Rendlesham Forest: The Lights Among the Trees

Suffolk, England. Christmas, nineteen eighty. On the east coast, a few miles from the sea, there's a dark pine forest called Rendlesham. And on its edge, behind high fences, sit two air bases: RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters.

They're Royal Air Force stations in name. But this is the height of the Cold War, and the people who run them are American. The United States Air Force. Fighter jets. Security patrols. Thousands of servicemen and their families, spending Christmas a long way from home.

And in the small hours of the morning after Christmas Day, something happened in that forest that has never been properly explained.

It's around three in the morning. A security patrol near the back gate of RAF Woodbridge sees lights. Lights coming down, into the trees. Their first thought is the obvious one. An aircraft. Crashed, or forced down in the forest.

They radio for permission to go outside the base and look. It's granted. And three airmen head out on foot, into Rendlesham Forest, in the dark.

What they reported seeing was later set down in an official memo, written by the base's deputy commander. This is what it says.

The individuals reported seeing a strange glowing object in the forest. The object was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, approximately two to three meters across the base and approximately two meters high. It illuminated the entire forest with a white light.

The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath. The object was hovering or on legs. As the patrolmen approached the object, it maneuvered through the trees and disappeared.

The memo adds one more detail. At that moment, the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy.

The airmen came back to base shaken. The local police were called, and officers drove out to the forest a little after four in the morning. They looked. And the only light they reported seeing was the beam of a lighthouse, flashing on the coast at Orford Ness, a few miles away.

Remember that lighthouse. It's going to matter.

In daylight, the airmen went back to the spot where they'd seen the object. And there, in a small clearing, they found marks in the ground.

The next day, three depressions, one and a half inches deep and seven inches in diameter, were found where the object had been sighted on the ground.

Three marks. In a triangle. The police came to look at those too. They weren't impressed. To them, and to a local forester, the marks looked like the diggings of rabbits.

It might have ended there. A strange night. A report. A few holes in the ground. But two nights later, the lights came back.

And this time, the man who went into the forest was the deputy commander of the base himself. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt.

Halt took a small team, a radiation detector, and a pocket tape recorder. He intended, he said, to put the story to rest.

They found the clearing, and the three marks. They measured for radiation. Halt's memo records the result.

Beta, gamma readings of zero point one milliroentgens were recorded, with peak readings in the three depressions and near the center of the triangle formed by the depressions.

To be fair, sceptics would later point out that readings like that are very low. Close to the natural background level you'd find almost anywhere. But that night, in the dark, with the counter clicking, it didn't feel like background.

Because then they saw it.

Later in the night a red sun-like light was seen through the trees. It moved about and pulsed. At one point it appeared to throw off glowing particles, and then broke into five separate white objects, and then disappeared.

And then, in the sky, more lights.

Three star-like objects were noticed in the sky, two objects to the north and one to the south. The objects moved rapidly in sharp angular movements and displayed red, green and blue lights. The object to the south was visible for two or three hours, and beamed down a stream of light from time to time.

And then Halt adds a single line that has kept this case alive ever since.

Numerous individuals, including the undersigned, witnessed the activities.

Including the undersigned. Not a rumour. Not a story told in a pub. A senior United States Air Force officer, putting his name to it.

Halt's memo was dated the thirteenth of January, nineteen eighty-one. Its subject line was just two words: Unexplained Lights. He sent it to his British counterpart on the base, and it went on to the Ministry of Defence in London.

And then, for more than two years, almost nothing.

Until nineteen eighty-three, when a copy was released in America under the Freedom of Information Act. Within months, it was on the front page of a British Sunday newspaper. And Rendlesham Forest became one of the most famous UFO cases in the world.

So what did the British government make of it? For years, the Ministry of Defence's position came down to this.

The event posed no threat to national security, and was therefore never investigated as a security matter.

No threat. So, no investigation. To believers, that sounded like a door being closed. To sceptics, it sounded like exactly what it said.

Which brings us back to the lighthouse. A British writer, Ian Ridpath, spent years going through the evidence. And he put forward a very down-to-earth explanation, in three parts.

First: at almost the exact time of the first sighting, a very bright meteor, a fireball, had streaked across the sky over southern England. Lights coming down into the trees.

Second: the Orford Ness lighthouse. A few miles to the east, in the same direction as the forest, flashing every five seconds. Seen through the trees, at night, by men already on edge, a flashing light that seems to move as you walk.

And third: the star-like objects in the sky. Bright stars, low on the horizon on a cold, clear winter night, twinkling red and green and blue.

Some of the witnesses themselves later said that, on one of the nights, they'd followed a light through the forest for a long way, before realising it was coming from the lighthouse.

Others have never accepted that. They say they know what they saw. That trained security personnel can tell a lighthouse from a craft. And in the years since, some witnesses have gone further, with new and more extraordinary accounts that weren't part of the original statements.

The memo, on its own, doesn't settle it either way. It records what men said they saw. It records three marks and some very low readings. It doesn't say what any of it was.

In the early nineteen nineties, the Americans left. But the forest is still there.

Today, you can walk a UFO trail through Rendlesham Forest, laid out by the Forestry Commission, past the spot where it all began. At the end of it there's a strange metal sculpture of the object, as the airmen described it. Families walk it on Sunday afternoons.

And some of them, on the way back to the car park, can't help glancing east. Towards the coast. Towards a light, flashing every five seconds.

So what came down into Rendlesham Forest, in the early hours after Christmas, nineteen eighty? A meteor, a lighthouse and some bright stars? Or something that three airmen, a deputy base commander, and numerous individuals still cannot explain?

The file is open. You decide.

This has been Mystery. Lieutenant Colonel Halt's memo, and every source for this episode, are on mystery dot app.