Rendlesham Forest

OVERVIEW

A Forestry England pinewood on the Suffolk coast between Woodbridge and the sea, wrapped around the former RAF Woodbridge, then a United States Air Force base. Around 3 a.m. on 26 December 1980 a security patrol from the east gate went into the trees after lights they took for a crashed aircraft; two nights later the deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, led a party into the forest with a tape recorder running. His memorandum to the MoD, 'Unexplained Lights', dated 13 January 1981, was released in 1983.

HISTORY

Halt's memo describes a glowing metallic object among the trees, three depressions in the ground and raised radiation readings next morning, and on the third night a flashing red light to the east and star-like objects to north and south. Sergeant Jim Penniston later said he touched a craft; no one else reported that at the time. Sceptics match the first night to a bright fireball recorded over southern England at that hour, the flashing light to the Orford Ness lighthouse five seconds apart on the same bearing, the impressions to rabbit diggings and the 'objects' to Sirius. Jenny Randles, who broke the story in 1981, wrote in 2010 that no unearthly craft was seen. The MoD said the event posed no threat and was not investigated.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The witnesses were trained airmen and their accounts are on paper, on tape and in later books; the explanations are equally on record. The entry holds the case, not a verdict. In 2005 Forestry England laid out a UFO Trail through the forest and in 2014 installed a sculpture of the object as the witnesses drew it.

VISITING

Open daily; the UFO Trail (about three miles) starts from the Rendlesham Forest Centre car park off the B1084. The old base is private.