The Rendlesham Forest Incident What Really Happened

"It's definitely coming this way." The man speaking is a lieutenant colonel of the United States Air Force. He is standing in a dark English forest in the middle of the night, with a small tape recorder in his hand. Around him, his men are watching a red light between the trees. "It looks like an ey

Chapters:
0:00 Lieutenant Colonel Halt sees the light
1:31 Halt's memo and tape recorder
2:48 Object vanishes, farm animals panic
4:06 Readings near the triangle marks
4:59 The winking light breaks apart
6:17 Halt signs the official memo
7:36 Marks and Rabbit Holes
8:49 The Trail Through the Pines

Written and narrated by Theo Penrose.

Read the story

"It's definitely coming this way." The man speaking is a lieutenant colonel of the United States Air Force. He is standing in a dark English forest in the middle of the night, with a small tape recorder in his hand. Around him, his men are watching a red light between the trees. "It looks like an eye winking at you," he says.

One of them answers, "It's like a pupil." And the tape keeps running. Twice in one Christmas week, American airmen at a base in Suffolk reported strange lights in the forest beside them. The second time, their deputy base commander went into the trees to see for himself. He came out with a tape recording made as it happened.

And two weeks later, he wrote it all down in an official memo, and signed his own name at the bottom. RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters were twin air bases in Suffolk, on the east coast of England. They had British names, but in 1980 they were being used by the United States Air Force, in the middle of the Cold War. Around them lay Rendlesham Forest, dark pine trees cut by tracks and firebreaks.

A few miles to the east, on the coast at Orford Ness, stood a lighthouse. Almost everything in this story comes back to two things one man made himself. One is a single page memo, typed and signed by the deputy base commander, with the subject line Unexplained Lights. The other is the tape he recorded in the forest, as it happened.

His name was Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt. And on the first night, he was not there. It began in the early hours of the twenty sixth of December, just after Christmas. At around three in the morning, security patrolmen near the back gate of Woodbridge saw unusual lights going down into the forest.

They thought an aircraft might have crashed. Permission was given, and three of them went out on foot into the trees. Among them were Sergeant Jim Penniston and John Burroughs. What they reported is set down in Halt's memo. A strange glowing object, metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, two or three metres across the base and about two metres high.

It lit the whole forest with a white light. On top was a pulsing red light, and underneath, a bank of blue lights. It was hovering, the memo says, or standing on legs. As the patrolmen came closer, the object moved through the trees and disappeared. At that moment, the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy.

About an hour later, it was seen again, briefly, near the back gate. Shortly after four in the morning, the local police were called. The officers who came out saw only one light in that direction: the lighthouse. When daylight came, the men went back into the forest. On the ground where the object had been, they found three marks pressed into the soil, an inch and a half deep and seven inches across, set out in a triangle.

At half past ten that morning, the police came out again. They looked at the marks and thought an animal might have made them. Two nights later, there were lights in the forest again. This time, the deputy base commander went out himself. With him were Lieutenant Englund, Sergeant Nevels and Master Sergeant Ball, with Sergeant Bustinza on the radio.

Halt carried a small tape recorder and a radiation meter. The tape begins with something going wrong. "We can't get the light all to work." They found the three marks and took readings. "We're getting rad," one of the men says on the tape. In his memo, Halt wrote that the readings peaked inside the three marks and near the centre of the triangle they made.

A tree close by read higher on the side that faced them. Then, at about ten to two in the morning, the men stopped working. They could hear the farm. "We're hearing some strange sounds out of the farmer's barnyard animals," Halt says into the recorder. "They're very, very active and making an awful lot of noise."

And then he sees it. A strange small red light, he says, maybe a quarter to half a mile away, maybe further. Soon he is telling the tape it is coming their way. "There's no doubt about it. This is weird." This is the light from the opening, the one that looked like a winking eye.

It moved from side to side. "Pieces are shooting off," Master Sergeant Ball says. In the memo, Halt wrote that the red, sun like light seemed to throw off glowing particles. Then it broke into five separate white objects, and it disappeared. The men stood among the trees. Then they looked up.

Three star like objects hung in the sky, the memo says, two to the north and one to the south, low over the horizon. They moved fast, in sharp angular turns, showing red, green and blue lights. At about a quarter past three, Halt is on the tape again. "Here he comes from the south.

He's coming in toward us now." "Now we're observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground." The object to the south, the memo says, stayed in view for two or three hours, and beamed down a stream of light from time to time. The last time Halt gives on the tape is four in the morning.

One object, he says, is still hovering over the Woodbridge base, low on the horizon. Two weeks later, Halt wrote it all up. The memo is dated the thirteenth of January 1981, and it went to the RAF commander at the base. One page. The first night, the marks, the readings, the lights.

And one plain sentence before his signature: numerous individuals, including the undersigned, witnessed the activities. The undersigned was the deputy base commander himself. The memo went on to the British Ministry of Defence, and for more than two years the public knew nothing about it. Then, in 1983, it was released in America under the Freedom of Information Act, and the story reached the British papers.

The Ministry later said the events posed no threat to national security, so they were never investigated as a security matter. The sceptics have looked at every part of it. The astronomy writer Ian Ridpath and the investigator Brian Dunning point to that lighthouse. The flashing light Halt followed was in line with Orford Ness, and on his own tape the flashes come every five seconds, the same as the lighthouse.

And a bright fireball was seen over southern England at about three in the morning on the first night. The police and the foresters thought the three marks were rabbit diggings. The radiation readings were around normal background levels for the area. The star like objects in the sky were most likely bright stars, low on the horizon.

Even the dates in Halt's memo are one day out, for both nights. These are fair questions, and they have never gone away. Some of the most dramatic parts of the story came much later. Jim Penniston has said he walked right up to the craft and touched it, and that it was very warm to the touch.

There was no public mention of that at the time, and no other witness has backed it up. And Halt has said that, to this day, nobody ever debriefed him about that night. And yet the record is still there. A deputy base commander put his name to a memo about lights in a forest, and sent it up the chain of command.

The three marks were measured. The farm animals were heard. And the tape still exists, a man's voice in the dark, moving from calm to something else, telling a recorder that this is weird. Today there is a walking trail through Rendlesham Forest, out to the place where it happened.

Families walk it in daylight. But on a winter night in 1980, a lieutenant colonel stood out there among the pines with a tape recorder, and said, here he comes. What do you think was coming toward them that night?