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

Can we let it be?

ianrid
...She still harbours the hope that there was something unusual going on, but she agrees it wasn’t a ‘real’ UFO in any normal sense of the term.

Thank you for your response. I like Ms. Randles and her work. Actually, I've experienced a sort of renaissance in the last few years by digging into Brit ufology. It seems much more robust--in many instances--than our Yank version. As a matter of fact, next time someone does a "Who's your favorite ufologist thread," mine will contain more Brits than Americans.

I have another question for anyone who can answer. While I'm sure the claims about the lightalls could be a case of what we might call "cross contamination," they also--as I mentioned earlier--seem to be something a few of our cast have actually agreed upon.

So, my question: How many of the witnesses have reported problems with the lightalls? I'd also be very interested to see a compilation of those statements.

ianrid
He called Halt in for an explanation, then spoke to the UK base commander Don Moreland and concluded that it was “just a bunch of guys screwing around in the woods”, as he told Phil Klass in 1984.

That, I think, is a fitting epitaph for the Rendlesham Forest UFO case.

And you believe that? So newsflash - now conspiracies and whole bunch of documents and accounts revolve around 'some guys screwing around in the woods'

I am done with this topic, arguing the unarguable - that they did see something strange (again, it doesn't matter if alien or not, the point is they were alarmed by smth unusual) and it was NOT the lighthouse.

If every time will be going back to page 1, arguing what shouldn't be argued, due to someone's moronic explanation, I mean, one has to see the obvious that this Halt is trying to belittle something (or is angry that he isn't in the center of attention)...

What a bunch of waste with such 'rational explanations' .

I am also doubting there is 'aliens' involved but dismissing everything that it didn't happen almost sounds like 'doubting that these people even existed'

I mean ridiculous much? ,.,. Skepticism for me is idiocy too subjective to deserve attention too bad Halt was allegedly one of the witnesses to talk such bullcrap. Or it was like 'I saw nothing, so it didn't happen doesn't matter what you saw'..

reply to post by ImpactoR

And you believe that? So newsflash - now conspiracies and whole bunch of documents and accounts revolve around 'some guys screwing around in the woods'

Looking at the facts of the case, that's what it seems like we are left with. Anything beyond that is pure speculation.

I am done with this topic, arguing the unarguable - that they did see something strange (again, it doesn't matter if alien or not, the point is they were alarmed by smth unusual) and it was NOT the lighthouse.

In the woods in the middle of the night, it doesn't take much to be alarmed. This is particularly true if you are already expecting to encounter something unusual. I have not seen a good argument to rule out the lighthouse.

I am starting to wonder if anyone has been outside of their homes.

There are several things which rule out the lighthouse theory for me:

1. Halt in his Affidavit of June 2010 stated: 'we could see the unknown light and the lighthouse simultaneously'.
   
2. Halt said at the National Press Club, on 27 September 2010 that an object "stopped directly overhead and sent down a concentrated beam at our feet ... the other object to the south was sending down beams about a mile, mile-and-a-half away”. The Halt tape also reveals a ‘beam coming down to the ground’.
   
   If this was caused by a star like Sirius, you’d think this would be a fairly common sighting. IMHO, a meteor or fireball sighting does not seem a rational or logical explanation for this phenomena.
   
3. “We saw nothing that resembled Lt. Col. Halt’s descriptions either in the sky or on the ground,” Col. Ted Conrad revealed to Dr David Clarke. If there were no lights, the control tower wouldn’t have seen anything. Surely Halt and co. were in radio contact with the tower? “Halt: You see anything out there?” “Tower: No, take your readings and come back in boys.”
   
4. If you discount the indentations and the radation levels (Halt claims 8-to-9 times higher than normal), why was a disaster preparedness NCO equipped with a Geiger counter and starscope/camera even out there even taking readings at a set location, tentatively named the “impact point” (on the Halt tape)? If it was just the lightouse flashing how did they derive this location? Coincidence they found that site?
   
5. You’ve also got similar cases of UFO over-flying military bases lending credence to high strangeness (e.g. Malmstrom AFB).
   

With this incident there are inconsistencies in testimonies, and it's hard to tell what's fact and what's fiction, i.e. there is a lot of speculation, but the lighthouse theory just doesn’t sit right.

Great thread mirageman!

reply to post by Defragmentor

Well, Halt’s story has changed quite a bit over the years since he has been giving TV interviews. He has been saying for a long time that the lighthouse was somewhere off to the right of where he was looking, but a simple check with a map shows that it wasn’t. I think he confused it with the Shipwash lightship, which was in the southeast. His own description of the position and flash rate of the UFO on the tape matches the lighthouse and there’s no way of avoiding that.

There is no mention on the tape of anything flying overhead and sending a beam of light down to their feet. This is another elaboration of the story that arose many years later. On his tape, Halt simply refers to starlike objects low on the horizon, two to the north and one to the south. The one to the south, which he describes as hovering over Woodbridge base, (and hence actually to the southwest), was the one that he described as sending down beams, but I interpret these as simply the normal twinkling of a bright star low down — Sirius, in this case. In a further elaboration of his story, he has since said that the two to the north sent down beams over the WSA at Bentwaters, but Tim Egercic, who was in the WSA at the time, has specifically refuted this.

The supposed landing site Halt examined was the one that had been found the morning after the initial sighting. The police were called out to see it, and we have a picture of them examining it. They said the marks looked like they had been made by an animal, as did the local forester.

Why did Halt take out a geiger counter? Good question, which he has never really answered. Probably it was all he could think of. However, the results were essentially negative. The night vision scope would be standard for such a situation, I would think.

Fortunately, we have Halt’s original tape so it’s actually quite easy to tell what’s fact and what’s fiction, and it wasn’t like Halt tells it now. Of course, you can believe his later changes of story if you prefer, but they contradict what is on the tape.

For my criticism of the many lapses of memory his affidavit, see here:
Col Halt’s iffy affidavit: Rewriting history at Rendlesham
www.ianridpath.com...

Other cases have to be taken on their merits, and Malmstrom is essentially fiction, as has been pointed out at length in many places
badufos.blogspot.co.uk...

Here's the whole tape.... I've gone into detail about this before on another thread. The timing of the tape is an unknown. Listen to Halts voice on the tape and go listen to Halt talk anywhere else online on YouTube and listen how much higher in pitch his voice sounds on the tape. Now part of that can be accounted by the microphone used on what was, in effect, a Dictaphone however, it also suggest strongly that the tape transcription was speeded up so you are hearing it played back faster than normal by anything up to 20%. And that is my view a "professional recording artist" of some 3 decades.

What Ridpath conveniently forgets to tell you is that, his lighthouse is only ever described as a red light, the lighthouse was not red it was bright and white and no gerrymandering of specious science about temperature inversions, can change it from white to red.


Anyway this is the whole tape.....

Key passage .... Halt: 0305, we see strange strobe like flashes to the, rather sporadic but there's definitely something, some kind of phenomena.

Halt: 0305, at about 10 degrees horizon, directly North, we've got two strange objects, uh, half-moon shaped, dancing about colored lights on them. At, uh, what I would guess to be about 5 to 10 miles out, maybe less. The half-moons are now turning full circles. It's asthough there was an eclipse or something there for a minute or two.

Halt: 0315, now we've got an object about 10 degrees directly South. 10 degrees off the horizon. And the ones to the North are moving. One's moving away from us.

Soldier: They're moving out fast!

Soldier: This one on the right is heading away too!

Halt: And they're both heading North. Here he comes from the South, he's heading toward us now. Now we're observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground. This is unreal.

Halt: 330, or 0330 and the objects are still in the sky although the one that's South looks like it's losing a little bit of altitude. We're turning around, heading back towards the base. The object to the, the object to the South is still beaming down lights to the ground.

Halt: 0400 hours, one object still hovering over Woodbridge Base at about 5 to 10 degrees off the horizon, still moving erratic, and similar lights, and beaming down as earlier.

Yeah stars, see them like that every night.

reply to post by FireMoon

Yeah, that does seem to lob a hardball in the "it was the lighthouse" court.

*Jiffy-Pop Time*

FireMoon
Listen to Halts voice on the tape and go listen to Halt talk anywhere else online on YouTube and listen how much higher in pitch his voice sounds on the tape.

FireMoonHalt's dialogue on the tape of experience he had, has been analysed by a specialist in recognising "stress patterns" and their opinion is that. he was stressed and then some

That is exactly what happens to your voice when you are stressed. Your voice pitch goes up.

Under stress, people's voices change. They tense their speech-production muscles, increasing their vocal pitch.

en.wikibooks.org...

This indicates a surge of adrenaline which alters your perceptions and includes color blindness.

It is common for an individual experiencing tachypsychia to have serious misinterpretations of their surroundings during the events, through a combination of their altered perception of time, as well as transient partial color blindness and tunnel vision

en.wikipedia.org...

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For those interested is here a very interesting show from James Whale with Georgina Bruni.
If you listen to what Georgina said after 0:37:35 you will see that the lighthouse explanation was used right from the beginning to kill the story, it was done by the people who interrogated Adrian Bustinza after the events.

www.youtube.com...

reply to post by ZetaRediculian

You can download a best-quality copy of the tape from here
www.ianridpath.com...
This plays at normal speed, unlike the one posted by FireMoon, which is slightly too fast.
Also on that page you’ll find a complete transcript of the tape.

Click here for a step-by-step analysis of the events on the tape
www.ianridpath.com...

This should cover all the points likely to be raised. The discussion of the starlike objects, which is the aspect of the sighting most often misunderstood, starts at Point 13 on the second page of the analysis.

I know it’s a lot to read but it should save a lot of postings here...

Let's talk about the trauma that incidents that define and change lives. I can speak from first hand experience as my dad had a battleship shot from under him in the South China Sea during world war 2. It took him till the 60th anniversary of the sinking to speak about it at length and one part in particular struck me as being very telling in its' detail.

"We saw the ship was sinking and that continuing to load ammo for the pom poms was pointless so we decided to abandon ship. We headed down a ladder , I went left, my best friend went right and that was that................... I never saw my best friend again".... At that point my dad's eyes glazed over and I could see him fighting back the tears even some 60 years later. Since the end of the war no-one who knew him had ever heard him refer to anyone as his "best friend" and certainly never had in the 40 years I'd known him and yes, i had mused on why he'd never used the term.

So, according the likes of Ridpath's cod 101 psychology then we know the following about my father and that incident. He didn't go left he went forwards and his mate went backwards, as my dad had never mentioned the term "best friend" for 60 years there was no best friend, he never had a best friend or surely he would have mentioned it before and as it took 60 years for him to speak of it, then it was obviously mere exaggeration.

Of course, because of social conventions, there is not a hope in hell's chance Ridpath or any other know it all, would have the bottle to say that about my dad however, as it's UFOs then it's fine to insult the witness's intelligence and in effect call them liars.

These are the facts Ian, not one of the many witnesses agrees with your assessment of the what happened. Even after 30 years they still say "something strange happened". Your evidence relies almost 100% on ignoring the evidence given by a dozen other people who were there., that's not science, that's playing fast and loose with the truth. Because of your intellectual dishonesty your opinion on anything to do with UFOs simply cannot be trusted.

Oh and given you don't have a clue what speed the tape was actually recorded at, how would you know your version hasn't been slowed down or is running fast? Truth is Ian, you don't and to pretend you do is yet another example of your ability to side step any inconvenient facts that trip your whole argument up.

Oh and Tim Egercic actually said the following... We, D Flight, were finishing up our last swing shift (3 p.m. – 11 a.m. [Thu 25/12]) when a Woodbridge Patrol called in a report of strange lights outside of the base. (…) Upon coming to work the next night [26/27] to start out three mid shifts (11 p.m. – 7 a.m.), we asked Bob Ball during guard mount if C Flight had seen the strange lights also. The answer we were given was no.
For the next three nights [26/27, 27/28 and 28/29], between midnight and 2 a.m., our Woodbridge patrols reported strange lights over Rendlesham forest (…) The radio transmissions from witnesses [on the last night, 28/29] were more than the three previous nights

and... I tracked him [Adrian Bustinza] down [after reading the Larry Fawcett interview in LEAG in 1997] using the internet and called him at his home… Adrian backed up most of Larry Warren’s claims during our ninety minute conversation, including the part of the landing and the surrounding of the craft by himself and other Air Force personnel.

For those who are not familiar with it there is an alternative view to Mr. Ridpath's here:

The Rendlesham Forest UFO Case - Another Perspective - Did Ian Ridpath really get it completely right? Maybe not

reply to post by FireMoon



Using your example, when someone [hypothetically] initially claims to have fallen off a PT boat during training, then thirty years later they come out with a statement that they had a battleship shot out from under them, we should just accept that as fact out of respect for the witness?

Being an Air Force guy myself, having worked with other Air Force guys for 20 years, I can totally see this being a clusterf@#$ of confusion as opposed to a "scientific investigation". SP's do not have advanced training in UFOLOGY, meteorology, or astrophysics. In fact, in tech school they were called "nine week wonders".

Additions to Op

Cobra Mist


Back in the 1980s one theory proposed was that the NSA tried to send an energy beam to intercept and bring down the Soviet’s Cosmos 749 satellite over the North Sea and that this caused the reports of UFO activity at the twin bases.

Cobra Mist was an “over-the-horizon radar” system designed to identify inter-continental ballistic missiles from the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. It was closed in 1973 because it was an unreliable detection system. Not only that the Cosmos satellite actually re-entered the earth’s atmosphere three months before the events at Rendlesham Forest. So this theory in itself was a bit of a non-starter.

Some more esoteric theories make out that residual effects were still happening due to the nature of the area, its history, and that strange happenings and events went on before and continued long after Christmas 1980. However I’ll leave a discussion of the mystical properties of the Suffolk countryside to someone else.

"You have been an involuntary participant in a top-secret Air Force experiment “
– Budd Hopkins, Left At East Gate -2005 edition


Something Larry Warren has always alluded to is that he and others were at the Twin Bases for a reason and that his experiences may point to some kind of controlled experiment. An experiment that not only messed with their minds but gave some of the witnesses longer term health problems after the incident.

So was there some kind of experiment or test conducted on a number of individuals at Bentwaters and Woodbridge by an official agency of the United States and/or United Kingdom?

Well it seems that there is some evidence, circumstantial though it is, to suggest that the United States - DNA (Defense Nuclear Agency) had something up their sleeve in 1980.

A document called the “The Role of Behavioral Science in the Physical Security Proceedings of the 5th Annual Symposium June 11-12, 1980” carefully details the plans. Download it here.




One of the concerns it looks at is the role of the human security elements at nuclear weapons facilities. A role that was seen as dull, boring and extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of as ‘real life’ major security threats were the exception rather than the norm.


SSOPRA – Security System Operational Recording and Analysis

"SSOPRA is a developmental project aimed at defining operationally relevant, quantitative measures of man-equipment effectiveness in security systems. …” One of the measures was a test of whether security staff would eventually ignore security alerts after multiple ‘false alarms’ were triggered. Perimeter areas of the facilities would have an electro magnetic device which would instil fear in the mind of intruders. A remote brain wave detection system would be used to identify personnel VERP (Visual Event Related Brain Potential)

There were also tests planned to use holographic machinery (for eventual use on naval vessels).




An Air Force Base would be selected as the development site.




The effects of ionised air on personnel and the impact on cognitive abilities is also discussed in much detail.

The theory behind all this is that the events at Rendlesham were not a UFO but a carefully constructed experiment involving the security personnel at the bases. Exotic technologies were used to confuse the men. The underlying reasons why stories do not match are because they were subject to mind bending stimuli. Hence why Burroughs and Penniston’s stories differ so much from the first night, how Larry Warren and Adrian Bustinza had a very surreal experience that none of the other witnesses endorse and also why Steve La Plume saw a strange object glide over his head some three weeks after the main events.

Further monitoring and interrogation, including the use of drugs, were used on some of the personnel involved to make elements of the story even more confusing and contradictory.

This can be backed up with documentation , albeit circumstantial evidence, and the topics it covers are very interesting. However there is no “proof” any of this applies to Rendlesham. We have to remember that the Soviets were getting twitchy about the Polish Solidarity movement at the time. The airmen were also “off-base” in UK sovereign territory which would further complicate matters. So is it plausible the US military would conduct such an experiment at this place and time? Also why let a UFO story into the wild that's now been around more than 30 years as a cover story?

The theory has been heavily criticised by Nick Pope, John Alexander and Jim Penniston amongst others.

But is it crazier than time travellers landing in an English forest communicating with binary codes?

Source : www.examiner.com...

mirageman
"You have been an involuntary participant in a top-secret Air Force experiment “
– Budd Hopkins, Left At East Gate -2005 edition

Hi mirageman, I hope you do not mind me doing this because you are doing a marvelous job here with this thread but here is the link to what Budd Hopkins said in his foreword in the “Left At East Gate” edition from 2005.

Budd said;

Over the years I have dealt with a number of former military men and woman who have had experiences similar to Larry Warren’s, and the patterns are often striking—particularly the techniques the authorities have used to insure the silence of UFO witnesses.
Simple intimidation is basic.
: Bullets are cheap,” said one debriefer to a nervous eyewitness. The government has a long arm, “said another.

In two different cases, witnesses were told that their extraordinary experiences did not evolve UFOs.

"You have been an involuntary participant in a top-secret Air Force experiment,“ one airman was told after he described an event in which a UFO hovered near his airplane, and –almost unbelievably—the tower’s radar reported that his heavy craft had been absolutely stationary for several minutes.

In another incident, an officer, along with several security guards, described firing at a group of tall, cylindrical objects as they effortless passed through a cyclone fence.
He was later told that he and the other witnesses had been “the involuntary participants in a top-secret Air Force experiment involving hallucinatory drugs.”

books.google.nl...,+Left+At+East+Gate+-2005+edition&source=bl&ots=eQ9F-FD9VM&sig=crXfInXPGr Nf4hyrL9JBNOVlvk4&hl=nl&sa=X&ei=RwTkUrerFcaN0AXmtoDYAg&ved=0CEgQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Budd%20Hopkins%2C%20Left%20At%20East%20Gate%20-2005%20edition&f=fal se

mirageman
The theory behind all this is that the events at Rendlesham were not a UFO but a carefully constructed experiment involving the security personnel at the bases. Exotic technologies were used to confuse the men. The underlying reasons why stories do not match are because they were subject to mind bending stimuli. Hence why Burroughs and Penniston’s stories differ so much from the first night, how Larry Warren and Adrian Bustinza had a very surreal experience that none of the other witnesses endorse and also why Steve La Plume saw a strange object glide over his head some three weeks after the main events.

While the theory does raise the questions you presented, it also has the strength of great explanatory power and as an "overlay" seems to fit extremely well.

In addition to Larry Warren, Steve La Plume has also mentioned that some of the folk sent to duty at Bentwaters might have been posted there for a purpose. La Plume also had contact at some point in his life with a very questionable FBI cointel operation that very possibly had some MK-ULTRA-style elements to it. That being Frank Camper's Merc School. Did some of the airmen come with their heads already diddled with? It deserves a good look-see I believe.

The theory has been heavily criticised by Nick Pope, John Alexander and Jim Penniston amongst others.

But is it crazier than time travellers landing in an English forest communicating with binary codes?

Seeing how Nick Pope and John Alexander have both clearly stated here on ATS that they won't/wouldn't give out any information that coincided with their security clearances, I'm not sure that if they point left we shouldn't look right, eh? Once a company man, always a company man they say.

I have little respect for Nick Pope and much suspicion. Col. Alexander I have some respect for, but I also view him with a very suspicious eye.

Jacques Vallee, of course, has also suggested Bentwaters might have been an experiment. I do have a lot of respect for Vallee, but don't get me wrong: I'm keeping a suspicious eye on him too!