Rendlesham Forest Incident: Two Nights, One Memo, and a Tape You Can Still Hear
- Why Were American Airmen in an English Forest?
- Night One: The Lights Beyond the East Gate
- The Memo Titled "Unexplained Lights"
- Night Two: Halt Takes a Tape Recorder Into the Woods
- Could the Flashing Light Have Been a Lighthouse?
- Or Was It Several Things at Once?
- Where Did the Binary Code Come From?
- Can You Walk the Site Today?
- So What Happened in the Woods?
Somewhere in a Suffolk pine forest, a U.S. Air Force officer once muttered "this is unreal" into a tape recorder, and you can still hear him say it.
He was the deputy commander of an American air base, out there because his own men had reported something coming down in the trees.
Two nights earlier, a patrol had chased strange lights through the same woods.
There's a memo on Air Force letterhead, a set of radiation readings, and a lighthouse that refuses to stay out of the conversation.
Take the two nights in order and the whole case gets easier to judge, starting with what American airmen were doing in an English forest at all.
Why Were American Airmen in an English Forest?
Rendlesham Forest lies near Woodbridge in Suffolk, on England's east coast. In 1980 it wrapped around two air bases, RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge, which Britain had loaned to the U.S. Air Force for the Cold War.
The National Archives' guide to Britain's UFO files notes the case is often called "Britain's Roswell." Unlike the original Roswell, though, it has a senior officer who wrote it all down within weeks.
Before the memo came the night that started everything: December 26, 1980.
Night One: The Lights Beyond the East Gate
In the small hours of December 26, security police at Woodbridge's back gate, known as the East Gate, saw lights coming down in the forest. Thinking an aircraft might have crashed, they got permission to go outside the fence and look.
Three men went out on foot: Jim Penniston, John Burroughs, and Ed Cabansag. Penniston and Burroughs would become the best-known names in the whole affair.
Accounts of what they saw don't all agree. Their deputy base commander's later memo describes "a strange glowing object in the forest," metallic-looking and triangular, about two to three meters across and two meters high.
As the men approached, the memo says, it "maneuvered through the trees and disappeared," while animals on a nearby farm "went into a frenzy."
Penniston has since said he got close enough to touch the object and see symbols on its side. We'll come back to that.
At daybreak, the forest offered up something you could actually measure: three marks on the ground.
The Memo Titled "Unexplained Lights"
Enter Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, deputy base commander at Bentwaters. On January 13, 1981, he signed a one-page memo to the base's RAF commander, headed simply "Unexplained Lights."
Halt later said he wrote it from memory several weeks after the events, which is why its dates don't match everyone else's:
| Stage | Memo's date | Date usually given |
|---|---|---|
| Patrol follows lights beyond the East Gate | December 27, about 3 a.m. | December 26 |
| Three depressions found in the ground | "The next day" | December 26 |
| Halt's own night in the forest | December 29 | December 27–28 |
| Memo signed | January 13, 1981 | January 13, 1981 |
The memo closes with the line that made it famous: "Numerous individuals, including the undersigned, witnessed the activities in paragraphs 2 and 3." It surfaced in 1983 through a U.S. Freedom of Information request and made the front page of the News of the World.
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The Ministry of Defence's own Rendlesham file, DEFE 24/1948/1, opened at the National Archives in 2009 and holds the memo plus the briefings written when an MP raised the story in Parliament. Halt's memo is a report of what men saw, not an official finding of what it was.
Paper is one thing. The tape is where you hear the case happen.
Night Two: Halt Takes a Tape Recorder Into the Woods
Two nights after the first patrol, Halt led a party out to examine the site, narrating as he went.
The three depressions were small, an inch and a half deep and seven inches across, and the memo records "Beta/Gamma readings of 0.1 milliroentgens" peaking in them. Then, "later in the night," it says, "a red sun-like object was seen through the trees," which pulsed, threw off glowing particles, and broke into five white objects.
The transcript of the Halt tape lets you follow it in something close to real time:
- 03:30: "the object to the south is still beaming down lights to the ground."
- 04:00: "one object still hovering over the Woodbridge base."
- The line everyone quotes: "It's coming this way. It's definitely coming this way."
The memo adds that the southern object "beamed down a stream of light from time to time" for two to three hours. Lights beaming down near a military base is what keeps this case in the national-security conversation.
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The tape can't measure anything, though; it records what trained men believed they were seeing, hesitation included.
Now for the forester with the map.
Could the Flashing Light Have Been a Lighthouse?
Enter Ian Ridpath, an astronomer who was the first journalist to investigate the case after the 1983 headlines. He found Vince Thurkettle, a forester who lived less than a mile from the supposed landing site.
Thurkettle's explanation for the flashing light was three words long: "It's the lighthouse." The Orford Ness lighthouse stood on the coast about five miles away, and when he plotted the airmen's line of sight on a map, it ran straight into the beam.
Ridpath took a BBC crew into the trees after midnight and filmed the beam flashing between the pines.
His account of that night and his photographs of the site show why your position matters. The lighthouse isn't visible from the East Gate itself, but walk deeper into the forest and it comes into view.
Thurkettle took the three depressions for rabbit diggings and the "burn marks" on the trees for foresters' axe cuts oozing resin. Local police who visited reported seeing no UFO, only the lighthouse.
Several witnesses reject all of that as an explanation for what they experienced. And a man who says he touched a craft is describing something a lighthouse five miles away cannot do.
So the lighthouse answers one observation, not the whole case. It also leaves the other lights in the sky unexplained.
Or Was It Several Things at Once?
Ridpath's wider reconstruction argues that Rendlesham is really three sightings stacked on top of each other. An exceptionally bright meteor burned up over southern England at about 3 a.m. on December 26, right when the patrol saw lights descending, and the flashing light between the trees was the lighthouse.
The starlike objects Halt watched for hours behaved, in Ridpath's view, like stars, and the brightest, the one that seemed to send down beams, sat in the direction of Sirius. Low stars twinkle and shift color through turbulent air, as our piece on why UFOs look so bright explains.
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As for the radiation, Ridpath says the readings were background levels, while Halt's memo calls the same numbers peaks. A reading only means something once you know what's normal for that patch of forest.
Compress everything into one encounter, though, and a meteor, a lighthouse, and a star start to sound like one object doing impossible things.
None of this touches the strangest part of the story, because the strangest part arrived decades later.
Where Did the Binary Code Come From?
Penniston's notebook, with its notes and sketches of the craft, first appeared on television in December 2003. Then, on the 30th anniversary in December 2010, he added that the day after the encounter he had filled pages with binary digits received telepathically.
There's a time-travel strand too, from a 1994 regression hypnosis session in which Penniston described the craft's occupants as our own distant descendants.
His summary of it has stuck: "They are time travellers. They are us."
None of this is in Halt's memo. Reading the later claims back into 1981 makes them look like part of the early record when they weren't.
That's why two people can argue about "Rendlesham" and mean different things: one means the tape and the memo, the other means everything added since.
Can You Walk the Site Today?
Yes, easily. Forestry England runs a three-mile UFO trail from the Tangham car park, marked with purple waymarkers, through the areas linked to the sightings.
The 1980 trees were felled within a few years, the base has closed, and the original East Gate is gone. Even the lighthouse has left: decommissioned in 2013, it was demolished in July 2020 before the sea could take it, according to Orford Museum.
Walking the ground won't tell you what the airmen saw, but it will show you how a flash through the trees can play tricks.
So What Happened in the Woods?
Named military witnesses, a memo signed within weeks, a real-time tape, and a place you can visit: not even the Navy's Tic Tac encounter offers all of that.
Skeptics have a meteor, a lighthouse, and Sirius. Witnesses have what they saw and, in one case, what they say they touched.
Start where Halt did: listen to the tape, read the memo, and decide for yourself whether "this is unreal" was a man watching a star or a man watching something else.
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