by wide-eyed acceptance that Rendlesham was a massive case proving that the aliens had landed. Quite the contrary, three of us tried and failed to verify things and only I retained any belief that there might be something to it beyond the very early days.

That only happened with me because by chance I discovered that two local women (a ghost hunter named Brenda Butler, who lived near the forest, and her newly joined BUFORA friend from 50 miles north, Dot Street) had picked up independent stories about the case from residents of Suffolk.

Indeed Brenda had been befriended (again in a pub) by a USAF intelligence officer who alleged direct involvement in seeing a landed UFO and even referred to aliens, plus a one-to-one contact between them and a local commander (Brigadier General Gordon Williams). There is little evidential support for this story (nearly all the military witnesses claim it never occurred) and I have never trusted this story. However, the tale fed to Brenda contained sufficient links with that coming from Watton to suggest they were at least referring to the same set of events (Brenda and Dot were unaware of the radar story when they heard from this USAF officer).

Brenda and Dot now did an extraordinary job of trawling the local area for other prospective witnesses and offered me several anecdotes about a man met in a bar who had said this, or a local farmer who had reported something else. Whilst the evidential value of these stories was not high, together they painted a picture of odd lights seen over the woods just after Christmas l980 that puzzled even the locals and activity inside the forest in the days afterwards, including men wandering around involved in what looked like some kind of ‘scene of crime’ or ‘data recovery’ operation wearing protective clothing.

All of this was enough to cause me to pause in being totally dismissive about the case and to do three things when invited to become Director of Investigations for BUFORA later that year.

Step one involved my holding a meeting in London, in late l981, bringing together all involved parties in this case in order to collate what we knew. I have to report that, apart from Brenda and Dot (who were convinced that something amazing must have gone on) and myself (persuaded only that this case could not simply be written off ), most of our colleagues thought it a waste of time and a story that would never go anywhere or get verified. The level of scepticism within UFOlogy may surprise you.

Armed with the data I then compiled an account of the stories, claims, rumours and hard facts (few as there were) – as an attempt to document evidence before it was lost amidst the confusion. I printed this at my expense, circulated it to about 100 people in British UFOlogy and gave permission for it to be carried by Flying Saucer Review (then a respectable journal edited by Charles Bowen and frequently carrying articles by scientists). This piece appeared in spring l982 and was the first detailed record of the case.

The third thing that I did (once again note the tenor) was to encourage a group of sceptical UFOlogists, from a group in Southern England allied to BUFORA, to visit the forest, spend some time with Brenda and Dot and offer an independent assessment of the case. I trusted their judgement.

That report, published in summer 1982, concluded that it could not be said one way or another whether any sighting had occurred, but expressed caution about some of Brenda and Dot’s anecdotal stories and argued (as with most other UFOlogists) that this case was likely to remain a dead duck in so far as gaining any meaningful evidence was concerned.

What did I think?

What was my opinion about this case during these early years? I was open-minded, but far from persuaded that we should treat these events at face value. There seemed scant reason to conclude that an alien contact had occurred at a NATO base.

However, I was deeply suspicious about the way this case had entered the public domain. That two separate people with military connections (both also linked to USAF intelligence sources and one actually a base intelligence public affairs officer) should leak this extraordinary story to the UFO community made no sense. Not if this story was true.

These days I might be more inclined to consider that this was all meant as a joke (even though the radar officer at Watton clearly never treated it as such) and what happened was that the tall tales on base were spread out with less than serious intent. But at the time the manner with which these stories seemed force fed (within four weeks of the events) and complete with extraordinary details, the like of which British UFOlogy had never seen before, made me suspect that the story was a mask for something else – especially as the MoD continued to say nothing at all about the case in replies to me. They just ignored every question that I asked about the matter and tried to deflect me onto other things.

Indeed at one stage they even released case files only weeks old about sightings from elsewhere in Britain in what seemed designed to set me off chasing these new stories and away from thinking about Rendlesham.

My dilemma was that I was increasingly convinced that an event had occurred in December 1980, but increasingly unconvinced it involved base commanders chatting with aliens beside a landed UFO. So why were stories saying this leaked out so casually? Clearly if these events had happened the radar tapes would have been taken from Watton without convoluted explanations to junior staff. Moreover, Brenda’s source had bolstered his credibility by offering to us a sketch map of the route to the forest landing site written on the back of what he said was a top secret memo he had taken from base. This memo was a communiqué during the time when President Carter tried to get NASA to take over UFO investigation work – and suggestive that there were forces trying to prevent this from happening.

Although of modest import in and of itself, this memo had never been released before under the then-active US Freedom of Information laws that had already generated thousands of government UFO records. The manner of its release suggested that Brenda’s source did have access to high-level data. Far from convincing me about his story, however, this actually made me more suspicious about the alien UFO story. I suspected that disinformation was at work and we UFOlogists were being set up to spread a tale so tall that it would never be believed by any sensible commentator and would stifle any serious investigation into what else might have occurred.

What else might that be? I knew that there were strong grounds to suspect nuclear weapons were on base. The stories about the case suggested that anomalous radiation levels had been recorded (although as yet we had no details of this). Witnesses told us about seeing men in protective suits on site after the events. The Cold War was at its height and there were mounting protests about moving American cruise missiles into British bases (such as Greenham Common).

So I began to ask myself what incident at an air base might be such a hot potato that it would be preferable to spin out a UFO-related cover story that was sufficiently absurd to kill any sober investigation into the base.

I concluded that if there had been a mishap involving a nuclear weapon, perhaps lost from a plane (not unheard of in 1980), then the subsequent clean up involving helicopters and security teams would be impossible to hide in a civilian forest. Yet it would be a political catastrophe for the UK and US at the time when they were committed to siting cruise missiles and promising how well they were protected from anything going wrong.

It would not have been difficult to allow reports of such covert activities to fester in the minds of those who inevitably stumbled across them as a UFO encounter, especially if given a helping hand by feeding out stories to hopefully gullible UFOlogists. Indeed there was even a movie doing the rounds at the time (Hangar 18) in which a military base, a crashed UFO, little aliens and a cover up feature. This might have given the idea to someone creative at the base public affairs office.

To me at the time this made more sense than senior USAF officers chatting to little aliens whilst the USAF helped them to fix their broken UFO (which was one version we had been offered). I suggested the nuclear mishap theory in the first public articles on the case (for the Orbis magazine The Unexplained in summer 1982) and soon after in an interview with popular science journal OMNI, that was published in early 1983.

Dr David Clarke has achieved what I failed to achieve all those years ago and obtained release of the file on Rendlesham. This shows how my decision to suggest a nuclear mishap theory struck fear into the MoD. Whilst nothing they say suggests that it was true, they were clearly more phased by the idea than by any of the wild tales placing Rendlesham into a UFO context.

In fact, one memo between the British commander at Bentwaters and the MoD actually says with relief that most other UFOlogists will not pursue an interest in this case if it is suspected of being anything but an alien UFO. The MoD were certainly adept at reading most UFOlogists.

The turning point

Although, of course, it has to remain a possibility that there is some hidden reason like the nuclear mishap theory behind the Rendlesham incident, I increasingly came to doubt this possibility.

After the OMNI article, the MoD suddenly made a major about-face. Within days of its release, my umpteenth request for an official statement about Rendlesham bore fruit. Presumably now that their own base officer (Squadron Leader Donald Moreland) had verified the case in his interview with OMNI, it was futile to try to say nothing any longer.

So, in a letter dated 11 April 1983, Pam Titchmarsh of the MoD told me that there had been unusual lights seen over the forest in December 1980 and that the MoD had come up with no explanation for them. It is hard to realise now to what extent that letter, minor as its admissions were, galvanised this case. For it was the proof in writing that there had been an incident and a public admission by the MoD that it was still unexplained. That was unheard of in 1983.

Very quickly American UFOlogists could now use their Freedom of Information Act to obtain the infamous Halt memo (the one-page statement of the case sent by him, as a deputy commander and USAF Lieutenant Colonel, to the MoD in London on 13 January 1981). Its release came in June 1983.

I had, of course, asked for this file the minute the MoD had affirmed the existence of the case to me. I never got it. But it was released to Americans, allegedly through the MoD. In August 1983 I was able (alongside Brenda and Dot) to take this file unannounced to the MoD main building in London. There had been no publicity for its existence anywhere and so our arrival was a total shock. A fascinating exchange took place. Although we half-suspected that we were breaking the Official Secrets Act by possessing this file, no action followed. Two months later it was plastered across the front page of the News of the World newspaper (although not at our initiative, I should add).

The world now knew about Rendlesham and the sceptical movement began to try to find answers – although, as I hope the above demonstrates, the UFO community was not entirely without caution in its two years prior involvement.

Of course, all that was lost amidst the maelstrom that followed (the case was a cause célèbre in the UK media for several days). I was hardly ever interviewed in that time, by the way, and do not feature at all in the News of the World reports (although I spent several hours with their reporter). My less than committed belief that this case had anything to do with aliens and spaceships was no doubt a factor.

Even so, the day before the News of the World story broke I was blitzed by calls from a rival tabloid. They offered me a fortune to talk to them exclusively and try to get one up on what they thought was a massive story about to break in a competitor. Of course, I was not going to get embroiled in this. The paper tried to blackmail me, literally claiming that if I did not talk they would make it up and ascribe it to me! They only went away (after several attempts) when I threatened to call in the police.

I spent much time in Rendlesham Forest over the next few months, now that the case was unavoidably big news. The radiation trace details were in the Halt memo and one of the first things that I did was get them analysed by an expert (Dr Michele Clare, a plant biologist). It is often reported that UFOlogists were over-excited by these radiation readings until sceptics proved them to be dubious. The later work by people such as Ian Ridpath and James Easton was invaluable but I had learned not to take these data too seriously right at the start, when Michele indicated that the figures were not way above background level. She also pointed out that in pine forests levels can build up due to the accumulation of fallen pine needles – especially if, as here, a nuclear power station is close by.

This was one reason why I had begun to doubt the nuclear mishap theory. Another came from my talks in the forest with forestry commission workers. They all doubted that any kind of dropped weapon was feasible or that helicopter recovery could have occurred in a dense forest or that they would be unaware of these things taking place. That said, one forester did intriguingly refer to a large hole in the tree canopy found in January 1981 close to what we believe was the alleged landing site. He considered it unusual, as if something heavy had passed through. Whilst UFOlogists might argue that it was a UFO ‘taking off ’, something falling from a plane is a more likely culprit, especially as there was a trace of a shallow crater in the ground beneath. Unhappily, the forester says that he reported it and within 24 hours that area of forest was felled, as part of a planned operation ordered by the regional headquarters in Cambridge.

The lighthouse

When the News of the World story was causing ripples I was actually busy on another case. A UFO had been reported by radio presenter, David Jacobs, who happened to be in a car with MP Shirley Williams. Although the ball of fire that they had briefly seen was of no importance, the witness factor came into play here again and made this case seem bigger than it deserved. There was never any question that what these witnesses had seen was a bolide, a bright meteor. But I had to fight a hard battle with NATO defence committee member, Major Sir Patrick Wall, to prevent him from connecting the incident with Rendlesham in questions that he was planning to ask in parliament to push the government to come clean on what it knew about the incident in December 1980. Predictably they told him little and that was that.

Although I prevented Patrick Wall from getting carried away by this new sighting, ironically, years later I met David Jacobs when we both did a TV chat show in Ireland. I went out of my way to try to explain to him what he had seen and how it could be explained. He seemed interested, asked me how to spell bolide and I thought I had scotched further coverage, at least. But a year or two later David appeared on the quiz show Countdown and he described the story of his UFO sighting to the enthralled audience. There was no mention of any explanation.

When Ian Ridpath, along with forester Vince Thurkettle, proposed their solution to the Rendlesham case in the wake of the press frenzy it was startling. They argued that a meteor known to have been seen from parts of the UK had attracted the military personnel into the forest where they were then fooled by the lights of the Orford Ness lighthouse. The first thing that I did was go to the forest at night and check it out. I had never been to these woods in the dark before, as such conditions were hardly conducive to doing meaningful research. Now, of course, it was essential. This is an example of factors that can transform a case years later when something arises that has simply never been considered before.

There was no doubt that from the site you could see the pulsing light of Orford Ness out across the field where the UFO supposedly came down. Alignments were broadly correct as well. Moreover, there was a second light (the Shipwash lightship) off to the right, although less obvious. The most noticeable lights were really those from a research building on Orford Ness where in the 1970s experiments involving atmospheric ionisation were conducted and whose role in this case has been a source of much interest on my part ever since.

Whilst it was obvious that these lights were visible in 1983, though easily explained if you knew what they were in advance, it was far less apparent how they might seem if you were not expecting to see a lighthouse from a forest. Could they have been the cause of the reported sightings three years earlier? A problem was that the forest at this point had been heavily felled since the sightings and so at the time of the events there would be far denser tree coverage. The lights even now were merely distant points of no real prominence. TV images tend to exaggerate their impact. I doubted that these lights would be strange enough to trigger a major encounter, but we now know that to some extent they did because of the abortive chase of what turned out to be the lighthouse on the same night as the UFO sighting. This was made by the very same witnesses.

Although these witnesses seem not to consider that encounter to be with the same lights involved in the UFO episode one has to be mindful of the possibility. Unhappily the American UFOlogists who were aware of these statements years ago had for some reason never published any record of their existence. I did not discover this until 14 years after that first nocturnal visit to the forest – by which point it had changed again out of all recognition.

It remains debatable whether the lighthouse and/or Shipwash or perhaps the building lights on the Ness could have triggered a complex close encounter. Did the tree coverage and intermittent visibility this afforded make these lights appear more mysterious? I have my doubts that the lighthouse, on its own, could be strange enough to be the primary cause of the encounters in the forest, although we seem forced to accept that these lights must have had a part to play in this complicated set of encounters. It is too much of a coincidence otherwise.

My doubts about the lighthouse as a primary culprit grew when over the years more military witnesses came forward, often only after they had left the military and no longer feared retribution. Principal of these was John Burroughs, whom I met by surprise in Arizona in 1989. Our long conversations gave me a vital key to the case – a direct witness to the events in Rendlesham Forest who was objective and willing to listen to sensible possibilities. John never claimed to have seen a spaceship, or any kind of machine, or indeed to have met aliens. He denounced most of the fanciful tales associated with the case but was adamant (as one of the three men who had the initial close encounter) that he saw something weird that was like a fuzzy, opaque mass of light. When asked directly about the lighthouse he said this was not the answer – pointing out that he had picnicked in the woods, knew about it, had seen it before and, in any case, lighthouses did not fly and the lights that he saw that night clearly did move vertically upwards at one stage.

One should never be over-reliant on a witness and, of course, John never mentioned to me then, or in 1994 interviews he gave for a TV documentary that I set up, his aborted chase of what turned out to be the lighthouse. However, I consider John Burroughs a strong witness and I trust his basic version of events. I should add that he reports what appears to be a strong electrostatic field in close proximity to this fuzzy light, causing his skin to tingle and hair to stand on end. He was certain this was a genuine energy field of some sort but was perfectly willing to consider that it was generated by some kind of natural atmospheric energy rather than an alien craft.

After what John Burroughs told me in 1989 I was inclined to consider the lighthouse theory hard to justify. Hence my interest in the ionisation experiments that had been going on from Orford Ness, dead ahead in line of sight from where Burroughs reported this close encounter.

But there is little hard evidence that such research might have been occurring as late as 1980. The records show that the experiments ended five years earlier, but also that an enlarged project was being developed and that Orford Ness was a preferred site for this new setup. The government files relating to this research are still banned from release for many years to come owing to their alleged sensitivity. So we only have scattered clues, such as claims from a sailor aboard HMS Norfolk sailing past Orford Ness that men were ordered below decks because something was going to occur off shore they were not supposed to see.

Around Orford Ness is where radar was developed in secret in the run-up to World War Two, where experimental telecommunications sites were later created, and where the original home of radar (Bawdsey Manor) has become a cover British military base. It is also where there are many local stories, unconnected with Rendlesham, about humming noises, strange electrical effects and green glows (described by one witness as looking like a cathode ray tube – which is pretty suggestive of ionisation). There also exists an MoD warning to shipping about electrical interference when passing

Orford Ness which indicates that at some stage such research was considered likely to manifest the sort of physical effects that are connected with the claims from Rendlesham Forest in 1980.

What do I believe now?

I could write thousands of additional words about what is undoubtedly the most complex UFO encounter in British history. I have, since Sky Crash (Butler, Street, & Randles, 1984), written two other full books about it (Randles, 1992, 1998) and a lengthy chapter for The UFOs that Never Were (Randles, Roberts, & Clarke, 2000). On each occasion there has been significantly more additional evidence available to me and witness testimony in need of analysis, because this case has been characterised by its slow emergence from confusion into clarity.

Many sensible heads have of late applied their reasoning powers and it is almost impossible for those seeing the wealth of data and the abundance of vociferous witnesses going public these days to think back to the first three years when all we had were second-hand stories, dubious witnesses, and a total lack of any written statements or official confirmation that anything had happened at all.

I believe that I tried to steer the case in a sensible direction, but once it became a mega-story thanks to the media intervention of 1983 there was always going to be a limited prospect of sorting truth from fantasy. As with any famous case, ‘wannabees’ and tall-tale-tellers have proliferated and from no evidence we now have a plethora of ‘evidence’ which is often next to impossible to make to fit together.

My view is that parts of this case have gradually become explained as time has progressed. I am now of the view that much of what happened on the night when Colonel Halt led a team into the forest and tape-recorded sightings is resolved. There were misperceptions of what are clearly stars (stationary lights, moving in box motion – a classic effect known as autokinesis) which then stayed in the sky as dawn broke, vanishing when the sun came up. Any UFOlogist with experience would recognise these for what they are almost immediately.

Similarly there is every chance that the lighthouse/lightship was involved in the equation somewhere – since this case is clearly not the product of a single IFO source but a combination of different things that are adding to its complexity.

The radiation is, I believe, not an issue. The score marks on the trees have simple answers connected with the practices of the forestry workers in marking trees and even Halt on his live tape expresses doubts saying these marks seemed not to be recent. There is no absolute certainty the landing site identified is exactly where the UFO was located. Therefore the contentious ground traces may be one giant red herring. After all, these were airmen from another country in a forest at night where it would be difficult to tell one clump of trees apart from another. They could have found the ground marks on retracing their steps (as we know they did) and assumed that because these were in the same general area to that in which they saw the strange lights, these were marks left by the lights. But that is very much an assumption, which few researchers into this case seem to appreciate. The link between ground traces and close encounter is often raised as a key reason to believe in its credibility.

What still stands out to me from Halt’s encounter is the reference to beams of pencil-like light that came down from the sky and touched the ground nearby. Halt told me that it was these laser-like beams that convinced him that something inexplicable was going on. And there is partial independent witness support from a civilian in a house just across the forest who saw bands of light coming down from the sky.

It may be that these relate to the claimed prank by Kevin Conde, using the bright lights of his 1979 Plymouth Volare to create a hoax, but a good deal of work needs to be done to demonstrate a clear cause and effect link between these two events. As for the first night, when a three-man security patrol, including John Burroughs, encountered that smoky light and the allegedly associated electrostatic field, what happened then? Were they fooled by the lighthouse?

Importantly there are references in witness testimony to the lights seen hovering on a carpet of mist. Weather records suggest ground mist could have been present. I have investigated cases where ground lights seen through mist have generated very odd-looking UFOs, especially if there is also a temperature inversion layer in the atmosphere. These conditions can trigger a mirage effect, where a ground light is smeared into a fuzzy blob and appears to move as it passes through the inversion layer.

Indeed I once myself witnessed a star rising over a lake through ground mist and an inversion layer. Only several minutes later, when the star finally rose above the mist and inversion layer, did its true nature become obvious. Before then it had resembled a yellow light that had a fuzzy shape and that moved suddenly in a burst of speed at one point, presumably when its rays of light were distorted by the inversion layer. A similar effect causes light from the sky near ground-level to bend on hot days creating what looks like a pool of water on the road ahead.

Is it possible that the lighthouse shining through mist and an inversion layer produced a spectacular mirage that turned this otherwise innocent light into a much stranger looking blob that seemed to rocket skywards? However, on this assumption, the reported electrostatic effects remain more of a mystery. I discuss this mirage theory in more detail in The UFOs that Never Were (Randles, Roberts, & Clarke, 2000).

In conclusion I would say that this case is a fascinating one because it is a true test of UFO analysis. Even now it is far from obvious what caused these events, and there are multiple possibilities.

If you are willing to regard it as a detective mystery to be unravelled then it is possibly the best example in UFOlogy, because the clues are there – just so many of them, often rather contradictory in nature, that you will struggle to piece together a coherent whole. The task is made more difficult because Rendlesham Forest in December 1980 was such a fascinating place with many things going on that could have had a part to play. A number of them may have chanced to come together to create a mystery.

References

• Butler, B., Street, D., & Randles, J. (1984). Sky Crash: A Cosmic Conspiracy. Essex: Neville Spearman.
• McClure, K. (1979). Stars and Rumours of Stars. Privately published.
• Randles, J. (1992). From out of the Blue: The Facts in the UFO Cover-up at Bentwaters NATO Air Base. New York: Berkeley.
• Randles, J. (1998). UFO Crash Landing? London: Cassell.
• Randles, J., Roberts, A., & Clarke, D. (2000). The UFOs that Never Were. London: London House.
• Randles, J., & Warrington, P. (1979). UFOs: A British Viewpoint. London: Robert Hale.
• Randles, J., & Warrington, P. (1983). The neglected science of UFOs. New Scientist.
• Randles, J., & Warrington, P. (1985). Science and the UFOs. Oxford: Blackwell.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 17, Issue 2-3, from 2006.

There are two basic categories of UFO-lore: alien abductions and conspiracies. Central to the UFO-lore is belief in a conspiracy by “the Government” – and primarily those of the USA and UK – to withhold the “secret truth” from the general public. This “truth” being an admission that the authorities have proof of the alien presence on earth, in the form of the wreckage of a spacecraft and the bodies of its crew. The ultimate expression of this modern legend is the Roswell incident, but the idea of an official cover-up has become widespread in popular culture. The “landed Martians” is such a well known story that it was included in Professor Jan Brunvand’s list of modern legends about Governments in his book, The Choking Doberman.

Brunvand says he received a lot of angry letters for comparing UFO cover-ups with urban legends. Indeed, many “serious UFOlogists” are horrified at attempts to study these stories as the modern equivalents of fairy tales and ancient legends. However, there are similarities between UFO cover-up narratives and modern legends such as the Vanishing Hitch-hiker: stories heard as rumour and gossip. Those who pass on the story believe it really happened to a friend of a friend, and the story is given immediacy and legitimacy by the inclusion of ‘real’ names and places. With the arrival of the Internet, new versions spread with dizzying speed around the world, spawning new variations upon the original theme.

While Roswell is the seminal story, the Rendlesham incident is often cited as ‘Britain’s Roswell.’ They are composed of two distinct entities: the popular myth and the few certain facts. In both cases, the two constituents have taken an independent life of their own, and continue to grow apart in ever more distant directions.

Central to the Rendlesham incidents is the testimony of a group of USAF security policemen who reported mysterious lights outside the perimeter of RAF Woodbridge, in Suffolk, on two occasions in December 1980. The most senior officer was USAF Lt Col (later Col) Charles Halt, who was the Deputy Base Commander of RAF Woodbridge. It was Halt who prepared an official memorandum summarizing these incidents for the attention of the British Ministry of Defence (MoD). At that time, Woodbridge and its twin base at Bentwaters were tenanted by USAF as part of their air defence responsibilities in Europe. Halt was, at face value, an experienced officer who was held in high regard by his superiors.

The Ministry of Defence and the Rendlesham incident

UFOlogists first learned that a UFO incident had occurred in the forest adjoining the twin RAF bases at Bentwaters–Woodbridge early in 1981. Although the bases were loaned to the United States Air Force (USAF) responsibility for events off-base – and indeed defence of surrounding UK airspace – rested with the MoD. Almost immediately, speculation was rife in the UFO community about an official cover-up.

In 1980 an air staff secretariat known as Defence Secretariat 8 (DS8) were the only Government agency officially acknowledged as having an interest in UFO reports. Policy documents released at the Public Record Office (PRO) reveal that UFOs were the lowest priority among the many other operational duties handled by DS8. A single member of staff (usually an Executive Office or Higher Executive Officer, both junior posts) spent a small proportion of his or her time examining reports received, purely for evidence of “defence significance” (i.e. for evidence that the UFOs were intruder aircraft). Essentially this policy remained unchanged since 1958 when DS8’s predecessor S4 (Air) accepted responsibility for responding to all inquiries concerning UFOs. On accepting the burden, a senior civil servant suggested that in response to questions on the subject they should “for the most part be politely unhelpful.”

There has been much speculation in UFO circles that DS8 and its successors was merely a “shop window” for a more covert MoD investigation team. PRO records suggest this perception is the result of a misunderstanding. Since 1958 S4 (Air) and later DS8 routinely copied all the reports they received to two other military and scientific branches of MoD. These are a defence intelligence unit, DI 55, and an RAF Ground Environment branch who are responsible for the air defence radar. Records show that neither were interested in UFOs outside of a limited defence remit, and rarely made inquiries of their own in recent years.

The MoD has historically said little or nothing in public concerning the extent and nature of their UFO investigations. Their policy of playing down the subject was in sharp contrast with the USAF, who maintained a highly public UFO project (Blue Book) until 1969. Even after the closure of Blue Book, American UFOlogists were able to use their country’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain access to documents produced by a variety of official agencies. It was via the US FOIA in 1983 that a copy of Col Halt’s memo was obtained by an American UFOlogist, and released into the public domain.

Britain is set to receive a partial FOIA in January 2005. Until recently, it was impossible to obtain information from the MoD concerning what they did, or did not, know about specific UFO reports. The Ministry maintained that all correspondence with members of the public was confidential, and files could only be released after the 30 years had passed under the Public Record Act. Under the current ‘30 year rule’ files on the Rendlesham Forest incident would not have been made public until 2011.

When UFOlogist Jenny Randles, with Brenda Butler and Dot Street, began to investigate the story early in 1981, they were informed that Halt’s report was “passed to staff concerned with air defence matters who were satisfied that there was nothing of defence interest in the alleged sightings.” From 1981 until 2001 this bland statement remained the standard official response to all inquiries about the incident. While adequate for media and public consumption, it encouraged some UFOlogists to believe a cover-up was under way.

As Britain did not have a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), little progress could be made with the Ministry of Defence until very recently. In 1994 a Code of Practice for Access to Government Information was introduced that provided limited access to material closed under the 30-year rule. Paradoxically, although the UFOlogists who were promoting the case claimed they were determined to discover “the truth” about Rendlesham, until 2001 no one made use of the new legislation to request access to official records. During the research for my book Out of the Shadows (Clarke & Roberts, 2002), I made an application under the Code for access to records that were relevant to the case.

In May 2001 the contents of an MoD Air file – 150 pages in length – were released. The file was unclassified and contained nothing ‘secret’ or ‘top secret’ as the UFOlogists had claimed. Five documents were initially withheld, two on the grounds of “defence, security and international relations” and three briefing documents because they contained “internal opinion, advice, recommendation and deliberation.” Speculation was immediately rife within the UFO community about the nature of their contents.  One magazine editor declared they were withheld because they contained “top secret” information about the case, or revealed the much sought-after “smoking gun.”

All five documents have now been released on appeal, the first two in October 2001 and the remaining briefings early in 2003. They contained nothing remotely “top secret” and the reasons for their retention had more to do with civil service bureaucracy than they had with the desire to conceal any “secret truth.” Their significance lay in the mystery that surrounded their content.

The Smoking Gun?

Jenny Randles acknowledges that the file “tells us much more about the MoD than it does about the events in Rendlesham Forest.” A small amount of material relates to the official investigation of Halt’s report – if it can be so described – between 1981 and 1983. The vast majority of its content consists of long and often tedious correspondence between Sec(AS)2, the MoD secretariat which replaced DS8, and members of the public between 1982 and 1994. The later material documents the MoD’s often tortuous attempts to avoid answering specific questions and its desire to avoid unwelcome publicity on the subject.

The file contains evidence that the MoD were not officially aware of the incident until DS8 received a copy of Lt Col Halt’s memo, forwarded by the British base commander, early in January 1981. By the time action was taken – in the form of circulating the paperwork to other branches – a month had passed and “the scent was cold.” In February checks were made with the radar cameras at Eastern Radar (RAF Watton) and the Central Reporting Centre at RAF Neatishead in Norfolk. This found “no entry in respect of unusual radar returns or other unusual occurrences.”

Unfortunately, on both occasions the MoD were reliant upon the dates of 27 and 29 December for the UFO events in Rendlesham Forest supplied by Col Halt in his memo. Both dates were incorrect, a mistake that could have been easily rectified. All the evidence suggests no follow-up request was ever made to Halt or his USAF superiors by the MoD. This lack of official interest was confirmed by the Group Captain Neil  Colvin responsible for Air Defence at MoD in 1981. In a letter dated 3 February 2003 he wrote: “I remember the alleged sightings by US airmen at Bentwaters [sic]. I recall that we could not explain them but were very sceptical of the reports. We were not privy to the actual evidence of the sightings by the personnel concerned, nor did we have the opportunity to interview the individuals involved.”

Cover-up or Cock-up?

Possibly the most astounding revelation contained in the file is that it was not until 1983 – two years after the events – that the MoD obtained the correct dates. These were supplied not by the USAF but came from a member of the public! Shortly after Halt’s memo was published by the News of the World astronomer Ian Ridpath made inquiries with Suffolk Police and was able to confirm from their records the correct date for the initial sighting by the airmen. Ridpath wrote to advise DS8 on 14 November 1983 that police had first been called to the scene in Rendlesham forest at 4.11am on 26 December 1980. He added: “They said that all they could see was the the lighthouse [at Orfordness]. They were called out again at 10.30am on Dec 26 to examine the reported landing marks. There seems little doubt that the date of Dec 27 given in Col. Halt’s letter is wrong. This also casts doubt on the second date he gives for the later events.”

As a result of this, DS8 wrote to the RAF Base Commander, Squadron Leader Donald Moreland, asking if he could re-check the dates. Moreland’s reply, dated 25 November 1983, compounded the errors and demonstrated the complete lack of interest the MoD had in the events of 1980. He wrote: “The incident is now almost 3 years old and no one here remembers it clearly. All we have is Lt Col. Halt’s letter dated 13 January 1981.”

This was hardly the “smoking gun” imagined by the UFOlogists. If an event of world-changing status had occurred at the base just two years earlier it was odd that “no one here remembers it clearly.”

A similar lack of interest related to claims of higher than expected levels of radiation recorded by Col. Halt in the area of the forest visited by the UFOs. Early in 1981 the MoD asked its defence intelligence specialists to comment on the data recorded in Lt Col. Halt’s memo, but made no attempt to establish independent confirmation of them. R.C. Moorcroft at DI 52, responding to DS8 on 23 February 1981 to the question, noted: “Background radioactivity varies considerably due to a number of factors … If you wish to pursue this further I could make enquiries as to natural background levels in the area.” There is nothing to suggest any further action was taken.

The radioactivity issue was not raised again until 1994 when Nick Pope, who was then Executive Officer at Sec(AS) 2, took the matter up with Giles Cowling at the Defence Radiological Protection Service, a branch of the Government’s Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DERA). Pope’s hand-written notes of his discussion with Cowling, dated 15 April 1994, form the last enclosure in the file. Pope – who subsequently described these notes as “the first and only official investigation into this aspect of the case” – ends with the comment “The level of 0.1 is completely harmless.”

Oddly, in the light of his own hand-written reservations, by 1996 Pope was describing the alleged radiation traces as “the most tangible proof that something extraordinary happened there [Rendlesham Forest.]”

‘UFO Lands in Suffolk – that’s official!’

In October1983 the News of the World broke the story contained in Lt Col. Halt’s memo and the MoD Press Office began to receive calls from the world’s media. DS8 prepared what it called a “Defensive Press Line” anticipating the questions that might be asked. The most amusing comment noted that the MoD and USAF “both referred callers to the other … [this] will have done nothing but confirm suspicions held in UFO circles that we are engaged in a cover-up.”

When in 1984 the retired head of DS8, Ralph Noyes, contacted his former colleagues to ask for clarification of their position he had to send two reminders before receiving a standard reply. This delay contributed to Noyes’ increasingly public pro-UFO stance and by 1987 he came to believe that the MoD had indeed lied about the incident. He was joined by a former Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Lord Hill-Norton. The Admiral, who became a UFO believer in retirement, also took up the case and reached the same conclusion. Ironically, whilst supporting the idea of a high level conspiracy, the Admiral asks us to believe that he was not part of it, and that the subject “never once crossed his desk” during his service as CDS!

The most recent MoD briefing on the Rendlesham Forest case contained in the file was compiled by Britain’s self-styled Fox Mulder, Nick Pope, in 1994. In this Pope followed the standard MoD line that “no evidence was found of any threat to the defence of the United Kingdom and no further investigations were carried out … no further information has come to light which alters our view that the sightings of these lights was of no defence significance … in the absence of any hard evidence, the MOD remains open-minded about these sightings.”

Pope served the standard three years as a junior officer with Sec (AS) 2 from 1991-94. After leaving this post he produced a book, Open Skies Closed Minds that took a pro-UFO stance. He maintains there was no cover-up of the Rendlesham incident but rather “a lack of action” by the MoD. In 2000 he provided the forward to Georgina Bruni’s book on the Rendlesham incident, You Can’t Tell the People. Although this book’s author strongly believes in a cover-up by the British and US Governments, Pope failed to appreciate the contradiction in his stance. During an interview I recorded with Pope in 2001 it became clear that he had abandoned the objective viewpoint he displayed whilst working for the MoD. When asked for his current belief about what happened at Rendlesham he told us:

As you know, despite the fact that I am a non-conspiracy theorist and a rational guy, you know that I am a believer in the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis and I will go with the ETH on this one. Am I allowed to give my answer as an extraterrestrial spacecraft? That’s the answer I’m going with on this case.

Conclusion

As the MoD maintained from the very beginning, there is nothing in the file to support claims that a cover-up had taken place to hide evidence of UFO landings in Suffolk. Rather than being a “smoking gun” the file contents chart the growth of a modern legend from birth to full maturity. As is the case with Roswell, the established facts have only a loose connection with the mythology that has grown up around the case in the UFO literature.

Folklore and UFO-lore share the same kind of evidence: the testimony of narrators describing extraordinary experiences. In UFO-lore reports made by military witnesses, particularly senior officers, are accredited special status. The existence of official documents describing extraordinary events is the UFOlogical equivalent of the “holy grail.” This is where the circular arguments that bedevil UFO-lore begin.

The UFOlogists want to know the truth about a baffling subject and because the Government is involved it is assumed, wrongly, that it must know all the answers. From the standpoint of believers in alien visitors, all that has to be done is to force the Government to release “the truth” and the UFO reality would be established to everyone’s satisfaction. Unfortunately, to use the words of Daniel Webster, “There is nothing so powerful as the truth and often nothing as strange.” When information is not forthcoming, or when it is released but does not provide the conclusive evidence demanded by believers, a deeper cover-up is suspected and so the argument becomes a circular one.

The idea of an official cover-up of the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident is belief-driven and can never be disproved, only proved.

Official sources: The MoD’s policy towards UFO reports is outlined in three files available at the Public Record Office

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 17, Issue 2-3, from 2006.

Interest in the Rendlesham Forest ‘UFO’ case began some years ago, when the Internet was evolving from computer ‘bulletin boards’. These formative discussion forums were a source of otherwise unobtainable information and featured a serious-minded, worldwide community, interested in the eclectic subject of ‘UFOs’.

Participants in Britain’s ‘Roswell’ were members of the 81st Security Police Squadron (SPS), serving at RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge. It was a joint base, operated by the US Air Force and separated by a two-mile stretch of Rendlesham Forest. Some of the witnesses, long since returned to the United States, began to release details of their involvement via the fledging Internet and, gradually, I began to set in context various pieces of the puzzle.

Following Yonder Christmas Light

There were two separate incidents that gave rise to this classic ‘UFO’ mystery. At around 3:00 a.m. on Friday 26 December, 1980, three members of the 81st SPS, Staff-Sergeant Jim Penniston, Airman First Class John Burroughs and Airman Ed Cabansag, were on routine patrol when some unfamiliar lights were noticed as apparently within the forest, due east of the ‘east gate’, or ‘back door’, entrance to RAF Woodbridge. Receiving permission to investigate, it was claimed they had encountered a small, triangular-shaped, craft, which moved backwards through the forest before silently taking off.

On the night of Saturday 27 December 1980, there was a belated officers’ Christmas party, during which the Deputy Base Commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Halt, was alerted by Lieutenant Bruce Englund to yet another ‘UFO’ sighting within Rendlesham Forest. As Halt recalled in a previously online interview, “…it had been, how shall I say, the centre of a lot of activity and controversy within the police squadron and they seemed to be more focused on UFO activity than their primary duty”. (This interview, on The Return of the UFOs to Bentwaters, December, 1980, was dated 13 May 1987, and was hosted by A. J. S. Rayl on behalf of the Microsoft Network.)

Many of the participants were young, had not been in England for long and were already enthralled by tales such as the ghost of ‘East End Charlie’, a WWII airman alleged to haunt the east gate runway. Another popular anecdote was about witchcraft in the forest.

In the same interview, Halt states that he decided he would, “put the whole thing to rest” and assembled a team of five other officers. He also took his microcassette recorder, to make any necessary notes. They entered the forest near east gate and, after a while, one of the officers detected a distant flashing light. Halt was using a ‘starlight scope’, or ‘starscope’, night-image intensifier, certainly not intended for viewing bright lights. He documented on his tape recorder:

It looks like an eye winking at you. Still moving from side to side. And when you put the starscope on it, it sorta has a hollow centre, a dark centre, it’s like a pupil of an eye looking at you, winking. And it flashes so bright to the starscope that it almost burns your eye.

Looking back towards east gate, Halt then described some puzzling ‘beams of light’, seemingly being directed downwards from unidentified aerial craft: “Now we’re observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground”. The shafts of light were visible for an astonishing 45 minutes, from 3:15 a.m. until 4:00 a.m., with Halt finally recording, “0400 hours. One object still hovering over Woodbridge base at about five to ten degrees off the horizon, still moving erratic and similar lights and beaming down as earlier”.

What next transpired was perhaps defining, as Halt explained in the same interview:

The Wing Commander at that time was not present. He was at another social event. He and I discussed this incident the day after, which was a day or two after which was a Saturday morning. I remember running into him in the hallway of the building — we shared a common office building — and I told him about it. He knew a little bit, but I told him some details and told him I made the tape and he was very interested and asked to hear the tape. I gave him the tape and played it for him and he said, ‘May I take this to the Third Air Force, to the staff meeting next Tuesday or Wednesday?’ I said, ‘Certainly.’ Well, I couldn’t tell him, no. And he took it down and played it to the staff and the General looked at the staff and said … first, the Wing Commander said, ‘Is he a credible witness?’ and the answer was, ‘Yes.’ So he turned to the staff and said, ‘What do we do now?’ And nobody knew what to do. So there was some chuckling in the room and I understand the comment was, ‘Well, it’s a British affair. Let’s give it to them.’

This timing was, in hindsight, critical.

As Halt’s adventures began on the night of Saturday 27 December, he is clearly mistaken about meeting Wing Commander Gordon Williams on a Saturday, “a day or two after”. However, if that already scheduled staff meeting was to take place the following Tuesday or Wednesday, it could be no later than Wednesday 31 December, 1980. Halt also confirmed, “Around New Year’s Eve, I took statements and interviewed the men who had taken part in the initial incident. The reports were nearly identical”. “I also took them from the Flight Commander and … a Master Sergeant” (Rayl, 1994). Although Burroughs’, Cabansag and Penniston’s affidavits are undated, those from Flight Commander Fred Buran and Master-Sergeant J. D. Chandler are dated 2 January 1981. The delay in obtaining formal statements, Halt explained, was due to the holiday period. As we shall see, that delay was perhaps a crucial factor why the inherent ‘UFO’ mythology evolved.

Halt’s stated recollection continues (interview dated 13 May, 1987):

The R.A.F. Liaison Officer or the R.A.F. Base Commander, as we called him, was Don Moreland. I went and approached him, and I said, ‘You know, this happened off base.’ Well, I did discuss this through our channels and the real answer from our channels was, ‘Hey, we don’t want to touch this with a pole. This was a British incident. It happened off the installation. Let them handle it.’ So, I contacted him. In fact, I contacted him earlier and the only reason the memo was dated that late was that he was on vacation and I wasn’t able to find out what he wanted and how much detail he wanted and what he wanted to do with the information. When I finally caught up with him on the, about the 10th or the 12th, he said, ‘Well, write a brief memo … We’ll see what happens.’ So, that’s what I did.

On 13 January, 1981, both nights’ events were reported by Halt in a memorandum to the Ministry of Defence. Within days of the initial incident, there were local rumours of a ‘UFO’ landing and this sparked endeavours to uncover the true facts. Although the Ministry of Defence subsequently indicated their files held nothing of consequence, in the United States researcher Robert Todd made a speculative enquiry under the Freedom of Information Act. He received a response from the 513th Combat Support Group, which provided document management services to the Third Air Force. They had located Halt’s memo. As the USAF’s own copy had been “properly disposed of in accordance with Air Force Regulations”, the copy now provided to Todd had been obtained with the “gracious consent of Her Majesty’s Government, the British Ministry of Defence and the Royal Air Force” (Fawcett & Greenwood, 1984, pp. 217 – 218).

For some, such palpable reticence by the Ministry to earlier disclose the memo’s existence did little to inspire confidence that ‘something’ wasn’t being covered-up. When the ‘Halt memo’ eventually became public knowledge, its contents catapulted both the UFO story and central witnesses to celebrity status.

‘UFO LANDS IN SUFFOLK – AND THAT’S OFFICIAL!’, proclaimed the News of the World front page, on 2 October, 1983.

The Lighthouse Illumination

In search of a rational explanation, science writer Ian Ridpath proposed that the witnesses had been deceived by Orford Ness [aka Orfordness] lighthouse and the Shipwash lightship, both visible due east from within Rendlesham Forest. Because of the undulating terrain, these coastal lights, some six miles distant, appeared to be at eye-level when intermittently visible between trees.

Halt rejected this, claiming that all involved knew where the lighthouse was located. Yet, in his recording, the ‘UFO’ is sighted again and Halt states, “We’re at the far side of the second farmer’s field and made sighting again about 110 degrees. This looks like it’s clear off to the coast. It’s right on the horizon. Moves about a bit and flashes from time to time”.

The riddle may have remained definitively unsolved, except for a dramatic discovery I made – copies of those five witness statements Halt had requested in early January, 1981. They were devastating to any credibility this ‘UFO’ legend had, as surely Halt must have recognised. These fundamental

testimonies exposed that the initial ‘flying saucer’, a catalyst for all that followed, had, in truth, been discovered by Burroughs, Cabansag and Penniston to be Orford Ness lighthouse, exactly as Ridpath suggested.

Burroughs’ affidavit affirmed:

We got up to a fence that separated the trees from the open field and you could see the lights down by a farmer’s house. We climbed over the fence and started heading towards the red and blue lights and they just disappeared. Once we reached the farmer’s house we could see a beacon going around so we went towards it. We followed it for about 2 miles before we could see it was coming from a lighthouse.

I have corresponded with Burroughs for over a year and he acknowledges this is what truly occurred. Consequently, when on the night of 27 December, Halt personally investigated continued sighting reports, he possibly did not yet realise the deceptive role already known to have been played by Orford Ness lighthouse.

By the time he was alerted, in early January, his tape-recorded ‘UFO’ incursion had already merited serious consideration at a staff meeting of the Third Air Force. Worse yet, the General who attended was none other than General Charles A. Gabriel, Commander in Chief, United States Air Forces in Europe. We can imagine Halt’s abject horror. What was he to do now? Absolutely nothing.

Beam Me Up, Conde

If those strange flashing lights had a mundane explanation, then what of the ‘light beams’. A rational explanation for them remained intangible, until I was contacted from the U.S. by former 81st SPS Command-Sergeant, Kevin Conde [pronounced cond-eh]. Surfing the ‘net, Conde had come across my related web site and recognised a striking similarity between some aspects of the UFO incidents and a hoax he perpetrated, “just after Christmas”, in 1980. Conde elucidated:

I was a Security Policeman at RAF Bentwaters/Woodbridge from mid-1978 to mid-1981. I arrived at Bentwaters as a Staff-Sergeant and departed as a Tech-Sergeant. I was a Law Enforcement specialist. While there I worked as a patrolman, desk sergeant, assistant Flight Chief, Flight Chief, training NCO and QA evaluator. My Shift Commander was Lieutenant Englund, and the Security Flight Chief at the time was Master-Sergeant Bobbie Ball. If I left QA six months before I left Bentwaters in the summer of 1981, and my Shift Commander was Lieutenant Englund … then my incident is right in the ball park.

Security worked the back gate during late hours even though gates were normally the responsibility of the LE [Law Enforcement] flight. That post was not a well liked one, and Master-Sergeant Ball did not usually assign his favourite troops. One particular kid was afraid of the dark, noises, etc. He was constantly calling for the patrol to swing by. That patrolman was usually me. I remember having to constantly go out to that gate and hold this guy’s hand. He was a perfect target for a practical joke. Our jokes were not malicious, but they did tend to be inventive and aimed at those troops that were most likely to fall for them.

We used at least three flashlights pointing upwards rolled up in the windows of the patrol car. These lights were red, blue, green, and possibly amber. The patrol car itself had the American style square red and blue emergency rack on top with revolving high intensity red and blue lights. It also had bright white alley lights – these are lights that point to the side in order to light up buildings as you drive past them at night. It also had a bright white spotlight that I pointed as close to straight up as I could. I had everything except my headlights on.

The flashlights, which were green, and maybe amber, were nowhere as bright as the red, blue and white emergency lights, which really lit up the night. One of the lights directed upwards was the patrol car’s spotlight. It is a very bright light that throws a beam a long way.

We then proceeded to drive the car in slow circles while making weird noises over the PA [public address] system. There was a light fog, which was the key to the joke’s success, as each light appeared in the fog as a moving beam of light. The kid on the gate freaked. The response to his call for help was quite gratifying. Since I was the patrolman on Woodbridge at the time, I was detailed to respond to the gate guard’s call. We just shut off the lights and waited a little while, to make the kid think we were coming from the main part of Woodbridge, before rolling up to the gate to see what was wrong.

The joke would have had to have happened late – after all the initial patrol duties like relieving the main gate for chow [food], and getting the first round of building checks done, and before things began to pick up again, and we got bored and started looking for a way to cause trouble. I cannot say for sure, but I would guess between 1:00 and 4:00 a.m. The night I did it I remember it as slightly foggy, probably low-lying fog. The lights lit the fog quite nicely, I should think making a nice halo effect. The fog was, in fact, critical for my prank, as you could see the light beams. Try shining a bright spotlight in fog – you get the light sabre effect. This was one of the more successful and hysterical practical jokes I participated in during my eleven years as a cop. One thing: I frankly don’t remember if we ever told the guy what really happened.

Ian Ridpath has copies of contemporary base weather records that record ground fog on the night of 27 December.

In UFO Crash Landing?, Jenny Randles (1998) documents a witness, Sarah Richardson (only 12 at the time), who reportedly watched enigmatic bands of light, at the same time Halt was making a similar observation. If it correlates with Conde’s east gate hoax, directly adjacent to the runway, we should find the witness observed at least three multicoloured and ever-changing beams of light in that location. Sarah remembers, “Three bands of light appeared over the woods to the side of the runway”. She adds, “But the oddest thing was the colour changes, blue, green, yellow and so on”. Jenny also notes that on the same night, a local garage owner, Gerry Harris, reportedly observed, near the east gate, “three separate lights” which sometimes “moved around in circles”.

In July, 2001, Tracy Williams, Director of the regional BBC Inside Out local news series, asked if I could assist with a documentary concerning the ‘UFO’ events. In early 2003, Conde’s confession had evidently resolved key aspects and I discussed a proposal with BBC East Inside Out producer, Clive Dunn. Once familiar with the overall evidence, it was clear that BBC East intended to produce a hard-hitting feature and this was duly achieved, the program being broadcast on 30 June, 2003 (see BBC online). It had a dramatic impact, with newspaper coverage including a full page in the Daily Mail, headed ‘UFO OLED!’ (Wednesday, 2 July 2003, p. 10).

Sod This For a Game of Soldiers

Although there’s a humorous angle, it should perhaps be remembered that the Weapons Storage Area at RAF Bentwaters contained nuclear ordnance. As former US Air Force employee at Bentwaters, Kathy Smith, was prepared to place on record, “In 1980 there were small, ‘hot’, tactical nuclear weapons at Bentwaters, as used on an F-16, not large as used on B-52s and B-1s. Bentwaters ‘hot row’ bunkers would look like small hills. They were covered with dirt and had grass growing on them sloped front to back. From the back to front, it was 30-40 feet and there were about 10 bunkers total. All of these contained nuclear weapons”.

Incredibly, Halt believed the Weapons Storage Area was under threat (as revealed in an undated previously online interview hosted by A. J. S. Rayl, on behalf on Microsoft Network): “Then it [the UFO] moved back toward Bentwaters and continued to send down beams of light, at one point near the weapons storage facility. We knew that, because we could hear the chatter on the radio”.

However, I’ve located and spoken with many personnel from the Weapons Storage Area, including some, such as Kathy’s husband, Sergeant Randy Smith, who were actually on duty that night. Not one of them had ever even heard a story about beams of light endangering munitions. Next day, it was ‘business as usual’.

Perhaps that’s just as well, as Halt seemed oblivious what action to take. Did he call the Third Air Force for aerial support, or send an SOS to the RAF for fighter cover? He explained how the drama ended: “It was a cold winter night, the wind was blowing, we were wet and I just ordered everybody back to the base. I saw no reason to stay out there any longer. We left those objects up there” (previously online interview, undated).

Of the officers not partying, Halt and five others had travelled an astonishing two miles off-base and consequently outside USAF jurisdiction, in search of ‘UFOs’. Halt noted, “There were probably 25 to 30 security policemen there … and all excited” (previously online interview, 13 May, 1987).

In late December 1980, RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge were on “Alert Condition” because of the Solidarity crisis in Poland. Amidst fears the Soviet Union might invade, A-10 ‘tankbuster’ aircraft, based at RAF Bentwaters, would be deployed to the 81^st Tactical Fighter Wing at Alhorn, Germany.

Thankfully, the only danger arose from perceived ‘UFOs’, apparently concluded to be on a benign mission and nothing more sinister, such as crack Soviet Spetsnaz commandos making a pre-emptive strike.

During the night and early morning of 27/28 December, who, we might enquire, was minding the store?

‘Rendlesham’ was once regarded as Britain’s most significant demonstration of the nefarious, global, government ‘UFO’ cover-up. A complex and eclectic episode, when unravelled, it is a landmark and provides fascinating insight, revealing infinitely more about terrestrial predilections when confronted with ‘UFO’ perceptions, especially if anticipated, than any remote substantiation why ET dropped in on Suffolk.

References

• Fawcett, L., & Greenwood, B. J. (1984). Clear Intent: The Government Coverup of the UFO Experience. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Randles, J. (1998). UFO Crash Landing? London: Blandford.
• Rayl, A. J. S. (1994). Baffled at Bentwaters. OMNI Magazine, April 1994.