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It'd be cool to see an alien or a spaceship, wouldn't it? Or maybe it'd be scary. One thing's for certain though, it wouldn't be boring. You'd want to talk about it and people would want to listen. That's what happened, or is said to have happened, to United States Air Force deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles I. Halt and some of his team in Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk on Boxing Day 1980.
How exciting! It was an event that came to be known as Britain's Roswell. It would grow to become one of the most debated, and believed, UFO sightings ever and I was in The Plume of Feathers with Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub to hear astronomy writer Ian Ridpath talk all about it. Ridpath actually thinks it's bigger than Roswell but as his talk was called 'The Rendlesham Forest UFO Case - Deconstructing A Myth' you won't be surprised to hear that he doesn't believe that aliens or spaceships visited Suffolk in 1980.
And to be fair he made a pretty good case of convincing me too. The reason Ridpath thinks Rendlesham is so popular is that it has witnesses and it has evidence. The reason he doesn't believe in it is that the witnesses have proved to be unreliable and the evidence is incredibly easy to debunk. People believe in aliens because they want to believe in aliens. People who perhaps don't believe in alien visitation may also want to believe in aliens too - but they generally like some proper evidence before committing.
So let's go back to Boxing Day 1980. It's 3am in the morning, a cold yet crisp night. Two security guards from nearby RAF Woodbridge are working the night shift when they see a bright object descend from the sky into the forest. Making their way to where they think this object has come down, they discover what appear to be landing marks but no craft. They also notice that some of the nearby trees seem to be scarred with what look like burn marks.
Two days later, a different group of USAF staff are out when they spot a bright, flashing, light in front of them. Looking up to the sky, they see more lights. Some moving and flashing. It's perhaps worth noting at this point that not too far from RAF Woodbridge stood the Orfordness lighthouse (which has, since then, been decommissioned and demolished and some of it fallen into the sea). All of which was documented by Halt two weeks after the event.
The fact that it took a fortnight to get round to writing up a report of these events suggest that it wasn't something seen as particularly important or serious at the time but when in 1983, under the Freedom of Information Act, the memo was released the News Of The World (a famously reliable periodical) picked up on it and carried a story with what you might describe as a rather sensational headline.
As we've established the story is bunk, what did fall from the Suffolk sky that Boxing Day night? Most likely nothing. Probably a bright fireball passed through the sky and was actually much further away than it appeared to the witnesses. Indeed a bright fireball had been seen, and reported, in the skies elsewhere in that area that very night.
Another one of the witnesses, immediately after the event, is on record as saying he believed it was a falling star and laughed at the suggestion it could have been a UFO. But if nothing came down how can we explain the flashing light? Well, you can probably see this one coming. It's the lighthouse. Of course, it's the fucking lighthouse. Everyone who has ever seen a lighthouse knows they have flashing lights. That's the whole point of lighthouses.
The Suffolk police who had been called out for some reason said they were certain it was the lighthouse and a local man, the splendidly named Vince Thurkettle, was interviewed and he said it was the lighthouse. Some of the witnesses also said the lighthouse. I'm willing to accept it was the lighthouse.
But what of the indentations in the ground and the burn marks on the trees? A local bobby took one look at the supposed landing indentations and said they looked as if they'd been made by rabbits. The 'burn marks' were only on trees that had been marked for cutting down and, indeed, they were felled not long after.
Some have cited high radiation readings taken on the site at the time as further, even undeniable, evidence of alien visitation but, unsurprisingly, this doesn't stand up either. The peak reading was not abnormally high and was, anyway, a mere spike and not a steady reading. That makes the radiation readings consistent with radiation readings taken pretty much everywhere else. This wasn't Chernobyl.
What of the other lights that were observed? The one that was said to be like a winking eye with a dark pupil and left five second gaps between flashes? Well, that was - you guessed it - the lighthouse again. The hovering starlike objects seen in the sky above were - see if you can see this one coming - stars! Celestial objects are the most common cause of UFO sightings but if you see a starlike object in the sky surely it's reasonable to surmise that it's probably a star?
One of the stars in this incident was Sirius, the dog star and the brightest star in the night sky (the sun wins hands down during the day). Halt, over the last four and a half decades, has embellished and updated (sexed up you might say) the story of his experience in Rendlesham Forest and is now, in his mid-eighties, a celebrated speaker on the UFO circuit who has published books and appeared on television. Having seen a UFO, it seems, pays a lot better than not having seen one.
I'm not saying Halt is lying to make money but it's certainly demonstrably true that his account of events has changed a lot since 1980. Others who believe will have their own reasons to believe but the evidence, as methodically dissected by Ian Ridpath, suggests there, perhaps sadly, was no alien visit to Rendlesham Forest over the 1980 festive season. Suffolk, however, will have a visit from TADS this summer and that, some might say, is even scarier. We'll be sure and land our spaceship with care.
There was a Q&A afterwards that took in the KGB, John Nash, the National Enquirer, the cold war, AI, Chinese lanterns, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the FBI, and nuclear missiles and there were even mince pies, even vegan ones (but I didn't partake, not keen) and, all in all (ignoring the man who was obsessed with USAF conspiracy theories and loved the sound of his voice so much his questions were nearly as long as the talk itself), it was a good way to round off a thoroughly enjoyable year of Greenwich Skeptics, the tenth year I've been attending.
Thanks to The Plume of Feathers, thanks to host Chris French, and thanks most of all to Ian Ridpath. Next time, let's see if he can debunk the Great Gazoo from The Flintstones.
