Mysteries Uncovered: True Stories of the Paranormal and Unexplained

In late December 1980, a group of American airmen from the US base at Woodbridge, Suffolk, saw strange lights in the sky. A short while later they claimed to have encountered a UFO in nearby Rendlesham Forest. What they saw that night would become one of the UK’s most famous UFO sightings, one that has fully earned the moniker of “Britain’s Roswell.”

In 1980, Royal Air Force Woodbridge and Royal Air Force Bentwaters were part of a US Air Force complex that was nestled among the dense, predominantly coniferous woodland of Rendlesham Forest, near the Suffolk coast. They were frontline defenders of Britain’s security. At the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union there were at least 13,000 US servicemen stationed at the two bases, as well as a number of nuclear weapons.¹¹

At around 3am on December 26, 1980, two USAF security police patrolmen from RAF Woodbridge noticed unusual lights around a mile from the back gate. Initially, Sgt. Jim Penniston and Airman First Class John Burroughs thought that an aircraft must have crashed in Rendlesham Forest. They asked for permission to leave the base and investigate. The on-duty flight chief told them to search the area on foot, taking along Airman First Class Ed Cabansag. His role was to stay in their truck and maintain radio contact with Penniston and Burroughs.

What the two men saw next was reported by deputy base commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles I. Halt in a USAF memo. After walking between 1 and 2 miles (1.6 to 3.2km)—accounts vary—into the forest, Penniston and Burroughs claimed they encountered a glowing object. It was metallic, triangular in shape, and around 9 feet (2.7m) wide by 6 feet (1.8m) high. The object “illuminated the entire forest with a white light and had a pulsing red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath,” reported Halt.²² It was either hovering or standing on short legs, and as the men drew closer, they began experiencing interference on their radios. In 2010, Penniston recalled, “At first, I was confused, not understanding what I was seeing. This was truly unbelievable. Then fear struck me, but I told myself I had to stay focused. Was this a threat to the base and to us? I had to determine that first and foremost.”³³ As the patrolmen approached the strange object, it moved away from them, as if under intelligent control, slowly passing through the trees and onto nearby farmland, where it caused some disturbance among livestock. Penniston and Burroughs climbed a fence that separated the forest trees from an open field. “You could see the lights down by a farmer’s field,” recollected Burroughs. They started walking toward the light. Then, in an instant, it vanished.

Penniston later claimed that, while in the forest that night, he had seen hieroglyphic-like characters on the side of the UFO—a triangle surrounded by other symbols. He claimed he drew the patterns he saw in a notebook. “They were etched into the surface of the craft,” said Penniston. “I put my hand on the craft and it was warm to the touch. The surface was smooth, like glass, but it had the quality of metal, and I felt a constant low voltage running through my hand and moving to my mid-forearm.” Burroughs had no recollection of any of this. Subsequently, commentators speculated that the symbols could have been binary code, and Penniston would claim in 2010, while under hypnosis, that a binary code was downloaded directly into his brain when he touched the UFO.

Penniston and Burroughs radioed RAF Woodbridge’s security desk to report what they had seen and the base contacted Suffolk police to report “a sighting of some unusual lights in the sky.” Two police officers investigated and reported back: “Air Traffic Control checked. No knowledge of aircraft. Reports received of aerial phenomena over southern England during the night. Only lights visible in this area was from Orford Ness Lighthouse (some 6 miles [9.7km] away). Search made of area—negative.”⁴⁴ The following day, however, police returned to the scene at the request of the Bentwaters base’s security officer, Wing Commander Gordon Williams, who claimed that they had “found a place where a craft of some sort seems to have landed, two miles east of the East Gate.”⁵⁵ According to Williams, they had found three shallow depressions on the ground where Penniston and Burroughs had claimed to see the UFO. These depressions were 1.5 inches (3.8cm) deep and 7 inches (17.8cm) wide. There were also burn marks on nearby trees and broken branches in the surrounding area.⁶⁶ PC Brian Cresswell attended the scene, but was unimpressed. “There were three marks in the area which did not follow a set pattern. The impressions made by these marks were of no depth and could have been made by an animal.”

On December 27, the twin bases’ annual Christmas party was interrupted by Lt. Bruce Englund. He told Lt. Col. Halt that strange lights had been seen and that “It” was back. Halt headed out to Rendlesham Forest with several servicemen, expecting to be able to debunk this supposed UFO sighting. His men were equipped with Geiger counters and took radiation readings of three depressions that they discovered in the ground. The readings showed high levels of radiation, around seven or eight times what would have been expected for that area.

Meanwhile, a USAF Sergeant stationed at RAF Bentwaters, Adrian Bustinza, had caught wind of what was unfolding at Rendlesham Forest. He assembled a number of military personnel and they set off for the scene.

At around 11pm, Bustinza’s group came across Halt and his men. Larry Warren—an 18-year-old soldier serving with the Air Force security police with Bustinza, recalled, “We were all told to hand in our weapons. I had an M16 rifle.”¹¹ As Halt and his men continued their investigation, they noticed strange sounds coming from nearby farm animals. Moments later, a red sunlike light was spotted moving and pulsing through the trees. “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 is still hovering over Woodbridge base . . . beaming down,”⁷⁷ said Halt into his voice recorder.

According to Warren, however, the incident was even more bizarre than Halt’s voice recording. In fact, years later, Warren’s account would become a topic of particular controversy. He described the object as “the size of a basketball, an American basketball,” that was “self-illuminated, not quite red.”⁸⁸ He claimed that this bright object suddenly exploded and a craft appeared on the forest ground right before them. He described this craft as having “no windows, no markings, no flag or country of origin. Nothing. You could hardly look at it head on, and if you looked at it through the side of your peripheral vision, you’d get the shape of it . . . and there it was, clear as a bell.” Warren claims that he and Bustinza were asked to leave the area by a senior officer. From a distance, he claimed that he saw Wing Commander Gordon Williams approach the craft and then have some kind of encounter with an alien, which Warren described as a “silent standoff.” Williams himself has never gone on record or publicly spoken about the Rendlesham Forest Incident.

In Halt’s version of events, however, nobody was close enough to the strange object to approach it. Instead, he described the object zigzagging through the trees as they moved closer to try and inspect it. Suddenly, it took off without any noise and at an unbelievable speed. It appeared to leave a trail of particles behind it before breaking into five separate white objects and disappearing. Halt described the object in the forest as like “nothing I have ever seen before” and also described a yellow mist drifting through the trees. According to Halt’s memo, moments after observing the object take off, three starlike objects were noticed in the sky, two to the north and one to the south. All of these objects were said to be 10 degrees off the horizon. They moved rapidly in sharp angular movements and displayed red, green, and blue lights. When the objects in the north were looked at through an 8-12–power lens, they could not be identified. Moments later, they appeared to lose their starlike shape and instead transformed into circles. The objects in the north remained in the sky for over an hour, while the object in the south was visible for two to three hours. From time to time, it beamed down a stream of light. Halt later commented, “Here I am, a senior official who routinely denies this sort of thing and diligently works to debunk them [i.e. UFOs], and I’m involved in the middle of something I can’t explain.” Bustinza’s version of events agreed with Halt’s account.

It was not until 1983, after Halt’s memo was released under the United States Freedom of Information Act, that the Rendlesham Forest Incident gained national publicity. “If the memo had not been released, I would have continued to remain silent,” said Halt. “This experience is not something I ever wanted to speak about publicly.”

Since then, what truly occurred that night has become increasingly hazy. Hard evidence of the Rendlesham Forest Incident is lacking, statements have changed, and new witnesses have come forward. As is the case with the majority of UFO sightings, rumors soon spread of some kind of military cover-up. The official response, as encapsulated in a Ministry of Defence statement released in 2002 under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, was certainly clear: “No evidence was found of any threat to the defence of the United Kingdom, and no further investigations were carried out. No further information has come to light which alters our view that the sightings of these lights was of no defence significance.”

The cause of the mystery has been variously explained as a military training exercise, an elaborate hoax, a UFO encounter, a meteor shower, a rogue satellite, and the beam from Orford Ness Lighthouse.

Ian Ridpath, editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Astronomy, is a staunch backer of the lighthouse-beam theory. After reviewing a transcript of a live tape recording made by Lt. Col. Halt while investigating the UFO with his men, Ridpath came to the conclusion that Halt had mistaken the stars Vega, Deneb, and Sirius, as well as beams from the Orford Ness Lighthouse and possibly the Shipwash Lightship, for UFO activity.

The lighthouse theory, however, does have its drawbacks. The strange lights were first noticed by USAF security police patrolmen Penniston and Burroughs from the back gate of RAF Woodbridge; however, the beacon of the Orford Ness Lighthouse cannot be seen from this location. Furthermore, every resident in the area knew about the lighthouse and it seems unlikely that it would have confused so many witnesses. “Lighthouses don’t fly,” Halt once quipped.⁹⁹ In 2010, Halt confirmed that while in Rendlesham Forest that night, he and his men saw the beam from the Orford Ness Lighthouse and the mysterious lights at the same time.

Ridpath also put forward the theory that what was seen that night in the sky was a fireball, explaining, “Brilliant fireballs like this, caused by natural pieces of debris from space burning up in the atmosphere, are a major cause of UFO reports.” At 2:50am on February, 26, 1980, four witnesses in southern England (the exact location was not reported) reported seeing “a fireball” in the sky. “[A] fireball is most likely what they saw, and . . . nothing landed in Rendlesham Forest,” commented Ridpath.¹⁰¹⁰

Another proposed explanation was that the UFO was some kind of secret prototype aircraft or even a drone. It has also been suggested that the strange symbols that Penniston claimed he saw may have been Cyrillic script, indicating that the UFO was a Soviet craft. Building on this premise, some commentators have even considered that the UFO and lights were some kind of military psychological operation, and that the witnesses were nothing more than human test subjects, manipulated to see how they would react to an unusual experience. It was also suggested that this military psychological operation had involved seemingly solid objects generated by holographic technology.

Another theory with an added Soviet Union twist was put forward in 1998 by Ufologist Jenny Randles, author of UFO: Crash Landing? Friend or Foe? Shortly after 9pm on December 25, 1980, the USSR’s Cosmos 749 rocket reentered Earth’s atmosphere over northwestern Europe. Randles suggested that the National Security Agency (NSA) at Orford Ness had fired an energy beam “to jam the electronics on the Soviet military satellite and deflect its orbital path, causing it to burn up in a controlled fashion.” While it was thought that the Cosmos 749 rocket had broken up during reentry and burned out somewhere east of Clacton, in the neighboring county of Essex, Randles suggested in her follow-up book, The UFOs That Never Were, that the flightpath of the incoming debris was altered “as if something caused the trajectory to be deflected.”¹¹¹¹

Since going public, Halt has said that many other witnesses have come to him privately to reveal that they witnessed something strange in the sky that night. He said that two air-traffic control tower operators at RAF Bentwaters saw an object that they could not identify and also observed something cross their screen. According to Halt, other witnesses came forward with similar accounts, but they had been ordered by somebody “up the chain of command” to stay silent about what they had seen. The two air-traffic controllers, Ike Barker and Jim Carey, went public in 2016 in the television documentary UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed. According to Barker: “It was traveling at an extremely high rate of speed. It passed over the control tower and then it stopped.” Jim Carey agreed, stating that, “It was just phenomenal to see it go that fast. I said, ‘That can’t be one of ours.’ ”¹²¹²

In 2010, Halt stated in a signed affidavit, “I believe the objects I saw at close quarters were extra-terrestrial in origin and that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted—both then and now—to subvert the significance of what occurred at Rendlesham Forest and RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practiced methods of disinformation.”¹³¹³ He also stated that he was tired “of all the disinformation out there. It seems that every time I turn around, I hear more nonsense or am accused of something.” He confessed that before that night, he was a UFO skeptic and that he “never really gave [UFOs] a second thought before the incident.”¹⁴¹⁴

Halt has maintained that agents from the US’s Office of Special Investigations had secretly investigated the incident in the days that followed. He alleged that witnesses were told by agents not to speak about what they had seen that night or they would lose their jobs. “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,” said Halt. In 2015, John Burroughs won compensation for illnesses that he blamed on exposure to radiation from the Rendlesham Forest Incident.

Another person who maintained that there was definitely an extraterrestrial presence in the forest that night was the pseudonymous “Steve Roberts,” an airman at the base at the time. According to Roberts, he was one of the group on patrol with Sgt. Bustinza. In 1981, he claimed, like Larry Warren, that he had witnessed Wing Commander Gordon Williams approaching the UFO. He alleged that everybody else present was ordered back while Williams had some kind of communication with the aliens that were beside the UFO. According to Roberts, it looked as though Williams was using some kind of sign language to communicate with them. He described the aliens as about 3 feet (0.9m) tall and wearing “all-over” silver suits. He said that they appeared to hover close to the ground and were suspended in a shaft of light that projected from the underside of the UFO.

Roberts’ account—much like Warren’s—has been met with widespread skepticism owing to lack of corroboration. While both men claimed that there was a number of other servicemen present, they are the only two to claim they saw extraterrestrials. In an interview with the News of the World newspaper on September 28, 1983, Warren changed his story and claimed that he didn’t actually see any aliens himself, stating, “I realized the spaceship was inhabited. There were beings aboard. I didn’t see them because I was on the wrong side of the craft. But others did. They said there were three, and they were wearing silver suits.” In the same interview, he claimed that he “had a strange feeling and seemed to black out,” adding that “the next thing I knew, it was about 5am and I was waking up lying half across my bunk. I still had my uniform on and was up to my knees in mud. To this day, I don’t know how I got back to the barracks.”

Halt has utterly dismissed claims that aliens—or images of aliens—were present at the scene, describing them as “pure fiction.”¹¹

In 1998, Warren published a book on his supposed experiences in Rendlesham Forest titled Left at East Gate : A First-Hand Account of the Bentwaters-Woodbridge Incident, Its Cover-up, and Investigation, which he coauthored with the investigative writer and UFO specialist Peter Robbins. However, in 2017, their relationship deteriorated when Robbins accused Warren of “deceiving him” with a false account of what took place that night. Speaking in May of that year to the Inception Radio Network, a show specializing in the paranormal, Robbins said, “Over the past year, even a bit more, highly specific information has been brought to my attention that has disturbed me tremendously.” He expressed that he had wholeheartedly believed in Warren’s version of events and that was why he had agreed to coauthor the book. “I felt I had proved enough to myself of Larry’s account and details surrounding it that he was telling the truth. And I feel now that in part that was not the case and there was an intent to deceive. To say this has tore me up over the last year is an understatement.” Following this revelation, the American publisher, Cosimo, announced that they would be suspending the distribution of Warren and Robbins’ book, stating, “Recently, it has been brought to our attention that some of the experiences described in this book may be inaccurate or embellished.”

By this point, other witnesses and commentators had also questioned Warren’s credibility. Bustinza had publicly stated that he couldn’t remember Warren even being in Rendlesham Forest that night and suggested that Warren had taken information about what he, Bustinza, had seen in the forest and reworked it to create his own story.

Finally, it is possible that the entire Rendlesham Forest Incident was an elaborate prank. In 2016, Dr. David Clark, a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, received an anonymous tip from a man who claimed to have been a member of the SAS at the time. Dr. Clark’s informant asserted that the entire Rendlesham Forest Incident was a hoax perpetrated by the British SAS on the American personnel stationed at Bentwaters and Woodbridge bases. Dr. Clark spent three years looking into this claim and came to believe that it was credible. Apparently, the SAS used to regularly test US security by probing the perimeters of the twin Air Force bases in Rendlesham Forest. Dr. Clark suggested that in August 1980, SAS soldiers had parachuted into Woodbridge Air Force Base to test its defenses and, to their considerable embarrassment, had been caught, imprisoned for 18 hours, and subjected to extensive interrogation by US personnel, who didn’t believe they were SAS soldiers at all. Their interrogators kept referring to them as “aliens.” Dr. Clark claimed that the word “aliens” stuck in the minds of these SAS troopers and they decided to hatch a revenge plan, by rigging up lights and colored flares in the forest using black helium balloons and remote-controlled kites.

Dr. Clark’s hoax theory, like all the others, has met with criticism. Nick Pope, a Ministry of Defence employee from 1985 to 2006, conducted a cold-case review of the incident during his tenure and coauthored the landmark book, You Can’t Tell the People with UFO researcher Georgina Bruni. According to Pope, “I’m skeptical of this latest theory . . . [and] I can confirm that no explanation for the Rendlesham Forest Incident was ever found. We looked at all the theories—and the claim that this was a prank isn’t new—and none of them fits the facts.”¹⁵¹⁵

During his time at the Ministry of Defence, Pope was tasked with evaluating UFO sightings and determining whether any of them posed a threat to the defense of the United Kingdom. Each case was thoroughly investigated and Pope determined that between 90 and 95 percent of UFO sightings could be attributed to the misidentification of ordinary objects or phenomena. However, there remained a small handful that “defied conventional explanation and involved what appeared to be a structured craft of unknown origin, capable of maneuvers and speeds beyond the abilities of anything in our inventory—prototype craft included.”⁷⁷

Pope’s investigations appeared to point to some kind of official cover-up, or at least to official negligence. In the Ministry of Defence’s Rendlesham Forest case file, there was evidence that General Gabriel, Commander in Chief of the US Air Force in Europe, had visited the Woodbridge base following the incident and taken possession of Lt. Col. Halt’s tape recordings. Pope also found that the original inquiries by the USAF had been “fundamentally flawed by procedural errors, delay, and poor information sharing. The USAF had not cordoned off the landing site, taken soil samples, or used metal detectors to search the area.” Pope also stated that the USAF did not pass on a number of witness statements, including a sketch that Penniston had made of the UFO. Critically, the USAF had conducted no follow-up interviews with key witnesses, including Lt. Col. Halt.

Pope believed that these failings resulted from confusion about jurisdiction; each party thought that the other should have been investigating the incident. When the senior USAF officer in the UK, General Robert Bazley, was briefed on the incident by Wing Commander Williams, the officer in command of RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters at the time, he was told that the incident was “a Brit affair” because it had taken place off base. Pope said that both the Ministry of Defence and the USAF had been ordered to “play down” the UFO element and the extent of official involvement. Therefore, confusion over jurisdiction suited both parties, who could each claim that the other was investigating the incident.

The Rendlesham Forest Incident remains Britain’s most tantalizing alleged “encounter of the third kind.” Sadly, over time, the case has been engulfed by misinformation, disinformation, confabulation, and secrecy. Many new witnesses have come forward while many original witnesses have changed their accounts, only deepening the mystery of the case. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm of Ufologists has never wavered and has even intensified over time. The incident has inspired numerous books, each one of which puts forward another theory as to what happened in Rendlesham Forest that night. In fact, Forestry England has capitalized on the affair by creating a UFO trail that meanders through the dense woodland.

“I can tell you this, we are not alone,” said Halt in an interview with local newspaper the Ipswich Star, September 6, 2018. “I’m not telling you there’s somebody walking around here that’s an alien. There’s some type of presence here . . .”¹⁶¹⁶