Rendlesham Forest UFO Sighting, 1980
You might dispute whether any crimes happened over Christmas 1980 in Rendlesham Forest but the same forensic investigation skills are relevant. And we went there recently!
Rendlesham Forest is relatively close to the coast and the lighthouse at Orfordness, which flashes its beam across the forest every night. This is not why it is famous, but it might still be a relevant point. Rendlesham Forest is famous because of what happened at Christmas 1980. US Servicemen believe they saw alien aircraft and other activity in the forest that night, 25th December 1980. Could all this just have been the lighthouse?
Rendlesham is a pine forest managed today by the Forestry Commission. It wraps completely around an MoD base that used to be a USAF air base called RAF Woodbridge. Another USAF base called RAF Bentwaters is also close by. Appropriately enough it is today the site of a Cold War museum.
Woodbridge closed as an RAF base in 1993, as indeed many other sites were. It is still owned by the British Government, and today is formally owned by the Ministry of Defence and operated by the British Army. It was the end of the Cold War that brought about the demise of many US-operated bases in England. Today it is a training facility.
We were spending a long weekend in the area and Rendlesham Forest was obviously going to be our first port of call. I say obviously. You might not know that my first novel, From Beyond Belief, written at university under the pen name of Paul Charles, was an X Files spin-off or what we might now call fan fiction. The names were changed but the characters of Mulder and Scully are fairly easy to spot. It was the first time I had a strong enough story to write a whole novel and I was really proud of it. It is still available today on Amazon and other places. Many of their UFO-related escapades happened in the pine forests of NW America. Twin Peaks country. Just like Rendlesham below.
We chose to follow the UFO walking trail, marked with purple arrows. Photos of the trail route and information at various points is a short scroll to the bottom.
The first point of interest is the gate below, the East Gate. The US servicemen from the air base (just out of shot to the right of this photo) emerged at this point and looked left into the forest. They saw lights and other comings and goings which they deemed to be UFO activity. There is no doubt that they thought this was alien activity and not just some amateur shenanigans. It certainly was nothing to do with the air base. Were that the case, they would of course have known.
The US airmen saw an metallic craft floating twelve inches off the ground. This smaller scale model shows what they described. Those with good eyesight will see a bright green child’s tractor right on top of the UFO which shows this is quite a small model, perhaps ten feet or so across. Maybe three metres.
The purple trail in Rendlesham is strongly recommended. It takes around an hour if you don’t stop very often and is three miles long. You can download the Forestry England map here but it does not have any UFO information on it.
The leaflet we used can be collected free of charge in the main car park at Rendlesham and there is also a really cool coffee truck there called Tintos.
The purple trail takes around one hour and is three miles long.
I heard about this case during that period. I had laid down the possibility of ball lightning however, eyewitness Colonel Charles Halt said it was a clear night sky which would have ruled out an earlier thunderstorm. It seems most likely that the object which had landed in Rendlesham Forest during the night of December 25-26, 1980 was just one variety of THW that was being tested for Operation Honey Badger, and that the USAF security guards on duty at the twin bases who responded that night unwittingly became the human guinea pigs for such a test. Watch this video from 7 News Spotlight's Journalist Ross Coulthart: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JBwH6yHEDo