Rendlesham Forest…, A Christmas Story from 1980 - Can We ‘Let it Be’?

reply to post by spacevisitor

They say at some point that the lights are moving, one to the left and the other one to the right and I cannot imagine myself that a lighthouse could do that?

the fact is that they could see the lighthouse from where they were. There is no mention of it because they (halt) thought it was in a different area. That has been established. It is not a belief. The flash matches the tape. The only possibility for this to be a UFO is for the ufo to have been blocking the view of the lighthouse and flashing at the same rate. There are a number of ways to misperceive or interpret any given light source in the middle of the night in the pitch black woods. If you were to come up with the ideal recipe for confusion, disorientation and misperception, this would be it.

reply to post by ZetaRediculian

Remember also that there was a second light off to the right, which was the Shipwash lightship. The direct beam of that was concealed by intervening land, but they could well have seen the sweep of its beam in the sky. When Halt said he could see the lighthouse off to the right, I think it is the Shipwash lightship that he was referring to.

The flashing light that attracted most of their attention, though, and which Halt looked at through the starscope, was the one right in front of them, and there is no real doubt that this was the lighthouse. Burroughs and Cabansag actually identified it as such on the first night.

As a matter of interest, it was Chuck de Caro's CNN documentary that first played the Halt tape over footage of the lighthouse flashing and showed that they matched. It convinced me!

ZetaRediculian
reply to post by spacevisitor

 

There are a number of ways to misperceive or interpret any given light source in the middle of the night in the pitch black woods.

It’s even more difficult to perceive or interpret it when you aren’t even there yourself.
And you must also take into account that Halt was not alone when he saw it all.

Here is what Vince Thurkettle had to say about being questioned by two English gentlemen dressed in suits in the days after the events (he isn't clear exactly when, only that it preceded the Halt memo. I am assuming this doesn't mean before October 1983 when it became public!)

There were many whispers in the forest straight after the incident mostly about a burnt area. But one of the things that’s quite important when you’ve got very few facts is that there was no crash site. …I don’t believe anything crashed in the forest......

At the time it was really exciting. Straight after the event I was out chopping wood one morning , a car pulled up two young men get out, English wearing suits, very polite asking me if I’d been out as there’d been a report of red lights in the forest.

Had I seen anything? No .And then they went and I thought they were reporters, something will come out …..in the East Anglia Daily Times and nothing did and I thought I wonder who they were?

I later found out they’d been visiting everybody. Now the critical things about this, is this is weeks before the Colonel Halt memo. So quietly somebody was looking into this immediately afterwards and they were British, long before the Halt memo, long before the rumours got going.

It can be heard right at the end of the Rendlesham Revealed BBC Radio Show at approx 1:46:30

If you are not able to listen to the show then it is also necessary to place it in context. The presenters were heavily pushing the "3 marks in the ground" being caused by the 67th ARRS from Woodbridge dropping a mock Apollo capsule into the woods on Christmas night and then having to recover it the night Colonel Halt was out in the forest. It's basically a crap theory because the evidence does not add up.

Theory Discussed here

Vince Thurkettle remains convinced nothing came down in the forest. Who he was questioned by remains a mystery. It could have been local journalists (would they operate in pairs though?), plain clothes detectives or members of a UK agency of some sort?

reply to post by spacevisitor

It’s even more difficult to perceive or interpret it when you aren’t even there yourself. And you must also take into account that Halt was not alone when he saw it all.

I actually agree with this statement 100%. There is no way to perceive or know exactly what they saw. It may be exactly the way they remember it and describe it today but there is no way to rely on 30 year old recollections. People do misperceive. That is a fact. Multiple people can also misperceive and misinterpret the same things in the same way. Peoples perceptions are also influenced by the way others are responding to the same thing. If Halt, the person in charge, was showing signs of excitement and declaring what he thought he saw, his subordinates would surely be influenced by this and follow his lead. I don't think anyone in psychology or related fields would disagree.

People can and do have false memories. That is a fact. People can influence each others memories also. It is entirely possible that none of the witnesses are lying. Its entirely possible that their story is true to the best of their knowledge and that something really did occur. It is also entirely possible that none of it occurred as they remembered it. At least 2 of the witnesses underwent hypnosis to recall the events and it is pretty much common knowledge that elaborate false memories can be formed while under hypnosis. It is also possible that they are embellishing the story and flat out lying in some cases.

Oliver Sacks puts this into perspective here:

It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else

www.nybooks.com...

This is why it is a good idea to write things down and take pictures. In this case, we have a recording.

The recording demonstrates that there was a bright flashing light that flashed to the same rate as the lighthouse from a location where the lighthouse was also visible. Regardless of any other details of other perceived lights dancing around, being red and firing light beams around, you STILL have recorded evidence of a bright flashing light exactly at the right location flashing at the correct frequency. It doesn't even matter if alien spaceships were responsible for every single light, you still have zero evidence for alien spaceships or anything else out of the ordinary but you DO have solid evidence for the lighthouse. Regardless of what Halt says today, you still have this recording. So the question remains, how do you tell an alien spaceship from a lighthouse?

reply to post by spacevisitor


This case is so complicated that even some of the witnesses are not sure what happened.

What I would say is that the lighthouse was visible and did play a part in this case. John Burroughs and Ed Cabansag's statements actually confirm this. Although they both have denied it was the original source of the lights they saw in the forest.

On the evening of the 26th Lt. Bonnie Tamplin witnessed her vehicle stall and a small blue light seemingly travelled through it. She was relieved from duty in a state of trauma according to John Burroughs.

In fact the blue lights and red lights are often ignored or always explained as people mistaking twinkling stars. Is there any astronomers' video of red and blue stars twinkling, that drip like molten metal etc. that could back this up? Perhaps there is and it would be interesting to see as it may well get very close to sealing this case off.

Colonel Halt may well have mistaken the lighthouse/lightship once he got to the farmers field. However we are told that a group of USAF Personnel were out in the forest before him. What triggered their intervention? Were they simply curious or messing about off base and then got so spooked that they reported it to Halt? There was no fireball, meteor or satellite coming down on that night so what was going on to kick start things?



Then we have the more outlandish tales by Larry Warren and Adrian Bustinza of a strange craft landing (we'll leave Jim Penniston out of this for now )which remain unexplained at present other than taking the easy option that they are liars.. I am unsure what Bustinza would have ever got out of going on the record when he has seldom given interviews. But he was there on the night Halt was out there and there is a massive gap in their stories.

As for Larry Warren, well his story could be a work of fiction but no one has ever proven it beyond doubt.

All I can say about all this is that our memories can be fallible and can be manipulated. So you may be convinced of what is true but that is not necessarily a fact!

But then again there many questions about which part of Rendlesham Forest was the actual landing site? How it can't be here or there. Well how do we know that if there was a strange craft it didn't land 20 times in the forest?

Or the arguments about radiation. They may be irrelevant, as a craft may not leave any trace of radiation at all.

This may confuse the case even more but some 'factoids" have almost became written in stone when in fact they may well be meaningless in the case.


Time for me to for now

At the risk of being monotous, I'll return to my theme here. It IS perfectly reasonable to consider the lighthouse, I agree. But the rest of the descriptions are pretty hard to get around.

Unless, that is, there was some EM factor--deliberate or geomagnetic--which put our players in some altered state. Then things--as we know empirically--can get very wiggy.

Once again--and with the lightalls in mind--this theory seems to resolve both sides of the issue in a more cohesive way.

reply to post by mirageman

In fact the blue lights and red lights are often ignored or always explained as people mistaking twinkling stars. Is there any astronomers' video of red and blue stars twinkling, that drip like molten metal etc. that could back this up? Perhaps there is and it would be interesting to see as it may well get very close to sealing this case off.

It gets confusing with who saw what and when they said it. I would treat "remembering" new facts 30 years later much different then stuff on the recording. On the recording, Halt is the only one to describe the first light as red and then later having a "yellow tinge ". Others say it is flat out Yellow. "molten metal" was remembered by Halt much later. With cases like this described as multiple witnesses seeing the same thing, it tends to not be the case. In this case, a description of "multiple witnesses seeing a red light moving around" is not at all accurate.

Im not a star expert but one key factor is that you can "see" things that cant be captured on film since they are perceptions. I have seen all kinds of things "melt" and "drip" but any picture of those things would look like ordinary things. Can multiple people "see" the same thing? I believe they can when looking at the same stimuli.

reply to post by Guest101

I think he did both. There were some reasons for a 'heightened sense', but when he arrived and found a lot of personnel running around he really wanted nothing more than to ‘put this to rest’. You can hear his agitation at the start of the tape, when they are investigating the indentations (“What are the impressions? Is that all the bigger they are?”), but he gets more interested as they find more traces.

Halt, being the commander of the group, should have been searching for rational explanations. You can tell by the tape that he was wrapped up in the moment and excitement at the time as the other personnel were. For example, his comments about the trees:

HALT: There’s a round abrasion on the tree about three and a half, four inches in diameter...it looks like it might be old, but, er...strange, there’s a crystalline...pine sap that has come out that fast. You say there was other trees here that are damaged in a similar fashion?

ENGLUND: Yes, all facing in toward the centre of the landing site...

The abrasions were axe cuts by foresters marking the trees to be cut down. The photo below shows these "strange" abrasions on various trees:

If Halt wasn't caught up in this excitement, he would have looked around on other trees for other abrasions and come to a more reasonable conclusion. But he did not.

=================================================================================

This is the comment about the "UFO" indentations by Halt on his tape:

HALT: ...side facing the...interesting. The indentations look like something twisted as it dropped... you know, as it sat down on them. Looks like someone took something and sat it down and twisted it from side to side. Very strange.

The indentations on the ground were said to be animal scrapings by both the police investigating the site and Vince Thurkettle. That would explain this "twisting from side to side" and mussed look of the indentations and pine needles. Being a forester in the area, Vince Thurkettle would have been far more familiar of any markings in the forest than an excitable (at the time) group of military men.

Examples of animal scrapings in the forest, compared to "landing site" markings:

Letter from the police investigation mentioning the marks, highlighted in yellow:

=================================================================================

-Round abrasions or burn marks made by the UFO = Markings made by foresters for felling of trees.

-Landing pad indentations made by UFO = Small animal nesting or scraped ground.

-Triangular area landing pad = Random arrangement of animal scrapings fit to be triangular in shape.

All of the above are identified as something strange, when in fact they are rationally explained. Besides the lighthouse argument, I think it shows Halt's mindset at the time. He was convinced even before seeing the light that something "strange"(his word) was going on.

Thanks to Ian Ridpath for use of some of his photos.

reply to post by The GUT

Unless, that is, there was some EM factor--deliberate or geomagnetic--which put our players in some altered state. Then things--as we know empirically--can get very wiggy.

EM, drugs, adrenaline and lack of sleep can all cause altered states. amphetamines were/are regularly used by the U.S. military so soldiers and pilots could be more vigilant. Of course the down side of this is misperception which can cause freindly fire incidents in its most extreme. Even among the "highly trained".

Though its possible that there was some form of "EM factor", In this case, I am only hearing about some lights moving around. Someone on some stims could easily chase a lighthouse around in my opinion.

ZetaRediculian
Though its possible that there was some form of "EM factor", In this case, I am only hearing about some lights moving around. Someone on some stims could easily chase a lighthouse around in my opinion.

Yeah. True. I had a comparative experience once. Dang...did I say that? But, yeah.

ZetaRediculian
reply to post by mirageman

 

In fact the blue lights and red lights are often ignored ....

...... On the recording, Halt is the only one to describe the first light as red and then later having a "yellow tinge ". Others say it is flat out Yellow.

I was referring more to the original witness statements from the first night not Halt's tape.

The red and blue lights were witnessed on the first night by ALL of the men involved and their statements all corroborate that fact.

“On the night of 25-26 Dec at around 3:00, while on patrol down at East Gate, myself and my partner saw lights coming from the woods due east of the gate. The lights were red and blue, the red one above the blue one, and they were flashing on and off. Because I've never seen anything like that coming from the woods before we decided to drive down and see what it was. We went down east-gate road and took a right at the stop sign and drove about 10-20 yards to where there is a road that goes into the forest. I could see a white light shining into the trees and I could still see the red and blue one.”


John Burroughs original witness statement

“A large yellow glowing light was emitting above the trees. In the centre of the lighted area directly in the centre ground level, there was red light blinking on and off 5 to 10 second intervals. And a blue light that was being for the most part steady. After receiving permission from CSC, we proceeded off base pass east gate, down an old logging road.”


Jim Penniston original witness statement

“While we walked, each one of us would see the lights. Blue, red, white, and yellow. The beacon light turned out to be the yellow light. We would see them periodically, but not In a specific pattern.”

Ed Cabansag original witness statement

“I could clearly see the lights from the gate, just outside the back gate [east gate]. It was next to the road. They were intermittent lights, very bright, 15-20 feet above the ground. They were pulsating and from what I recall there were 3 lights, red green and blue.”

Geraldo Valdes-Sanchez interview with James Easton - ‘Pulsar Newsletter no.4” 1999

Now just like the lighthouse, there is a re-occurring theme here of blue and red lights. As far as I know the lighthouse did not generate a blue or red light. So what were those coloured lights?

All witnesses on record - Jim Penniston, John Burroughs, Ed Cabansag, Charles Halt, Monroe Nevels, Adrian Bustinza, Robert Ball and Larry Warren not one of them believes that all they saw was a lighthouse. Bruce Englund’s views are unknown but it seems he was the one who came calling for the cavalry to Charles Halt at the awards dinner.

All the focus is placed on the first night with Burroughs, Penniston and Cabansag or Halt’s later expeditions into the forest and the arguments rage about how important a flashing lighthouse is to this case.



But there was an important period in between where someone gave the orders to transport several lightalls out into the forest and some two dozen personnel were involved off base in UK territory. If the men were just searching for lights they could have used flashlights.

Surely they would not take mobile floodlights off base into a dense wooded area to look out for odd flashing lights unless someone in charge knew they would need them for something else. Something that needed a large area lit up?

What happened between the 26th and 27th of December needs more research as people are distracted by the revolving arguments about a lighthouse.

The truth may not lie with that lighthouse or an ET spacecraft.

Is there something happening behind the scenes to refresh this in the medias mind?

Over the past few weeks, I've seen a few documenteries about this on TV. I've seen like 4-5 within a short time span, usually this doesn't happen about one topic, unless it's a celebrity death or something.

Ectoplasm8
I think it shows Halt's mindset at the time. He was convinced even before seeing the light that something "strange"(his word) was going on.

Well, something strange WAS going on.

Halt was called in at 01:00 because some of his armed men had been running out of the woods, scared by a strange arrangement of lights in a yellow ground fog with enough static in the air to make the hair below their hats stand up.

So they were not simply investigating a random patch of forest floor, but a location where someone (probably Battram) spotted a strange object. They even were very cautious when they approached this site, constantly monitoring radiation levels.

Halt himself is NOT impressed by the indentations (‘is that all the bigger they are?’). He also does NOT make a big deal about the abrasions on the tree (‘it looks like it may be old’). He just thinks it is interesting that the radiation is highest on the tree sides that face the landing site and notices that the tree seems to have reacted abnormally fast to the damage done. He also thinks it is strange that the indentations look ‘twisted’. These are the only opinions he gives, the rest is just registering data.

Still, the combination of traces plus the fact that an object was seen earlier on this spot is very interesting:
- A small blasted area in the center where the radiation peaks.
- Freshly broken tree branches directly overhead.
- Three indentations in the ground.
- Heat reflections from the blasted area and the indentations.
- A heat reflection from three trees in the area immediately adjacent to the site within ten feet of the suspected landing site, about three or four feet off the ground.
- Abrasions and elevated radiation levels on the trees facing the blasted area.

The Suffolk Police was taken to the site of night one, which was two miles east of east gate (as noted in the police log, this position is way beyond the farmer’s field which is just one mile east of east gate). They were never taken to the Battram site that Halt was investigating on night three.

Vince Thurkettle studied a site marked with sticks and littered with cans SIX WEEKS after the incident, and he wasn’t even sure it was the correct site.

reply to post by Guest101

There seem to be quite a few myths or misunderstandings in this posting. Let me go through the points in the order you raise them.

1. A small blasted area in the center where the radiation peaks.
The geiger counter did jump, once, in the centre (not in the indentations). The first time they scanned over the area there was no such jump. The spike (not a steady level) was hence random and most likely due to natural sources or even a movement of the meter and is not significant.
For more on the radiation readings see: Were the radiation readings significant?
www.ianridpath.com...

2. Freshly broken tree branches directly overhead.
There are freshly broken tree branches everywhere in the forest. The trees swirl around, the branches break off. It’s normal.

3. Three indentations in the ground.
Which look just like rabbit diggings, and not even in a regular triangle. There are loads of them everywhere on the forest floor, too.

4. Heat reflections from the blasted area and the indentations.
5. A heat reflection from three trees in the area immediately adjacent to the site within ten feet of the suspected landing site, about three or four feet off the ground.
6. Abrasions and elevated radiation levels on the trees facing the blasted area.
Not heat. The starscope was an image intensifier, not an infrared device, so it was simply amplifying small differences in brightness.
The abrasions, as we know, were axe cuts made by the foresters.
The readings on the trees were just the same as everywhere else in the area, i.e. 3-4 clicks.

7.The Suffolk Police was [sic] taken to the site of night one, which was two miles east of east gate (as noted in the police log). They were never taken to the Battram site that Halt was investigating on night three.
Long answer needed here. The police report for Night One says the location was simply “beyond East Gate to RAF Woodbridge”.
The result was: “Only lights visible in this area was from Orford Light House. Search made of area — negative.”
The following morning they were called again. This time they were told (by Law Enforcement at Bentwaters) that the USAF had found “a place where a craft of some sort seems to have landed approx 2 miles east of the East Gate.”
The 2 miles estimate is clearly an exaggeration — in fact it's more like 2 km to the edge of the forest. We have the photo of a policeman at the site with Sgt Gulyas
www.ianridpath.com...
The site is among the trees, but evidently close to the forest edge since daylight can be seen between the trees. The police reported: “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.”
Note that the forest floor in this area is overlain with a thick drop of pine needles and easy to scuff up. It was not “frozen solid” as some have claimed.
All lines of evidence are quite consistent that this was the same site that Halt was called out to two nights later.

Hope this helps.

reply to post by richisdisturbed


Not sure where you are located but it has received a lot of what I would call 'low key' media coverage here in the UK. Mainly down the lower end of the TV menu.

The "Unsolved Mysteries" episode "Bentwaters UFO" has been rotated on CBS for some time.

Similarly History's H2 Channel has "Britain's Roswell" and "Unsealed Alien Files (aka Alien Files : Unsealed)" and "Ancient Aliens" featured discussions on Rendlesham.

There was also NatGeo's "UFOs Europe the Untold Stories" and a Canadian production on Discovery "Alien Mysteries".

All have covered the incident in varying levels but I am not sure there is any agenda within the media. I think it's more likely that this is a high profile case and, unlike many other cases, has multiple witnesses that are all still alive. Plus it has lots of evidence for both sceptical and more open minded researchers to get their teeth into as we can see from this thread.

reply to post by ianrid




But Jim Penniston, allegedly, went out and made plaster casts of the indentations left by the craft. So maybe there was more than one landing site?

Halt's memo indicates that they turned up fairly soon after the incident. I think we can safely say these were not hidden for years in his notebook.

What's your theory on these plaster casts Ian?

mirageman
reply to post by ianrid
But Jim Penniston, allegedly, went out and made plaster casts of the indentations left by the craft. So maybe there was more than one landing site?

Why would that suggest there was more than one site?

As far as I am aware, these were taken at the site investigated by Halt. Halt has always thought so. He has even said he saw the plaster around the marks, although I'm not sure how seriously we can take this statement. There are apparently pine needles embedded in the plaster.

Recall that a multiplication of crash sites was one of the symptoms of the downfall of the Roswell case...

reply to post by ianrid


Because the plaster cast look more conical in shape and different from the depressions in the pics in Ectoplasm's post
www.abovetopsecret.com...

And if this 'craft' or indeed crafts (if they ever existed) had been around for a few days is it not possible that something could have landed in a number of locations in the forest?

mirageman
reply to post by ianrid
And if this 'craft' or indeed crafts (if they ever existed) had been around for a few days is it not possible that something could have landed in a number of locations in the forest?

I think you are getting into multiplication of hypotheses now.