They approached cautiously and Penniston got close enough to see strange markings on the side of the craft, which he likened to Egyptian hieroglyphs. He made some rapid sketches in his police notebook.[121]
Later on, because of the complicated legal and jurisdictional position of United States Air Force bases in the UK, police from Suffolk constabulary were called out to the site where the object had apparently landed. They conducted a brief but inconclusive examination and then left. But three indentations were visible in the clearing, and when mapped they formed the shape of an equilateral triangle. A Geiger counter was used to check the site and the readings peaked markedly in the depressions where the object—possibly on legs of some sort—had briefly come to Earth.
News of the UFO encounter spread quickly around the bases and came to the attention of the deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt. He was skeptical, but had the witnesses write up official reports, including sketches of what they had seen. Two nights later Halt was at a social function when a young airman burst in and ran up to the colonel. “Sir,” he stammered, “it’s back.” Halt looked confused. “What?” he retorted. “What’s back?” “The UFO, sir—the UFO’s back.” Halt remained skeptical but gathered together a small team and went out into the forest to investigate. He subsequently stated that he went out with no expectation of seeing anything; in his own words, he said that his intention was to “debunk” the whole affair.
But he never did. He, too, encountered the UFO, becoming one of the highest ranking military officers ever to go on the record about a UFO sighting. As he and his men tracked the UFO, their radios began to malfunction and powerful mobile “light-alls,” brought along to illuminate the forest, mysteriously began to cut out. One piece of equipment that didn’t malfunction was the hand-held tape recorder that the colonel took with him to document his investigation. The tape recording still survives, and one can hear the rising tension in Halt’s voice and in the voices of his men as the UFO approaches: “I see it, too… It’s back again… It’s coming this way… There’s no doubt about it… This is weird… It looks like an eye winking at you… It almost burns your eyes… He’s coming toward us now… Now we’re observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground… one object still hovering over Woodbridge base… beaming down.”
At one point the tension in their voices almost seems to become panic as the UFO makes a close approach and fires light beams down next to Halt and his men. Following these events, Charles Halt wrote an official report of the incident and sent it to the Ministry of Defence. Although somewhat innocuously entitled “Unexplained Lights,” his report described the first night’s UFO as being “metallic in appearance and triangular in shape… a pulsing red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath… The animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy.” He went on to detail the radiation readings taken from the landing site and set out the description of his own sighting.
Halt’s report was received by the same Ministry of Defence section where, a little over ten years later, I would spend three years researching and investigating UFO sightings. The report went to my predecessors, who began an investigation. But they were hampered by a critical mistake that was to have dire consequences. For whatever reason—and it may have been nothing more than a simple typographical error—Charles Halt’s report gave incorrect dates for the incident. So when the MoD checked the radar tapes, they were looking at the wrong days.
Looking at radar evidence is a critical part of any UFO investigation. There have been plenty of spectacular UFO sightings over the years, many correlated with radar. The MoD’s comprehensive UFO files detail several such cases, including ones where RAF pilots encountered UFOs and gave chase—unsuccessfully, I might add. In the absence of any radar data that might confirm the presence of the Rendlesham Forest UFOs, the investigation petered out. Yet, as I was to discover years later, the UFO
I spoke to former RAF radar operator Nigel Kerr, who had been stationed at RAF Watton at Christmas 1980 and had received a call from somebody at RAF Bentwaters. The caller wanted to know if there was anything unusual on his radar screen. He looked, and for three or four sweeps, something did show up, directly over the base. But it faded away, and no official report was ever made. It was only years later that Kerr even heard of the Rendlesham Forest incident and realized he might have a missing piece of the puzzle.
At the time, however, in the apparent absence of radar data to verify the presence of the UFO, arguably the most critical piece of evidence was never followed up: The Defence Intelligence Staff had assessed the radiation readings taken at the landing site and judged them to be “significantly higher than the average background.” In fact, they were about seven times what would have been expected for the area concerned.
In reassessing the case during my review, I was disappointed by what I found. I discovered a series of additional mistakes that had fatally flawed the first investigation: failure to cordon off the landing site, search it with metal detectors, or take soil samples; delay in reporting the incident to the MoD; failings in information-sharing between the MoD and the USAF. If the investigation had been handled differently, we might know a lot more today about the strange object that landed. While delay and poor information-sharing were arguably human errors, the root of the problem was confusion about jurisdiction and whether the British or the Americans should lead the investigation. My own view is that both had jurisdiction but that the UK authorities had primacy and should have led. In fairness, the difficulties were compounded by the unprecedented nature of the incident. There was simply no standard operating procedure to cover a situation like this. I rechecked the assessment of the radiation readings, this time with the Defence Radiological Protection Survey, and they confirmed the original analysis.
I have spoken with the key witnesses in this complex case on many occasions. I am convinced that they are being truthful, and while recollections vary in some instances, this is to be expected given the time that has passed and given the fact that events occurred over several nights, with different people being involved at different locations. Indeed, I would be suspicious if everyone told exactly the same story, because in my experience this would suggest improper collusion between the witnesses.
But the simple fact that this is a multiple-witness event, where those involved are military personnel and where there is physical evidence, makes this one of the most significant UFO sightings ever.[122]
The late five-star admiral Lord Hill-Norton, the UK’s former Chief of the Defence Staff (the equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United States), though retired at the time, often asked me to brief him on the UFO phenomenon and draft material for him on the subject—a fearsome task for a middle-ranking government official. He was particularly outspoken on the Rendlesham Forest case and felt strongly that the MoD’s line on the incident (that the events were of “no defense significance”) was entirely unacceptable and at odds with the facts. In a letter that he wrote to a UK defense minister, which he copied to me, the admiral summarized his views on the case as follows:
My position both privately and publicly expressed over the last dozen years or more, is that there are only two possibilities, either:
An intrusion into our Air Space and a landing by unidentified craft took place at Rendlesham, as described. Or:
The Deputy Commander of an operational, nuclear armed, U.S. Air Force Base in England, and a large number of his enlisted men, were either hallucinating or lying.
Either of these simply must be “of interest to the Ministry of Defence,” which has been repeatedly denied, in precisely those terms.[123]
Project Condign
On May 15, 2006, under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, which is broadly similar to the U.S. FOIA, the Ministry of Defence published a formerly secret report on UFOs. Much information about UFOs had already been released, both at the National Archives and on the Ministry of Defence’s website, but the release of this latest study was different and totally unprecedented. The study was classified “Secret UK Eyes Only” and only eleven copies of the report were ever made. It ran to over 460 pages and was given the code name Project Condign. Work started in 1996 and the final report was not published until December 2000.
Interestingly, the timescale is broadly similar to the semiofficial COMETA Report from France, which was initiated in 1995 and released in 1999. There was no link between the two projects, and the high classification and extreme sensitivity of the UK study precluded liaison with any other country.
