THE RENDLESHAM FOREST UFO CASE

by Ian Ridpath

Note: This article about my investigation of the Rendlesham Forest UFO case first appeared in The Guardian on 1985 January 5, and is given here in slightly amended form. The article was written before the release of the tape-recording made by Lt.Colonel Charles Halt during the events of the second night, when he participated in the sightings.

I have included a few bracketed asides, and appended a postscript to discuss some of the points raised by the information contained on that tape.

In December 1980, something remarkable allegedly occurred outside the US Air Force base at Woodbridge, near Ipswich. News of the event leaked out slowly, finally hitting the headlines in October 1983: "UFO lands in Suffolk - and that's official", screamed the front page of the News of the World.

The story was sensational. It told of a group of American airmen who were confronted one night with an alien spaceship in Rendlesham Forest, which surrounds the air force base. According to the story, the craft came down over the trees and landed in a blinding explosion of light.

The airmen tried to approach the object, but it moved away from them as though under intelligent control. The following day, landing marks were found on the ground, burns were seen on nearby trees, and radiation traces were recorded. There was even talk of aliens aboard the craft, and allegations of a massive cover-up. It had all the ingredients of a classic UFO encounter.

The News of the World's informant was a former US airman. He was given the pseudonym Art Wallace, for he claimed that his life had been threatened if he talked [note: his real name is Larry Warren, as everyone now knows]. Yet here he was freely giving interviews to newspapers and television.

While his fantastic story might be doubted, it was impossible to shrug off a memo written by the deputy base commander, Lt. Col. Charles I.

Halt, to the Ministry of Defence, which was publicly released in the United States under the Freedom of Information Act. Halt's memo, reprinted in full here [see appendix at end], is not as sensational as Wallace's story, but it is prime documentary evidence of a type rarely encountered in UFO cases.

UFO researchers in Britain could scarcely believe their luck: the was The Big One, final proof that We Are Not Alone. The News of the World paid 12,000 for the story. A subsequent book about the case, Sky Crash by Brenda Butler, Jenny Randles and Dot Street, described it as "unique in the annals of UFO history...the world's first officially observed, and officially confirmed, UFO landing and contact". Cable News Network made a documentary about the case.

All that evidence, backed up by the word of the US Air Force, could not possibly have a rational explanation. Or could it? I have my own detective story about the Rendlesham Forest UFO.

Soon after the News of the World story appeared, I went in search of local opinions about the case. I made contact by telephone with a forester, Vince Thurkettle, who lives within a mile of the alleged UFO landing site [he now lives in Norfolk]. Immediately I was brought down to Earth. "I don't know of anyone around here who believes that anything strange happened that night," he told me.

So what did he think the flashing light was in Rendlesham Forest? I was astonished by his reply. "It's the lighthouse," he said.

That lighthouse lies at Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast, five miles from the forest. Thurkettle plotted on a map the direction in which the airmen reported seeing their flashing UFO, and found that they were looking straight into the lighthouse beam.

Could this really be the answer? I visited the site with a camera crew from BBC TV's Breakfast Time programme. One the way there, the cameraman was sceptical about the lighthouse theory. I didn't blame him.

It was past midnight when Vince Thurkettle took us to the site of the alleged landing, and it felt spooky. The area had by now been cleared of trees as part of normal forest operations, but enough pines remained at the edge of the forest to give us a realistic idea of what the airmen saw that night.

Sure enough, the lighthouse beam seemed to hover a few feet above ground level, because Rendlesham Forest is higher than the coastline.

The light seemed to move around as we moved. And it looked close - only a few hundred yards away among the trees. All this matched the airmen's description of the UFO.

The conclusion was clear. Had a real UFO been present as well as the lighthouse, the airmen should have reported seeing two brilliant flashing lights among the trees, not one. But they never mentioned the lighthouse, only a pulsating UFO - not surprisingly, since no one expects to come across a lighthouse beam near ground level in a forest.

So startlingly brilliant was the beam that the television cameras captured it easily. The formerly sceptical cameraman was convinced.

My report was shown the following morning on Breakfast Time, much to the dismay of UFO spotters and the News of the World reporter.

The lighthouse theory soon had its supporters and its detractors. But there were still too many open questions for the case to be considered solved. For instance, what about those landing marks?

Some weeks later I returned to Rendlesham Forest in search of answers.

The landing marks had long since been destroyed when the trees were felled, but I now knew an eyewitness who had seen them: Vince Thurkettle. He recalled for me his disappointment with what he saw.

The three depressions were irregular in shape and did not even form a symmetrical triangle. He recognized them as rabbit diggings, several months old and covered with a layer of fallen pine needles. They lay in an area surrounded by 75ft-tall pine trees planted 10ft to 15ft apart - scarcely the place to land a 20ft-wide spacecraft. [note: this is one of the various estimates of size that have been made. Witness Jim Penniston says it was "the size of a tank" although Halt's memo described it as 2-3 metres across].

The "burn marks" on the trees were axe cuts in the bark, made by the foresters themselves as a sign that the trees were ready to be felled.

I saw numerous examples in which the pine resin, bubbling into the cut, gives the impression of a burn.

Additional information came from other eyewitnesses - the local police, called to the scene by the Woodbridge air base. The police officers who visited the site reported that they could see no UFO, only the Orford Ness lighthouse. Like Vince Thurkettle, they attributed the landing marks to animals. The case for a landed spacecraft was looking very shaky indeed.

What had made the airmen think that something had crashed into the forest in the first place? I already knew from previous UFO cases that a brilliant meteor, a piece of natural debris from space burning up in the atmosphere, could give such an impression. But I was unable to find records of such a meteor on the morning of December 27 [the date given in Halt's memo].

Here the police account provided a vital lead by showing that Col.

Halt's memo, written two weeks after the event, had got the date of the first sighting wrong. It occurred on December 26, not December 27.

With this corrected date, I telephoned Dr John Mason, who collects reports of such sightings for the British Astronomical Association.

He told me that shortly before 3 am on December 26 an exceptionally brilliant meteor, almost as bright as the full Moon, had been seen over southern England. Dr Mason confirmed that this meteor would have been visible to the airmen at Woodbridge as though something were crashing into the forest nearby. The time of the sighting matched that given in Col. Halt's memo.

Finally, I turned to the question of the radiation readings. I learned [from the NRPB] that readings like those given in Col. Halt's memo would be expected from natural sources of radiation such as cosmic rays and the Earth itself. In short, there was no unusual radiation at the site.

As for the star-like objects in the final paragraph of Col. Halt's memo, they were probably just that - stars. Bright celestial objects are the main culprits in UFO sightings and have fooled many experienced observers, including pilots. The object seen by Col. Halt to the south was almost certainly Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.

If it seems surprising that a colonel in the US Air Force should identify a star as a UFO, consider the alternatives. Is it likely that a bright, flashing UFO should hover over southern England for three hours without being spotted by anyone other than a group of excited airmen? And if Col. Halt really believed that an alien craft had invaded his airspace, why did he not scramble fighters to investigate?

[Actually, we now know from Halt himself and from RAF Watton that Halt asked if anything was seen on radar, but evidently nothing was. Halt's call was logged by RAF Watton at 03.25 on December 28, which shows that Halt got the date of the second sighting wrong, too].

UFO hunters will continue to believe that an alien spaceship landed in Rendlesham Forest that night. But I know that the first sighting coincided with the burn-up in the atmosphere of an exceptionally bright meteor, and that the airmen who saw the flashing UFO between the pine trees were looking straight at the Orford Ness lighthouse.

The rest of the case is a marvellous product of human imagination.

APPENDIX:

THE HALT MEMO

POSTSCRIPT:

Some time after this article was written, Woodbridge air base released the 18-minute tape recording made by Halt during the sighting on the second night, which has now been established as December 28. It confirms the above explanation, and also adds some more information, For example, we can hear the geiger counter operator calling out radiation readings.

In his book _Open Skies, Closed Minds_ Nick Pope has made much of these readings, describing them as "the most tangible proof that something extraordinary happened there". Hence it is essential that the readings are shown to be beyond reproach.

In 1997, for a TV programme on which Professor Frank Close was to discuss the Rendlesham case, Britain's National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) contacted the American manufacturers of the radiation monitor used by the airmen, a PDR 27, who stated that Halt's peak measurement of 0.1 mR/h was the "bottom reading on the lowest range" of the monitor and was "of little or no significance". They noted further that these instruments are designed to be used to monitor workplace fields or radiation levels after sizable nuclear incidents and are therefore not suitable for environmental monitoring at background levels. NRPB concluded that using such an instrument to establish a level of 10x background (ie 0.1 mR/h) is not credible.

NRPB official Michael Clark confirmed to me: "We are convinced of the correctness of our interpretation." Hence anyone who continues to claim that there was anything unusual about the radiation levels at Rendlesham is on very shaky ground indeed.

Perhaps the most significant exchange comes when they see the flashing light between the trees, and we have this exchange:

HALT: You just saw a light? Where? [garbled] Slow down. Where?

VOICE: Right on this position here. Straight ahead, in between the trees - there it is again. Watch - straight ahead, off my flashlight there, sir. There it is.

The time interval between the "there it is again...there it is" is five seconds, the rate at which the Orford Ness lighthouse flashes.

When CNN made a documentary about the case, this excerpt of the tape was played over video footage of the lighthouse flashing, and the two matched exactly. I tried to encourage London Weekend Television to do the same when making their Strange But True programme about the case, but they declined, possibly reasoning that it would give the game away.

Later on, we hear this on the tape:

HALT: 2:44. 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. Still steady or red in colour. Also after negative readings in the centre of the field we're picking up slight readings, four or five clicks now, on the meter.

Halt's compass bearing to the light is 110 degrees. The actual bearing of the Orford Ness lighthouse, allowing for magnetic deviation at the time of the incident, would have been about 100 degrees. Remember that Halt was trying to take a bearing on an intermittent light in the dark, so an error of 10 degrees does not seem unreasonable. However, Halt now says that he also saw the lighthouse to the right of the unidentified light, and the tape does indeed confirm that a second light was seen to the right, although no compass bearing is given and no one ever mentions the lighthouse on the tape. Of course, if Halt's compass bearing of 100 degrees to the unidentified flashing light had been precise, then the lighthouse should have been about 10 degrees to the *left* of this. In fact, there would have been another flashing light visible to the right of the lighthouse from their position at the edge of the forest, and that is the Shipwash lightship, which lies further out to sea. So Halt's own words, recorded at the time, undermine his later claim that he knew and recognized the Orford Ness lighthouse.

It's important to distinguish these flashing lights from the "star-like objects" that Halt reported later, which have all the characteristics of stars. From Halt's tape we can make a more definite identification of the starlike object to the south. Halt described it as "hovering over Woodbridge base at about five to ten degrees off the horizon". As seen from the patrol's position in the forest, the base would have been not due south but southwest, which is where Sirius was slowly setting, having reached an altitude of about 7 degrees at 4 am.

When taken individually, a straightforward explanation can be found for all the pieces of the Rendlesham puzzle. As Jenny Randles writes glumly in her latest book on the case, UFO Crash Landing: "Many people think the Rendlesham story is a nonsense that was debunked out of existence. One might even be tempted to argue that if a UFO case like Rendlesham falls, then none is safe. The whole mystery may collapse into misperception and witness exaggeration."

That, of course, is exactly why the UFO community dare not let Rendlesham fall.

(c) Ian Ridpath 1998