American Airmen, Airbases and Alien Encounters
Part 2
Last week I spoke about UFOs or, as they’re now known, UAPs. In particular, one that I experienced in the mid-nineties at the old RAF Bentwaters in Suffolk. It was around fifteen years before this, at the same time of the year, that there occurred what is probably the most famous UFO incident in Britain: the Rendlesham Forest UFO.
Rendlesham Forest sits between the twin bases of RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge; back in 1980 both were home to units of the United States Air Force. On the night of 25/26th December 1980, there was a report of lights in the forest and several security police from the base left RAF Woodbridge through the East Gate and headed through the forest to investigate.
Two nights later the lights apparently returned and were witnessed by dozens more airmen, including the Deputy Base Commander, Lt. Col. Charles Halt. A tape recording he made during his encounter with the lights and the subsequent memo he wrote to the Ministry of Defence have become infamous and the subject of dozens of books and 219,000 pages on the internet according to Google.
This is not one of those pages. This is a page about travel, albeit not a great distance.
I live close to Rendlesham Forest, and have done for thirty years. I had never ventured out to see where Britain’s most famous UFO incident allegedly took place. It’s often the way that we don’t see the sights that are closest to home. It was clearly high time that I did.
I head out on the most glorious morning: bright and blue-skied but cold. There is still frost on the forest floor but I can just feel the warmth of the sun on my face. What a perfect winter’s day. I park my car in the car park six hundred yards from the infamous East Gate and, to make the day even more perfect, the pay and display machine is out of order.
I walk down the concrete track to the East Gate. This is where the USAF airmen left the airbase to go hunting for aliens. I’d have liked it to be a bit more impressive but it is just a gate.
Okay, it’s a big gate, well, two gates actually; eight feet high with four strands of barbed wire across the top. They span what was clearly once a road with white lines down the centre for two lanes of traffic. Now it’s just a track, narrowed further by over-growing ferns and fallen leaves from last autumn, still crunchy on the ground. The other side of the gates, just forty yards or so into the base, is an old, boarded up guard hut and new signs warning of troops training in the area and telling you not to touch any military debris in case it should blow up and kill you. The former RAF Woodbridge is now Rock Barracks, home to two regiments of the Royal Engineers – presumably one regiment to build things and another to blow them up.
Turning my back on the gate as Staff Sergeant Jim Penniston, Airman First Class John Burroughs and Airman Edward Cabansag had done in the early hours of that cold winter’s night in 1980, I walk down the track that they had driven down and then follow the route that they had taken, on foot, through the forest.
The main difference being the fact that I did it in daytime, mainly because I do not get my underwear issued by the USAF. Even though I doubt we’re visited by alien spaceships, that doesn’t stop me not wanting to find out first hand that I was wrong. When I say I don’t believe in visits by spaceships, I don’t have any decent theories about what did happen here the week before 1981 came along. One thing is very clear, though. Something did happen to these airmen who were sent out to investigate on that night; but no-one can agree on what.
Of the three airmen I mentioned, one said he saw some weird lights, one said he saw a craft which he believed to have travelled through time and which communicated with him telepathically, while the third thought they’d all just been looking at the Orford Ness lighthouse. I do not know what they saw. None of us do, none of us can. Clearly they don’t, either.
The trees now aren’t as they were then; many of them blown down in the great storm of 1987. Even the lighthouse at Orford has been dismantled. The thing that interests me about the Rendlesham Forest incident is that nobody can explain what happened, not even the people who were present; particularly the people who were present. I find it fascinating that either something very, very strange happened to dozens of USAF personnel over the course of two or three nights or something really rather ordinary happened but they - well-trained and well-armed as they were - misunderstood it so fantastically.
I had read about their encounter in an appropriately titled book by Nick Pope, Encounter in Rendlesham Forest but I don’t need any background research or special interest in order to follow in their footsteps. About fifteen years ago, the Forestry Commission put in a UFO Trail, complete with information boards and little blue waymarkers to point the way. I follow them for about half a mile into the forest until I come to a section that is barricaded off with signs saying TRAIL CLOSED – NO ENTRY. Of course, they are trying to hide something, this is classic X Files territory right here.
As an intrepid investigator I do as instructed and follow the officially signposted diversion. I still end up at the sculpture, placed here in 2014, which is modelled on reports by some of the airmen of the “alien” craft they encountered. On its side are strange hieroglyphs, ones that Jim Penniston apparently saw, but they are today joined by a fair amount of graffiti which suggests that the aliens may have been called The Russells - this being the only place in the world where I have ever seen family graffiti. The most inexplicable thing here today being their use of an apostrophe.
On the way back to my car I notice that, when approaching from the other direction, the signs blocking the trail have either fallen down or been taken down and so I fearlessly continue onto the trail, as though I have no knowledge of the closure. It turns out that it is closed because the Forestry Commission had been logging. Maybe the truth is out there but it is generally quite dull. Perhaps that’s why people make up conspiracy theories and wild stories, to make life seem brighter.
Maybe the truth, or a large portion of it, at least, is not out there, it is in here, in our minds. We don’t ever truly see what is out there, our brains live in the dark, all we ever see are the stories we tell ourselves about the things which are out there.
I’d like to tell you my stories, of the things I saw out there. There are no aliens, no more UFOs, just the places I see as I head out on the road again. Next week I will talk about Bell End, The Knob, Scratching Fanny of Cock Lane and a county built largely of flapjacks.