The Rendlesham Incident

There can be few people who haven’t heard of the Roswell Incident when, back in July 1947, a “flying disc” was recovered by the US military – and all the conspiracy theories regarding aliens began in earnest. Far fewer people have heard of the Rendlesham Incident – the “British Roswell”.

Rendlesham Forest is an area of woodland some eight miles east of Ipswich, or about eighty miles from London. At the northern end of the area is RAF Bentwaters; to the west is RAF Woodbridge: at the time of the incident in December 1980, both bases were on loan to the United States Air Force and nuclear weapons were in storage.

The Rendlesham Incident story goes that, on the night of December 25, the security patrol at Woodbridge’s east gate saw strange lights in the trees. They drove out to have a look and saw flickering red, yellow and green lights that were closer than they expected. As they neared the area, a large white light came on and mirrored their movement - they decided to return to base to get assistance. They called in the odd occurrence and the duty chief went down to ask them what was happening. He thought it might be an aircraft crash, but the security guys were adamant that the object had landed, not crashed. Since there was no air traffic around, a patrol was sent to check things out.

The two men who went into Rendlesham Forest (leaving a third at their vehicle to act as radio relay) discovered something very strange: a conical object about three metres tall and equally wide at the base. It sat there in the woods with flashing lights running around its middle. The air around it was filled with electricity and as they approached the guards’ movements became slower and more difficult. The surface of the thing was like smooth, opaque, black glass and had some lettering on it. One of the patrolmen even walked right up to the object and touched it: the symbols were about three inches tall and felt like they were inscribed rather than painted.

Once the object had been touched, it seemed to become more active. It grew brighter and the two men threw themselves to the ground for cover as it lifted off. It moved slowly through the trees for a while, then rose up above Rendlesham Forest and – in the blink of an eye – shot off and was gone. The object made no sound throughout the entire incident.

In the morning, the patrolmen returned to the site to check for physical signs: trees were scorched and three indentations were noticed in the ground where the object had been sitting on landing legs. Strange, since the ground had been frozen.

The Rendlesham Incident doesn’t end there, though – perhaps that should be a plural title! On the night of December 27, the lights were back. This time, the base personnel went out in greater numbers to try to figure out what was going on, but their efforts were flummoxed by lamps that refused to work, radio problems and other oddities. They did see a second landing site in Rendlesham Forest and followed a very strange light through the trees into a nearby field, where it sat for a while then exploded into several separate white lights. One of those danced in the sky while sending down beams, like a laser.

Back at Woodbridge, the dancing light and the beams were also seen. Some claim that the beams penetrated the hardened weapons storage area in the base (where the nuclear weapons were stored). Some even claim that weapons were disabled by the beams, though that hasn’t been confirmed, of course.

There’s also a third Rendlesham Incident that is reported, but often pushed aside because it’s even less believable. This one involves actual contact with the inhabitants of a UFO and so on, allegedly on the night of December 28.

The Rendlesham Incident is unusual in that some of the documentation has been made available through Freedom of Information acts in the UK and the US. Colonel Halt’s original memo, for example, is reproduced here. There is the small question of almost 300 pages of missing documentation, missing film, tapes and Geiger counter evidence that the US government took and which was “lost”, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it?