The Rendlesham Forest incident: The UFO sighting that is one of East Anglia s great mysteries cambridge-news.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cambridge-news.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Is it possible that one day we might travel through time in much the same way that today we hop on a plane to take our yearly vacation? “Time travel is not theoretically possible, for if it was they’d already be here telling us about it,” British physicist Stephen Hawking famously said a number. Read more »
Now and again, I’m asked: how, and under what circumstances, did the saga of the “UFO landing” at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England in December 1980 begin? And how did it all come tumbling out? On the issue of how Ufology learned of the story, there’s no doubt at all that it was the team of Brenda Butler, Dot Street and Jenny Randles that got the ball rolling. They were the authors of the very first book on the mystery,
Sky Crash, which was published in 1984. There is also no doubt that without their combined investigations, our knowledge of the incidents would be nowhere compared to where we are today. Possibly, even, without those three persistent investigators the truth behind those incidents would have remained hidden and locked away. Forever? I would not bet against it. That gives you some idea of the depth and determination of Dot, Jenny and Brenda to get the answers. A bit of background for you on how the story began to surface:
One of the most unfortunate aspects of Ufology is that of hoaxing, whether it’s doctored photographs, outrageous claims, and more. Many are known, such as the shenanigans of George Adamski and those of Gray Barker (I’ll come to the latter soon). There are, however, some hoaxes that have largely gone under the radar for a long time and that aren’t known to the vast majority of Ufology. The ones I’m talking about are not based around photos or claims, but documents and papers. Questionable documents have circulated in the UFO community for years – the most infamous being the original Majestic 12 papers. Since those originals are so well known, I’m going to avoid them and go onto others. I’ll begin with one that surfaced in the mid-1980s in the U.K. Under situations still not clear now, what looked like a U.K. Ministry of Defense document – that was focused on the December 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident – appeared. It looked like a letter sent from one individual to a
During the course of the events that occurred in and around Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England in December 1980, rumors circulated suggesting that radar tapes were taken from the Royal Air Force Watton base by U.S. Air Force personnel, who wanted to examine the alleged UFO evidence and see what, exactly, the tapes showed. This part of the story began in January 1981 with a writer named Paul Begg. It turns out that Begg knew a serviceman who was aware of something of the UFO incidents. It wasn’t long before Jenny Randles was able to speak with this particular source. Not wanting to jeopardize the man’s career, Randles chose to refer to him as “David Potts.” It was Potts who was able to put the pieces together. Potts told Randles that it was on December 29 when the Americans turned up at RAF Watton. Jenny learned that they took not just the radar-based data, but even the logbook for the relevant time. There was a very strange facet to all of this: the U.S. agents openly stated