"US DoD have confirmed the UFO phenomenon is real"

originally posted by: Bybyots
a reply to: FireMoon

Thanks very much. I have found Max's article Usual Suspects and I am digesting it now. It's good to have a way to begin to put Clarke in to perspective. I am trying to get as clear as I can on how he relates to Project Condign and Burns' article is very helpful.

Also, thanks again for the information on Rendlesham forest, I thought that might have been the case, but I wasn't expecting it to be that strange. I love the detail about the low population-density and how it resists being farmed despite the need for food production. In some ways it reminds me of the early days of our West Virginia.

I would be really interesting if you could list legends from West Virginia stretching right back to the First Nations and relate them to modern day activity in a thread dedicated to it specifically. There's a sizeable rump of us on this forum who are most interested in that side of the phenomenon as we think there's possibly, a key to understanding some of the nature of what goes on by collating and studying the "weird history" of places all round the world.

a reply to: Bybyots

I see Firemoon has pointed you in the right direction over Clarke and the 'folklore' of East Anglia. That whole Sheffield UFO Incident is one very peculiar case altogether. It's also quite recent (1997) and dismiised as "of no defence significance" even though numerous witnesses saw something crash in to moorland, RAF fighters were 'exercising' in the area, and two sonic booms were recorded over the area. Notably after the RAF had officially confirmed all their aircraft had returned to base. Now if something supersonic flew over Britain and it wasn't the RAF (or NATO aircraft) surely that's of defence significance?

Anyway Clarke and his sidekick Roberts have had the finger pointed their way in a number of investigations but I'll leave it there so as not to let the thread drift away from it's original topic.

originally posted by: Bybyots
When I was a little kid reading C.S. Lewis' books I would dream sometimes at night of an enchanted forest that let out to the ocean. I think the idea grabbed me so deeply because the forests that I grew up around let out in to tract homes in one direction and the mountains in the other. Forests that open to the sea mean adventure and High Fantasy to me., and East Anglia means witches, but that's because I'm not from Britain and can only read about it.

I hate to ruin a good fantasy but I must tell you first and foremost that Rendlesham is a plantation forest. Almost entirely pines I believe, it is a relatively modern forest as forests go, less than a 100 or so years old. If you look at it from Google maps you can see all the trees are in neatly lined segments, there is nothing 'natural' about the forest, totally man-made. However, like many of the national forests designed for sustainable harvest, it takes advantage of the fact that the pine is an encroachment species, that is it crosses the boundaries between ecosystems, specificly into marsh and wetlands, which is what Rendlesham was before the Forestry Commission moved in.

I can still give you witches though...kind of. In recent years there has been much debate about the way in which these places were seen by the Iron Age inhabitants of the area as a boundary between worlds both literally and metaphysically due to the nature of the offerings left in such places. This extends to the numerous bog bodies that have been recovered which indicate some form of ritual death, one such theory being that they were considered witches.

The area to the west of Rendlesham was settled in the 6th century by Anglo-Saxons, they left a whole cluster of burial mounds, including the incredibly famous Sutton Hoo which is a mere spitting distance from Rendlesham. Then though much of Rendlesham would have been, at some times of the year, a broad, deep almost inpenetrable bog.

The whole area that the bases occupy is on boggy moorland. That type of land does have a reputation for producing visual light phenomenon, but I am not sure that would provide a sufficient explanation...on it's own...for the lights taken as a single event, but I think could possibly be a contributing factor.

originally posted by: mirageman
It was a sort of "much ado about nothing" piece. Portillo peers through his spectacles at the Halt Memo looking intrigued. Later Dr. David Clarke explains that the three holes in the ground were viewed as "rabbit scratchings" by the local police and that the radiation readings were nothing unusual in a pine forest. He then rather glibly states something did happen but only 3 of the soldiers are saying it was supernatural whilst there were many more on the bases who believe no such thing. Strangely the lighthouse theory was hardly mentioned. It all then ends with a feature on how we might actually discover alien life.

"Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to decieve."
Sir Walter Scott

I am going to go out on a limb here BUT I know that you guys have been looking at this for an awful lot longer than I have so you could prevent me from chasing my tail, if that is what I am doing, and I would rather be shot down in flames than waste my time...so grabbing hold of the seat of my pants...

Is it possible that a modified Cobra Mist was still operational at Orford Ness and that on the nights in question, as well as on previous occasions, had been engaging in tests? If we factor into that equation that Burroughs had a hypersensitivity reaction to either the over-the-horizon radar system or whatever the OTHR system was being used to test, then I think that that explains just about everything, including what can then be seen as a cover up and deflection.

Not sure where you get the idea Rendlesham was bog land from.

This is from an old man writing into the Ipswich Journal in 1877, ‘When I was quite a child, in 1814, we used to play at Rendlesham where there was a pond at one end with trees round it, the grass in early spring full of flowers … If we went too near our nursemaid would call out to us not to go so near ‘lest the mermaid should come and crome us in.’ A crome is a pond raking tool with sharp tines that curl over a bit like a person’s hand. There are still a few pools out of Rendlesham heading towards Campsea Ash, so beware if you are taking your children there, our mermaids are beautiful with long green hair and will entice your children if they can…

The legend of the mermaid in the pool at Rendlesham goes back into medieval times and whilst the topography is bound to change somewhat in the intervening years, the pond was consistent for several hundred. Trees don't grow well in bogs and certainly not those which are tidal.

originally posted by: FireMoon
Not sure where you get the idea Rendlesham was bog land from.

The legend of the mermaid in the pool at Rendlesham goes back into medieval times and whilst the topography is bound to change somewhat in the intervening years, the pond was consistent for several hundred. Trees don't grow well in bogs and certainly not those which are tidal.

The land that the bases and forest are on was bog land, and as I explained, pine is a wet-land invasive species. There are of course very old settled areas on the high areas, hence why I mentioned the iron age settlers, as well as the much later Anglo-Saxons. The riparian lifestyle very much relied on wetland species of plants which bore roots and tubers that formed the basis of their summer diet.

originally posted by: Anaana

originally posted by: mirageman
It was a sort of "much ado about nothing" piece. Portillo peers through his spectacles at the Halt Memo looking intrigued. Later Dr. David Clarke explains that the three holes in the ground were viewed as "rabbit scratchings" by the local police and that the radiation readings were nothing unusual in a pine forest. He then rather glibly states something did happen but only 3 of the soldiers are saying it was supernatural whilst there were many more on the bases who believe no such thing. Strangely the lighthouse theory was hardly mentioned. It all then ends with a feature on how we might actually discover alien life.

"Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to decieve."
Sir Walter Scott

I am going to go out on a limb here BUT I know that you guys have been looking at this for an awful lot longer than I have so you could prevent me from chasing my tail, if that is what I am doing, and I would rather be shot down in flames than waste my time...so grabbing hold of the seat of my pants...

Is it possible that a modified Cobra Mist was still operational at Orford Ness and that on the nights in question, as well as on previous occasions, had been engaging in tests? If we factor into that equation that Burroughs had a hypersensitivity reaction to either the over-the-horizon radar system or whatever the OTHR system was being used to test, then I think that that explains just about everything, including what can then be seen as a cover up and deflection.

What makes you suspect a OTH radar? I'd figure it'd be LOS from an existing installation...

originally posted by: 1ofthe9
What makes you suspect a OTH radar? I'd figure it'd be LOS from an existing installation...

Because it was an OTH radar system that was installed at Orford Ness, Cobra Mist. The project was shut down in 1973 and the fan array antenna dismantled, but I can find no mention as to whether to 80 acres of aliminium ground net were removed. I reckon it remained in 'warm storage' until they could develop a computer capable of sifting the data...and that sometime in 1980 the dust covers were taken off and they began testing the system again.

One other thing that I wanted to bring to the table before I go, there was a lot of press interest in Cobra Mist, leading to even more speculation, eventually the US insisted that they vet all press releases and soon after allowed the Department of Trade to issue a general response to public concerns about the safety of what was going on on Orford Ness. It stated that no threat to safety was known, and if there was one it was contained to the station, it did however give a list of the possible effects of exposure to the OTHR. They are uninteresting enough except for one that is super interesting.

"The spontaneous operation of certain kinds of electrically initiated devices which are normally carried only by commercial and military vessels and aircraft." (quoted in Most Secret: The Hidden History of Orford Ness by Paddy Heazell)



Right?

originally posted by: Anaana

originally posted by: FireMoon
Not sure where you get the idea Rendlesham was bog land from.

The legend of the mermaid in the pool at Rendlesham goes back into medieval times and whilst the topography is bound to change somewhat in the intervening years, the pond was consistent for several hundred. Trees don't grow well in bogs and certainly not those which are tidal.

The land that the bases and forest are on was bog land, and as I explained, pine is a wet-land invasive species. There are of course very old settled areas on the high areas, hence why I mentioned the iron age settlers, as well as the much later Anglo-Saxons. The riparian lifestyle very much relied on wetland species of plants which bore roots and tubers that formed the basis of their summer diet.

Sorry, that's historically inaccurate in so many ways I don;t really know where to begin. Firstly, the Romans invaded Britain for four reasons, Gold, Silver, Prestige and most importantly, at the time of their invasion Britain was the only country in Northern Europe with a net export of grain. That is, the country was so stable as to be able to regularly feed its' indigenous population and still export food abroad. The chief grain areas of Britain were then and still are today areas like Suffolk. In fact outside of the downs and areas around Wiltshire the rest of Britain was almost nothing bar one huge forest. It was the Romans who began the deforestation of the mountains in Wales. Before they arrived, what is now mostly moorland or bare rock was solid deciduous forest as was something like 90% of the rest of the country. It's often quoted that, the fleet that fought at Trafalgar was built from the very last natural oak forests left in England. Suffolk was in Celtic times predominantly farmland and wealthy farm land at that. The pressure was always to bring any land under the plough not just feed to the locals rather, the rest of Norfolk and for export.

By medieval times that pressure had grown even greater for three main reasons. A series of what is often referred to mini ice ages where the temperature dropped for several years and brought about often near famine, the increase in population and the loss of Celtic farming techniques the grain yields of which, were never equalled until the modern day and the use of vast numbers of chemicals. At this point in time, the forest still covered pretty much, the whole of the Midlands down to the South Coast and into Yorkshire, Suffolk was one of the very few areas that could be considered "under the plough". Yet for some reason, a huge area was left fallow and as woodland, right smack in the centre of the grain growing area of the country. Just as the Normans shunned Meon Hill and yet, chose to go to the immense hassle of raising a Motte and Bailey at Brinklow for no logical reason. Just as the Romans, the Normans, the Angles, chose to let Barbury castle fall into nothing more than sheep grazing land when it commanded the route across the Ridgeway. For some reason people post the early Iron Age, chose to shun perfectly good sites for both cultivation and habitation in areas where historically, there has always been pressure on land to be used in the most efficient manner. The one thing all these areas share in common? People have strange experiences in them, way above and beyond what one might call the background count of local legends one finds elsewhere in the country and compared to the rest of the area they are in, they have a low population density.

Even during World War 2, when virtually every last sod of earth in Britain was turned over to agriculture ,no-one chopped down the frankly, useless fir forest around Rendlesham, just as Barbury Caslte was left to the sheep. Yet both areas attracted the military to them . it's a pattern repeated time and time again not only in Britain rather, over the pond in the USA as well. People don't like living there, so the military moves in and takes over, coincidence? Not at all, quite practical really only, then you dig into the modern legends and what do we find? Oh yes...... Hangars ground crew won't work in after dark unless they are ordered to. Strange statistical anomalies, with pilot suicides in particular, one killed them self just before the Rendlesham incident.

a reply to: FireMoon

I stand corrected, I have just been looking at the topography a little more closely. It is heathland, not bog. My mistake, sorry for the confusion of my error. That explains much, including the reason why it hasn't been used for anything other than grazing in the past. Heath, by nature and definition, is infertile.

As far as your other points, are you public school educated by any chance? Sorry, just reading your perspective of the Roman occupation of Britain, the grain export, I thought that this discussion could easily descend into a debate into the Punic Wars, that old Harrow-vian curriculum standard.

I can assure you that I am fully appraised of the landscape of Britain pre-, during and post-occupation. As I sit here, 2000 years ago I would have been shrouded on three sides by dense forest, to the north stretching, unbroken, as far as Northumbria, but tapering up into Scotland before changing in species distribution from mixed deciduous to increadingly assiduous. Behind me, the forest stretched all the way down to lands end, filling every nook and cranny. Fast forward two hundred years, and I sit on a the terrace of a grand Roman villa overlooking a busy port teeming with thousands of ships built with the trees of the forests that transport Jet from Whitby, and Pearls from Scotland back to the Empire. The wheat in the fields that stretch out across the alluvial plain in all directions, have pushed the forest almost completely from sight. Another 1000 or so years and there are only scattered woods, small and isolated, everything else is farmland, and timber is increasingly imported, England has been transformed into a green and pleasant land.

Given the fertility of the fields here, they have always been hotly contested and fiercely defended. The same can be said of areas of Suffolk, but some land just wasn't/isn't productive, like heathland. I am not disputing that superstitions exist around these kinds of areas or this specific one, just that that is not necessarily the reason it is unused. Not all land is suitable, heathland is highly acidic, nothing you can really do about that, but it would have been covered with a mixed woodland at some point before being depleted successively and irretrievably by centuries of deforestation. Left to it's own devices it would also, most likely return to mixed woodland, heathland has to be maintained to be such. By planting pine the land becomes productive. 10 to 30 years and you have mature harvestable wood, hence the preference for retaining heathland as a standby for wood production, should the # hit the fan as it were.

This thread just got hardcore.

originally posted by: Anaana
One other thing that I wanted to bring to the table before I go, there was a lot of press interest in Cobra Mist,.........

It's a good couple of years since I looked at Cobra Mist as a possible link to the Rendlesham incident. According to the US the facility was shutdown in 1973 and the OTH radar disassembled. There were ongoing problems due to interference on the signal which some thought might be coming from a Russian trawler in the North Sea. Although I don't think it was ever fully discovered what the cause was.

There is a released FOIA document from the DoD on Cobra Mist which covers this. Although it is subject to a number redactions. I would tend to rule out anything involving Cobra Mist because it had been out of operation for 7 years by the time of the Bentwaters incident. But I may well have missed or misunderstood something

By the way, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviets were studying UFOs as well. They had come to the conclusion that mass movements of military equipment and areas containing weapons were places were UFOs were often reported. They even tried to summon "UFOs".

..
In the early 1980s, an experiment to "summon" a UFO was staged at a military range in Astrakhan Region. By then, experts had realized that UFOs were frequently sighted in areas of "heightened tension" – for instance, during weapons tests, or when there was a lot of military hardware gathered in one area......


(Source.

Now at the time of the Rendlesham incident there were heightened tensions in Poland. The Soviets were massing on the Polish border. Bentwaters was on alert and the A10 squadrons were being moved from England to the West German front line. Back up aircraft would have been brought in from the USA to replace them. Did all this military activity attract UFOs?

It's all a conjecture really because trying to piece it all together is like a huge jigsaw puzzle. Only you've got no picture from the box to go by, some of the pieces are blurry and indistinct, and others are from a totally different puzzle altogether and simply don't fit.

a reply to: FireMoon

Hi there Firemoon,

Interesting stuff there. Because I would have thought that Suffolk's strategic position in Britain would have been the major reason military have continually been stationed there. Perhaps the threat of invasion from ze Europeans since Roman times, coastal erosion, infertile land and then German bombs have all deterred population growth there as well if I'm looking at it from a matter of fact perspective?

But let's keep an open mind to all possibilities.

Because it is also interesting to note that some of the military personnel based at Woodbridge/Bentwaters noted a sense of apprehension and foreboding atmosphere whilst stationed there (and not all of these were witnesses to Rendlesham or even stationed there at the time it happened). So perhaps there is something that interacts with human minds that we cannot yet understand?

That was never the question. They know they are real you do not intercept "unreal" objects by fighter aircraft, nor did Blue Book investigate unreal phenomena that is detected on radar systems.

The question has always been, "what do we tell the public?".

originally posted by: SENSEYE
That was never the question. They know they are real you do not intercept "unreal" objects by fighter aircraft, nor did Blue Book investigate unreal phenomena that is detected on radar systems.

The question has always been, "what do we tell the public?".

Swamp gas?
Blirds?
Chinese lanterns?
Venus?

originally posted by: mirageman
It's a good couple of years since I looked at Cobra Mist as a possible link to the Rendlesham incident. According to the US the facility was shutdown in 1973 and the OTH radar disassembled. There were ongoing problems due to interference on the signal which some thought might be coming from a Russian trawler in the North Sea. Although I don't think it was ever fully discovered what the cause was.

The joint US/UK Scientific Assessment Committee (SAC) found the transmitter to be faultless, in fact it appears to have been too good, collecting both terrestrial and astronomical noise. SAC made several recommendations which they believed would overcome the problem, and yet, the decision was taken the following month to abandon the multi-million dollar project. The closure of the Orford Ness station was announced on the 29th and by midnight on the 30th all staff had been removed and the doors bolted. Over. Just like that.

While I am sure that I would be horrified to learn just how many multi-million pound projects end in failure, or have funding withdrawn due to regime changes, but I don't think that this was the case here. Although the "noise of undetermined origin" was an issue, it was only an issue because of the inability of the complex data received to be adequately processed. The computers, then available, weren't up to the job, by 1980 they were, but the radar technology itself had evolved too, so, Orford Ness, in the context of the System 441A OTHR was defunct, but was Orford Ness in the context of the successor, evolved, technology defunct.

Orford Ness had been in use as a test aerial bombing range since the first world war, and they spent a hell of a lot of time digging up "unexploded ordnance" in the 1980s, and AWRE was based on the penninsula too. I find it no stretch of the imagination to think that Orford Ness plays a much bigger role in all this than seems to have been adequately explored.

And now, we have the NIEMR evidence provided by the DoD/VA ruling on Burrough's injuries, as well as Dr Green's confirmation of the details of that NIEMR and coincidently only 7 years ago a system based on such 'broadband' NIEMR was in development a stone's throw away, and in line of sight, between the East Gate and the light house.

One more thing that struck me. In the witness statements from the Rendlesham incident, the lighthouse is taken to be what is referred to as the 'beacon'. I thought this an odd term to begin with. A lighthouse is a lighthouse not a beacon isn't it? But, I thought perhaps that was an Americanism, cast it aside, however when I was reading about the Orford Ness site and it mentions a 'Black Beacon'...

The original Orfordness Beacon was constructed in a small building that looked similar to the lower portion of a Dutch windmill. Painted black, it remains a prominent landmark today. The system went online in July 1929.[5]

The Orfordness Beacon did not broadcast continuously, but on a five minute on-off pattern. This allowed for the construction of a second Beacon at RAE Farnborough, south-west of London. The Farnborough station broadcast on the same frequency as Orford, using the letters G and W for north and east. Orfordness broadcast on the first five minutes of every ten minute period, and Farnborough on the second five minutes. Operation started in early 1930, but was first used only experimentally, for short periods on weekdays.[4]

en.wikipedia.org...

Not sure it adds much, but I found it interesting

originally posted by: mirageman

By the way, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviets were studying UFOs as well. They had come to the conclusion that mass movements of military equipment and areas containing weapons were places were UFOs were often reported. They even tried to summon "UFOs".

Robert Hastings extensively studied UFO sightings at military nuclear installations, and UFO’s do seem to have an interest in them.

Some people suggest the rise of sightings in the 40’s was partly due to the invention of the A-bomb.

I was intrigued by this, so a while ago I decided to test this ‘UFO-nukes-relation hypothesis’ by investigating the ‘nuclear situation’ during one of the biggest UFO flaps in American history: The famous flap of 1952 where the number of UFO sightings was almost 10x higher than average.

In his book, Ruppelt (head of project Blue Book at that time) spent a whole chapter on this flap:

In early June 1952 the Air Force was unknowingly in the initial stages of a flap - a flying saucer flap - the flying saucer flap of 1952.
All records for the number of UFO reports were not just broken, they were disintegrated.

Ruppelt, chapter 11

So if the ‘UFO-nukes-relation hypothesis’ was true, something special must have been going on in 1952.

To my big surprise, this was the case. The US was in the middle of the Korean war and the use of A-bombs was very seriously considered. They were even practising bombing runs:

Truman stated during a 30 November 1950 press conference that using nuclear weapons had "always been under active consideration", with control under the local military commander.

In 1951, the U.S. escalated closest to atomic warfare in Korea. In October 1951, the United States effected Operation Hudson Harbor to establish nuclear weapons capability. USAF B-29 bombers practised individual bombing runs from Okinawa to North Korea

Wikipedia on the Korean War

But on top of that, something even more disturbing was going on: The US was finalizing the production of the first H-bomb in 1951-1952; the first H-bomb was tested in November 1952. (H-bombs are a lot more powerful than A-bombs).

The "George" shot of Operation Greenhouse of 9 May 1951 tested the basic concept of an H-bomb for the first time on a very small scale. It raised expectations to a near certainty that the concept would work.

On November 1, 1952, the first H-bomb was tested at full scale with a yield of 10.4 megatons.

Wikipedia on the H-bomb

So a war was going on since 1950, the use of nuclear bombs in this war was seriously considered and during 1952 the development of the first H-bomb is being finalized.
In that same year, a UFO flap that broke all records occurs, even with UFO’s flying over Washington.

Maybe I’m connecting dots that aren’t actually connected, but it really surprised me that I could find the period of a major nuclear threat just by looking at UFO statistics.

a reply to: Anaana

Jenny Randles claimed that Cobra Mist was followed by another project called "Cold Witness" which did not end until 1983. Although any real evidence for it seems elusive.

The Foreign Office took over the site in 1975 and the BBC World Service began broadcasting from there a few years later.


Former Cobra Mist site

Larger pic of the whole site

I'm not sure it's a piece of the puzzle myself.