UFOs

for the staff, and for his boss, General Robert Bazley.

Williams told me that nobody had any ideas at the meeting, and they responded with silence. But he instructed me to contact the British RAF liaison officer, Don Moreland, stating that since this happened off base, General Bazley had declared it “a British affair.” It turned out Don was on vacation, but when he returned, he asked me to file a memo (his absence explains the delay in the date of the document). I wrote up the details in my January 13, 1981, memo, “Unexplained Lights,” and a copy was sent to the British Ministry of Defence and to the Third Air Force. The memo described the sighting of Penniston and the two patrolmen of the triangular object on the ground; the depressions and other physical evidence we found at the landing site; and the various lights and objects that I and numerous others witnessed subsequently.

Sometime later, my new boss found my tape and, unbeknownst to me, started playing it at cocktail parties. Word of it got out, and an American researcher started digging for more information. In 1983, I got a call from Pete Bent, acting Third Air Force Commander, and he told me that my memo from the Third Air Force files was going to be released under the Freedom of Information Act. I knew Pete and asked him to please burn it, to destroy it, and told him my life and his would never be the same because of what would happen if this were released. He said that too many people knew of the statement, so he had no choice. In October 1983, my worst fears were realized: The popular British tabloid News of the World ran a huge headline with the story on its front page, and reporters were swarming the base looking for the author of the memo. Fortunately I was already on a flight to the United States at the time, but this was only the beginning. In 1984, the audio tape was made public as well. The original tape was returned to me, and I also have the actual pocket tape recorder that was used that night.

If the memo had not been released, I would have continued to remain silent. This experience is not something I ever wanted to speak about publicly. On the other hand, no one has ever tried to influence me not to do so. When I had my final debriefing before leaving the Air Force, it wasn’t even mentioned, so I asked if I could talk about the case, and was given permission, as if it really didn’t matter.

Over the years, I have heard privately from many other witnesses. The weapons storage area tower operator and a communications worker in the same tower both told me they saw an object that went into the forest near Woodbridge base. The air traffic control tower operators at Bentwaters also saw an object and observed something cross their screen at extremely high speed, up to 3,000 to 4,000 mph—the radar monitor registered one streak as opposed to the usual series of blips for even the fastest aircraft. Others have now come forward with similar accounts. All had been cautioned not to talk by someone up the chain of command, or were afraid to talk at the time for various reasons.

Many have wondered how much the United States government might know about the Rendlesham Forest incident. Over the years, it has become clear to me that agents from the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the Air Force’s major investigative service, were on the base and secretly investigated the case in the days following. The incident had everyone very nervous. The high-ranking officers wanted to stay out of it, and the OSI didn’t want anyone involved whom they couldn’t control. OSI operatives harshly interrogated five young airmen, some of them in shock at the time, who were key witnesses. These men reported later that the agents told them not to talk about the UFO events, or their careers would be in jeopardy. Drugs such as sodium pentothal, often called a “truth serum” when used with some form of brainwashing or hypnosis, were administered during these interrogations, and the whole thing has had damaging, and lasting, effects on the men involved.

Other witnesses may have been exposed to high doses of radiation from the landed object. Some have health problems and struggle with personal issues to this day. Repression by the OSI is not uncommon in the military, but nobody involved will ever admit that. The OSI commander for Bentwaters told me then that they weren’t investigating. Others have reported a different story.

I retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1991 as a colonel. This publicity was not exactly career-enhancing; nevertheless, I went on to become a base commander at two large installations and at the time of my retirement was director, inspections directorate for the DoD Office of Inspector General. In that position I had inspection oversight of all military services and defense agencies.

I still have no idea what we saw that night. It must have been something beyond our technology, judging from the speed of the objects, the way they moved and the angles they turned, and other things they did. I do know one thing, without a doubt: These objects were under intelligent control.

CHAPTER 19 Chile: Aeronautical Cases and the Official Response by General Ricardo Bermudez Sanhueza (Ret.), Chilean Air Force, and by Captain Rodrigo Bravo Garrido, Aviation Army of Chile

Along with West European nations, South America has also played a crucial role in establishing new agencies to investigate UFOs, and these endeavors have gathered some momentum in that part of the world. Peru set up its Air Force Office for the Investigation of Anomalous Activity, known as the OIFFA,[126] in 2001, primarily concerned with the safety of air operations. And the Peruvian government took another important step about two years later. The Air Force publicly reported on its investigations of a series of sightings, videotaped in the remote Chulucanas area, stating that whatever was being seen was physically real but could not be explained.[127] Announced in February 2003 by Peruvian Air Force colonel Jose Raffo Moloche, official acknowledgment of the existence of UFOs had never been provided publicly before by the Peruvian government, so this was an important breakthrough.

Comandante Julio Chamorro, the founder and first director of the OIFFA, had been previously stationed at La Joya air base and was a witness to the incident involving Oscar Santa Maria Huertas in 1980, when the base was put on alert. He told me that Peru funded its Air Force agency because “these anomalous events had occurred frequently enough over national territory to create a danger, and we recognized that they needed to be taken seriously.” Chamorro says that, as director of the OIFFA, he had approached the U.S. Embassy on a number of occasions to discuss the situation for the purpose of requesting assistance, but received no response. “We have not been able to expect any help from the Americans in dealing with this problem,” he says.

The Uruguayan Air Force, which has been active in UFO investigations for decades, declassified its UFO files in 2009 and made them public, including records of forty cases that remain unexplained, some involving military pilots. “The UFO phenomenon exists and I must stress that the Air Force does not dismiss an extraterrestrial hypothesis based on our scientific analysis,” said Colonel Ariel Sanchez at the time, an officer with thirty-three years of active service who presides over an Air Force commission studying the cases.[128]

Chile set up an agency within its civil aviation department, the equivalent of our FAA, in 1997 to investigate UFO cases affecting aviation safety. The CEFAA[129] (the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena) was founded and directed by General Ricardo Bermudez and soon developed a relationship with the aviation branch of the Chilean Army, through the work of Captain Rodrigo Bravo. Since leaving the CEFAA in 2002, General Bermudez has prepared a graduate- level course in UAP for the University of Science and Technology in Santiago, “designed to furnish the students with the necessary tools for distinguishing between what is real and what is fictional regarding UFOs,” as he describes it. He constructed the course to include a wide range of lectures by other professors in related fields, such as astronomy, space physics, and astronautics. In January 2010, General Bermudez was reinstated as chief of the CEFAA, in an elaborate ceremony chaired by the director general of civil aviation. Representatives of the armed forces, police (carabineros), and academic and research communities from all over Chile were in attendance, and the event was covered by the media. “It was a beautiful ceremony that had the full support of the authorities,” Bermudez wrote in an e-mail.[130]