AS its 30th anniversary approaches, the world-famous Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident, widely regarded by UFO enthusiasts as among the top ten cases in the world, appears to lie in tatters following a series of damaging revelations and reversals.
Most of us, of course, thought the case was dead and buried in the late 1990s when James Easton, a dogged researcher now sadly retired from UFOlogy, obtained and published the statements made by the military personnel who were involved in the first night of sightings just after Christmas 1980. The sightings took place over at least two nights in Rendlesham Forest outside the USAF base at Woodbridge in Suffolk, and according to some versions involved contact with a landed craft of unknown origin.
The statements proved that, contrary to such sensational claims, the USAF security police who went into the forest on that first night did not come within touching distance of a landed craft, they were not mysteriously out of radio contact for an extended period, and the flashing light they were chasing was indeed the lighthouse at Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast, as a local forester and local police had originally suggested.
As a result of this new information Easton, originally a believer in the case, became one of its most outspoken critics. Even Jenny Randles, who had written the first book on the incident, Sky Crash, terming it “the world’s first officially observed, and officially confirmed, UFO landing and contact”, reversed her stance.
My own involvement with the case had begun a decade earlier, after it became the front-page story in the News of the World in October 1983, nearly three years after the events had taken place. I was able to find mundane explanations for all the major aspects, which I published in 1985. Easton’s independent research provided gratifying support. However, many dedicated UFO believers still refused to give up their faith in the case.
Further revelations
What has stirred the pot lately are further revelations by another researcher, Dr David Clarke, a senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University. Clarke was responsible for obtaining the release of the official government files on the case in 2001.
Following this release of documents he interviewed several military and civilian participants who were privy to what had happened behind the scenes but had not spoken out before. Perhaps most important of these was Simon Weeden, the civil servant at the Ministry of Defence who dealt with the memo reporting the sightings written by Lt Col Halt, the USAF deputy base commander. Halt had himself witnessed unusual lights on the second and best-documented night of events in Rendlesham Forest, and it was the release of his official memo in 1983 that propelled the case into the headlines.
Clarke’s interviews, like the government files, confirmed that the Ministry of Defence had never taken the incident seriously, had never bothered to investigate it in depth at the time, and that there was nothing to be covered up, despite what the conspiracy theorists had hopefully claimed. Some of the information garnered by Clarke made its way into print, but much of it remained unpublished until just recently.
In response to renewed calls from Rendlesham advocates that the British and US governments should release whatever information on the case they were withholding, Clarke finally put his full findings into circulation in early September on his blog.
Halt’s boss speaks – and not kindly...
As well as demonstrating that there was nothing more to release, at least on the UK side, the revelations contained another dramatic development that the believers had not anticipated: a long statement from Col Ted Conrad, Halt’s superior officer at the base. Conrad had remained silent until now, not wishing to criticize a fellow officer publicly. However, that was about to change.
Conrad revealed he and some other high-ranking staff on the base had gone outside to look for the hovering UFOs that Halt was reporting over the radio, but failed to see anything unusual at all. Halt has often claimed that Conrad did witness strange lights in the sky, but this claim – like many Halt has made in the years since he left the Air Force – is evidently untrue. Had Conrad really seen anything of note, one supposes he would have taken more action than did Halt, who simply turned round and went back home.
Conrad also contradicted two of the favourite claims made by the conspiracy theorists: no further report was submitted to the US or UK authorities beyond the Halt memo, and there was no interrogation of the witnesses by OSI. Some over-imaginative TV reconstructions have shown frightened witnesses being subjected to a harsh grilling by fearsome intelligence men, including injections with sodium pentothal. “I was in a position to know about the OSI,” Conrad assured Clarke. “The OSI commander kept me informed of any ongoing investigations they had.”
In his correspondence with Clarke, Conrad not only expressed regret at the way Halt had handled the UFO affair but also attacked him for suggesting that the US and the UK had been engaged in a cover-up of the facts. “Halt should be ashamed and embarrassed,” declared an obviously dismayed Conrad.
This was not the first time that Halt’s conduct over this matter had been criticized by his superiors. Wing Commander Gordon Williams, who was in overall charge of the base at the time, had earlier dissociated himself from the Halt memo. In an interview for a pro-UFO programme called I Know What I Saw, Williams admitted: “It [the memo] had some things in there that I don’t think we were prepared to defend.” In other words, he wasn't going to defend the indefensible.
And back in 1983, when Col Sam Morgan replaced Ted Conrad as base commander, he listened to Halt’s tape recording, discussed it with him and concluded, as he told writer Phil Klass, that it was “just a bunch of guys screwing around in the woods”. (I have always thought that was a fitting epitaph for the Rendlesham case.)
Halt’s iffy affidavit
Halt inflicted more damage on himself and the case in June this year when he issued a notarized affidavit summarizing his recall of events, ending with the declaration the objects he had seen “were extraterrestrial in origin”.
Unfortunately this affidavit, compiled from 30-year-old memory and clearly influenced by the numerous interviews he has given to the media in the meantime, contains many statements at odds with what we know actually happened, as I explain here.
How can we be so sure what went on that night? Because Halt made a tape recording during his foray into the woods which was released into the public domain shortly after I published my explanation of the case. Thanks to this remarkable tape, we can listen in to a major UFO sighting as it happens. I have analysed the contents of Halt’s tape in detail here and there is nothing on it that I find truly inexplicable.
However, what I do find inexplicable is why Halt did not go back and listen to the tape (or at least read my transcript of it – he has a copy) before committing himself to a notarized affidavit. Did he not think that investigators would compare the two? Or did he hope that a notarized statement made with the benefit of hindsight and flawed by failure of memory would take precedence over his descriptions made at the time? In practice, the errors in this affidavit mean that it is worthless as evidence and make Halt look an unreliable witness.
There is much to be written about the dramatis personae in this mystery story of a UFO chase in and around a forest on a dark winter’s night: the genuinely baffled, the delusional, the manipulators and the manipulated. But it is a story in which we see the workings of human intelligence, not extraterrestrial. It is a rare privilege to have a front-row seat in the development of a modern myth that will doubtless outlive us all, and I will be returning to it in future posts.
Read about my expedition into Rendlesham Forest with Evan Davis of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4: The truth is not out there.
Rare public appearance!
For those who missed my talk about the Rendlesham case at the Fortean Times Unconvention in October 2010 (or even for those who did make it) you can see a video here.
