Rendlesham Forest: ‘Britain’s Roswell’ (1980)

ARCHIVE FILE · Event year: 1980. This happened in 1980 and is not breaking news. It’s part of the Redacted Weekly evergreen archive.

In the early hours of 26 December 1980, U.S. Air Force security personnel at RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, saw lights in Rendlesham Forest just outside the base’s east gate. At first they thought an aircraft had crashed. A small patrol went into the trees, and what they reported there turned the incident into the UK’s most famous UFO case.

CASE FILE · RW-ARC-UAP-005
Subject: Lights in the forest; reported “craft”
When: ~03:00, 26 December 1980, and again on the night of 27–28 December
Where: Rendlesham Forest, beside RAF Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK
Witnesses on record: Lt. Col. Charles Halt; airmen including Jim Penniston and John Burroughs (named in press and books)
Evidence: Halt’s memo to the UK Ministry of Defence; Halt’s audio tape; ground marks; radiation readings
Official UK view: No threat to national security
Lighthouse status: Flashing every five seconds, as usual

What was reported

According to the deputy base commander, Lt. Col. Charles Halt, the first patrol described a glowing object that looked metallic and had colored lights, which moved off through the trees as they approached. One serviceman, Sgt. Jim Penniston, later claimed he had approached a “craft of unknown origin,” though nothing like that was publicly mentioned at the time.

The next morning, depressions were found in a small clearing. Two nights later, Halt led his own team into the forest with a Geiger counter and a micro-cassette recorder, narrating as they went. They recorded readings in the depressions and saw a flashing light through the trees, plus star-like lights in the sky.

Halt’s memo to the Ministry of Defence, dated 13 January 1981, gives the first date as 27 December. Later researchers established that it was the early hours of 26 December. The memo became public in the U.S. in 1983 through a Freedom of Information request, and the UK’s National Archives later released MoD files on the case.

The tape

The 18-minute audio of Halt’s patrol circulates widely. We reference a third-party upload by the channel Eyes On Cinema, titled “Colonel Charles Halt’s Real-Time Audio Recording During the UFO Sightings at Rendlesham Forest, 1980,” uploaded 10 Oct 2022, length 18:14. All four frames we pulled (~3:38, ~8:12, ~12:45, ~16:24) show the same static image: a News of the World front page headlined “UFO LANDS IN SUFFOLK” with a photo of Halt. The video is audio over a still. A full transcript of the tape is published by astronomer Ian Ridpath. Embed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvSUPYBs9FA

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