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

Just watched the Strange But True episode on the Rendlesham Incident.



This aired on 9 December 1994 - just 14 years after the fact.

I understand that the MOD has stated there was nothing detected on radar and that nothing intruded into UK airspace at the time.

Watch the video from 2:22. It states otherwise, ie that an RAF station "nearby" did indeed detect something on radar, and that it behaved in an inexplicable way.

It doesn't make it clear if this was detected at the exact same time as the incident itself, but it's certainly interesting.

(Apologies if this video has already been shown)

reply to post by draknoir2


Yes. The initial statements are linked earlier in the post along with the Halt Memo. All mention strange coloured lights but only Penniston identified them as a structured craft.

Larry Warren however has always maintained he witnessed something very strange.

reply to post by CJCrawley


Yes that episode is a good synopsis of the case however you will find that Mal Scurrah , the radar operator was referring to an incident in Nov 1980 and the unidentified intrusion and scrambling of fighters was not linked to Rendlesham.

He made this clear fairly soon after the programme aired in the 1990s and was annoyed how it was edited to make it appear as though he was involved.

Nigel Kerr a radar operator at RAF Watton at the time has confirmed that he noticed 3 or 4 blips in the vicinity of the twin bases before they faded around the time John Burroughs sighted something lit up in the forest early on Boxing Day 1980.

reply to post by mirageman


One other question.

If Col. Halt and his men had seen the Russian satellite that was flying over southern England at the time, why wasn't that picked up on radar?

reply to post by mirageman

Nigel Kerr a radar operator at RAF Watton at the time has confirmed that he noticed 3 or 4 blips in the vicinity of the twin bases before they faded around the time John Burroughs sighted something lit up in the forest early on Boxing Day 1980.

Ah. Could this have been the Russian satellite?

So something WAS detected on radar.

And yet the MOD have always maintained that NOTHING was detected at the time.

A little confusing.

reply to post by ianrid


It would seem that you can back up ALL of your points with actual quotes, diagrams and actual facts. How are we then expected to carry on a proper discussion of alien spaceships and whatnot? It is very disheartening that facts and good manners have somehow taken over this discussion.

draknoir2
I notice these are all relatively recent quotes, the earliest being seventeen years after the fact. All seem far more elaborate than the initial report.

How much would it cost me to get you to say similar things? A book deal? A 10 minute spot on UFO hunters? I'm not implying anything here but what would be the motivating factors to not embellish the story?

ZetaRediculian

draknoir2
I notice these are all relatively recent quotes, the earliest being seventeen years after the fact. All seem far more elaborate than the initial report.

How much would it cost me to get you to say similar things? A book deal? A 10 minute spot on UFO hunters? I'm not implying anything here but what would be the motivating factors to not embellish the story?

Lunch.

CJCrawley
If Col. Halt and his men had seen the Russian satellite that was flying over southern England at the time, why wasn't that picked up on radar?

The Cosmos re-entry was at 21.07 on the evening of 1980 December 25, so it was not directly responsible for any of the Rendlesham Forest sightings. It did, though, spark off sightings over southern England that were reported on radio news that night. The security guards could well have heard these reports. So when the (natural) fireball appeared at 3am the following morning they were already primed... See my page about it here:
www.ianridpath.com...

The satellite re-entry would have been too high to show up on radar.

ZetaRediculian

draknoir2
I notice these are all relatively recent quotes, the earliest being seventeen years after the fact. All seem far more elaborate than the initial report.

How much would it cost me to get you to say similar things? A book deal? A 10 minute spot on UFO hunters? I'm not implying anything here but what would be the motivating factors to not embellish the story?

In the world of UFOlogy narratives do tend to evolve with time.

Roswell, for example. One crash... two crashes... aliens...

reply to post by ianrid


Was the fireball detected on radar?

If not, what accounts for this?

Nigel Kerr a radar operator at RAF Watton at the time has confirmed that he noticed 3 or 4 blips in the vicinity of the twin bases before they faded around the time John Burroughs sighted something lit up in the forest early on Boxing Day 1980.

CJCrawley
reply to post by ianrid

 

Was the fireball detected on radar?

If not, what accounts for this?

Nigel Kerr a radar operator at RAF Watton at the time has confirmed that he noticed 3 or 4 blips in the vicinity of the twin bases before they faded around the time John Burroughs sighted something lit up in the forest early on Boxing Day 1980.

I don't know. Seems a bit odd that he only just realized what he had seen back in 1980 in 2004, don't you think? Has all the hallmarks of UFO disease. Everyone else is getting theirs, so why shouldn't he get his?

Does anyone happen to know where Jenny Randles sits on this subject today?

One thing that doesn't seem to have been addressed to any great degree is the apparent "high strangeness" factors in this case. FireMoon did touch briefly on the fact that rather eerie goings on have been reported for decades in that and other areas of England. More than just anomalous "red lights," too, it should be mentioned.

Does that have any bearing on this case? Hard to say, but high-strangeness has been a hallmark of some of our most intriguing cases…even if the "pop ufologists" prefer to leave them out of their reports.

What if--and I usually hate "what ifs"--someone figured out how to induce such high-strangeness and threw a bunch of soldiers in the middle of it and sat back and watched? Think about it.

The GUT

What if--and I usually hate "what ifs"--someone figured out how to induce such high-strangeness and threw a bunch of soldiers in the middle of it and sat back and watched? Think about it.

I think you just induced high strangeness into this thread.


No idea what you're getting at, but I have heard other ATS members throw that buzz phrase around as if it were an explanation.

draknoir2
No idea what you're getting at...

Surprises me not.

... but I have heard other ATS members throw that buzz phrase around as if it were an explanation.

Did I proffer an explanation? Nope. Food for thought, yes.

High strangeness could be suggestive of many things, however. Maybe you are unfamiliar with the empirical evidence that EM--whether manmade or geomagnetic--can cause a number of remarkable effects on the human brain?

EM could also effect, say, lightalls for instance.

The GUT

High strangeness could be suggestive of many things, however. Maybe you are unfamiliar with the empirical evidence that EM--whether manmade or geomagnetic--can cause a number of remarkable effects on the human brain?

EM could also effect, say, lightalls for instance.

I will be writing up another theory which revolves around all of this sort of strange stuff if you can all hang on a few days.

I haven't got my head around it all as yet, never mind written anything up on it.

CJCrawley
Was the fireball detected on radar?

Again, that would have been too high.

If not, what accounts for this?

Well, anyone can say that they saw something well after the event. As draknoir has indicated, the "Me, too" effect may be at work here. Where's the documentation?

reply to post by draknoir2


This can get confusing so I'll try to clarify what the radar blips relate to.

The fireball was not detected on radar because it happened around 9pm on Christmas night as Ian Ridpath pointed out earlier. This was prior to Burroughs and Penniston venturing out with Cabansag into the forest.

Nigel Kerr was the RAF radar operator at Watton when Bentwaters requested a radar check. Allegedly American investigators asked for the radar tapes the following day. Due to the shift patterns changing Nigel Kerr was not on duty again for a few days and so the personnel involved that night could have been unaware of any requests from the USAF.

Not only that Halt's inability to get his dates right on his memo also confused matters for a long time and it was thought the events occurred on the 27th December 1980.

In 1980 Kerr was a radar operator stationed at RAF Watton, which was situated approximately thirty-five miles north of Woodbridge. Unlike Bentwaters and Woodbridge, Watton was home to the Royal Air Force. It turned out that Nigel Kerr had actually been on duty that week. He recalls the incident happened sometime around the Christmas holidays, during which time there was a skeleton staff on duty. He clearly remembers the call from Bentwaters reporting that there was a ‘flashing light in the sky’, and although he had received similar reports during his tenure at Watton, he thought the Bentwaters sighting was a bit wild.......

On checking the radar he realized there was indeed something on their approach line, and at first he thought it was a helicopter. However, it remained stationary long enough for it to show up for three to four sweeps across their screens before it dissipated. ................

He thought no more of it until he read about the incident three years later in The News of the World newspaper........It is therefore possible that when the Americans turned up Kerr was off duty. It is interesting that Kerr cannot recall the incident ever being discussed among the operators. I did not have the impression that Nigel Kerr was holding anything back, on the contrary he was very interested in the case and was as keen as me to know what had happened in Rendlesham Forest. ......


Source : www.tinyurl.com...
You Can't Tell the People

You can hear it from Kerr himself in this episode of UFOs the Untold Stories about 10 minutes in. Although the whole part on Rendlesham is worth a watch.

ianrid

mirageman
In the meantime I would like to ask Ian Ridpath (or any other astronomers) if the unusual cosmic display over the 3 nights can be recreated in something in astronomy software so we could see how the night sky would have appeared to the USAF personnel as time passed over Christmas in 1980?

Planetarium software can easily recreate the appearance of the sky for any given time or location, although we can't reproduce the sighting of the 3am fireball that seemingly sparked off the whole chain of events.

Any particular date and time you have in mind?

I was thinking of the night Halt's team were out reporting all sorts of strange lights and how he described them as "losing altitude". It would be interesting to see how the start moved across the sky during that time.

I found a freeware program "Stellarium" which for nothing seems like a really good application and am going to have a tinker with that.

mirageman
He clearly remembers the call from Bentwaters reporting that there was a ‘flashing light in the sky’

That means that it occurred during Halt's sighting, since Halt asked for a radar check from Eastern Radar at RAF Watton, which was responsible for air defence of that region. “Twice they reported that they didn't see anything,” Halt recalled for journalist Salley Rayl in an interview published in the 1994 April issue of Omni.

The senior operations officer on duty at RAF Watton that night was Squadron Leader Derek Coumbe. In 2003 he recalled for BBC Radio 4 that several calls had come through from Bentwaters asking them if they were seeing anything unusual in the Bentwaters and Woodbridge area. “We scrutinized the radar time and time again completely, and kept a watch on it through the whole period when these phone calls were going on and nothing was seen. Nothing at all,” Coumbe told the BBC.

My colleague Dave Clarke has written more about this on his page here:
drdavidclarke.blogspot.co.uk...
Search on the word "radar".

My own page on the radar readings, from which I have taken the above quotes, is here
www.ianridpath.com...