The Rendlesham Forest Incident
A microcosm of the phenomenon, its manifold events chronicled military interactions with an unknown intelligence.
Some one or some thing from beyond the world we know visited the East of England over the course of three haunting nights in December 1980. Active duty U.S. Air Force and Royal Air Force personnel, U.K. police officers, and a number of civilians living and working in the surrounding communities sighted unidentified craft, experienced unknown phenomena and encountered an unrevealed intelligence.
Centered around neighboring Joint RAF-USAF Air Bases, RAF Bentwaters and two miles to the south, RAF Woodbridge, the broad spectrum of experiences and phenomena are collectively known today as the Rendlesham Forest Incident. The phenomenon left physical traces, was confirmed by radar, and exhibited a broad spectrum of phenomenological and psychic events.
Labeled “The Roswell of Britain,” the appellation is not fair to Rendlesham Forest or the people who lived these experiences. Active-duty military personnel reported numerous and varied unidentified flying objects and nocturnal lights, silent UFOs hovering over and scanning a top secret weapon storage area, and reports of a number of landings and close encounters.
At some of the events, witnesses reported missing time, conflicting memories of what was seen or present, and psychic or telepathic communication with possibly nonhuman entities — as well as between human witnesses themselves. Two airmen, independent of each other, reported they witnessed the apparent teleportation of a third enlisted man who had approached and touched a landed object.
“IT WAS NOT A CRASH. IT LANDED”
On the evening of Friday, December 26, 1980, two USAF airmen on guard patrol were ordered to investigate a light spotted over the woods neighboring RAF-USAF Joint Air Base Bentwaters. Thinking they were investigating a possible airplane crash, Staff Sergeant James Penniston and Airman First Class John Burroughs opened an auxiliary gate and drove into the forest to investigate. When they briefly climbed out of their vehicle, the atmosphere, they felt, was filled with “static electricity.”
What they felt and saw made the two airmen turn around and return to base to report. Calling from the first telephone they found, the two airmen informed their commander to report something unusual in the forest.
“We thought we were looking at a crashed aircraft, burning in the woods,” AFC Burroughs later reported. “It wasn’t a crash. It landed.”
SSgt. Penniston and AFC Burroughs, now joined by Airman Ed Cabansag, were sent back to Rendlesham Forest to investigate. Driving as far as the road allowed, they walked on foot into the woods and walked through a farm field toward an area illuminated by an object with multicolored lights. As they walked closer, they reported the object began to course toward them, suddenly vanished, and then a moment later silently reappeared behind them before again disappearing.
They airmen continued forward into the woods. Climbing over a small mound, they were surprised by a blast of light. When they could see, they faced some kind of light-emitting object, triangular in shape, about 10-feet long at the base and about 10-feet tall. One airman said he saw a metallic, triangular shaped craft. Another said the object looked like a disc hovering over the clearing. Whatever was floating or resting on three legs, it left impressions in the ground.
SSgt. Penniston and AFC Burroughs took notes and made drawings in their air police notebooks. SSgt. Penniston and Airman Cabansag reportedly took photographs on film cameras. SSgt. Penniston approached and touched the object.
“It was solid, as if built of metal,” Airman First Class John Burroughs said in one interview years later. “But it felt warm and smooth to the touch, like black glass. The ‘hieroglyphs,’ though, felt rough, like sand paper.”
Burroughs had touched what seemed like a number of symbols along one edge of the object. As he touched them, alight atop the craft suddenly became “sun-like” in brightness and made the surrounding wooded clearing as “bright as day.”
And then things got really weird. After which, the men returned to RAF Bentwaters and reported what they experienced.
Seeing What Is Not Supposed to Exist
The following evening, Col. Charles I. Halt, USAF (Ret.) heard the “UFOs had returned.” Then serving as deputy base commander of Joint RAF/USAF Base Bentwaters, Col. Halt personally led a team of Air Force personnel into the forest to investigate.
Here’s part of his official report, a memorandum composed about a week after the events (please click on the image to enlarge for readability), released about two years after the incident via FOIA request by ufologists:
A Surreal Experience
The Air Force team found indentations in the ground where the team the previous evening reported seeing the object touched down in a small clearing in the public forest. They measured significantly higher radiation on the ground and on the trees facing the landing spot. While there, they sighted a mysterious light, about the size and orange color of a basketball.
To help document the investigation, Col. Halt carried a micro-cassette tape recorder to capture much of what was said and seen during his foray the second evening. Excerpts in Col. Halt’s voice:
“It’s coming this way. It is definitely coming this way...Pieces of it are shooting off...There is no doubt about it. This is weird!
“OK, we’re looking at the thing. We’re probably about two to three hundred yards away. It looks like an eye winking at you. Still moving from side to side. And when you put the Starscope on it, it sort of has a hollow center. It’s... Yeah, like an eye.
“We see strange strobe-like flashes to the...rather sporadic, but there’s definitely something there. Some kind of phenomenon...”
NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, made the tape recording in a digital format here via Wikipedia. NICAP also made a transcript of the tape, available here.
One more important quote from Col. Halt to consider, made at 4 a.m.:
“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…This is unreal.”
A security forces airman at Joint Base Woodbridge would later report observing a “black triangle” while on guard duty at the sensitive Weapons Storage Area. As he watched, another object that appeared as a round or elliptical light passed over the area, scanning the weapons below with a beam of light similar to a laser, swinging the beam from side to side, as if conducting a search.
Ufologist Linda Moulton Howe later interviewed another airman, the anonymous “Smith Jones,” stationed on guard duty at Joint Base Heywood — about 100 miles to the west — who on the same evening sighted a similar object searching the top secret weapons area. Ms. Howe also has conducted important interviews with many of the principals of Rendlesham, including Col. Halt, who in a press release dated June 25, 2009, wrote:
“I wish to make it perfectly clear that the UFOs that I saw were structured machines moving under intelligent control and operating beyond the realm of anything I have ever seen before or since. I believe the objects that I saw at close quarter were extraterrestrial in origin and that the security services of both the United States and England were and have been complicit in trying to subvert the significance of what occurred at Rendlesham by use of well-practiced methods of disinformation.”
As with much of ufology, much of this story seems absurd. What’s more, much if not most of the data, does not make sense with what we know about science and the universe. However, the character of witnesses to these events is impeccable in terms of professional qualifications and personal integrity. The extensive documentation they created describes a variety of unknown and unexplained phenomena.
The Rendlesham Forest Incident stands as one of the most important cases on record. Also important to note is the bravery of the witnesses who have spoken publicly as citizens in a democracy by reporting what they saw during their official duties.
“The Witnesses of Rendlesham Forest” and documentary filmmaker Richard Thomsen have created an excellent online record with the eyewitnesses reporting their experiences in their own words:
Mr. Thomsen provided an index of speakers:
00:00 Intro
02:35 Night one
02:42 John Burroughs
08:14 Jim Penniston
12:43 Richard Bertolino
17:20 Lindy Vaughn (Night one)
21:09 Night two
21:18 Lori Bouen
23:50 Lindy Vaughn (Night two)
26:14 RAF Upper Heyford
26:30 Smith Jones (*pseudonym)
29:08 Night three
29:26 Greg Battram
31:18 Monroe Nevels
33:54 Charles Halt
36:20 Michael Stacy Smith
38:00 Rick Bobo
41:18 Jim Carey
42:00 Ike Barker
43:24 Larry Warren
48:34 Adrian Bustinza
53:36 End
Background and Resources
What the witnesses of Rendlesham Forest experienced holds national security implications involving UFOs over the airspace of several NATO bases during the height of the Cold War — and the closing days of the Iranian Hostage Crisis. The fact photographs, videotapes and other material records witnesses said they made have not been released via FOIA or leak is a public sign of its importance.
For those new to the Rendlesham Forest Incident, CUFOS, the Center for UFO Studies founded by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, provides a good overview and background in its resource: Classic UFO Cases. UFO Weekly also provides an excellent overview: “Unraveling the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident.” BBC News provides additional context in its report: “Rendlesham Forest: Are we any closer to the truth 40 years on?”
UK ufologist Gary Heseltine, a veteran law enforcement officer and a veteran of the RAF, personally investigated the extraordinary case in detail, interviewing witnesses, visiting locations, and examining records at his own expense. Mr. Heseltine kindly shares the results of his four-year investigation in “Non-Human: The Rendlesham Forest UFO Incidents: 42 Years of Denial.”