Rendlesham Forest Incident
Two nights of lights in a Suffolk pine forest between two American air bases in December 1980, and a one-page memo the deputy base commander sent to the Ministry of Defence three weeks later. The lighthouse at the center of the standard explanation was demolished in 2020.
Field Guide Entry
Two nights, then a memo
Around 3am on December 26, 1980, security patrolmen at the back gate of RAF Woodbridge saw lights coming down into Rendlesham Forest. John Burroughs and Jim Penniston went in on foot. Penniston later said he walked up to a craft and put his hand on it. A bright fireball burned up over southern England the same night, which is independently on record.
Two nights later Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, the deputy base commander, took a patrol out to the reported landing site carrying a radiation meter and a tape recorder left running. That recording is public and has been for decades.
On January 13, 1981, Halt wrote to the Ministry of Defence under the heading "Unexplained Lights." The memo runs to one page. It describes three depressions in the ground, radiation readings above background, and a red sun-like object that broke into white pieces. It reached the public through a US Freedom of Information Act request in 1983, years before the British files went to the National Archives.
The lighthouse
Ian Ridpath, an astronomer and science writer, built the standard counter-account and has spent decades adding to it. The flashing light the airmen followed between the trees lines up with the Orford Ness lighthouse, which was visible from that part of the forest, and a pulsing beam seen through moving pines and drifting mist reads as something hovering. The star-like objects Halt tracked on the tape match bright stars and planets low on the horizon, Sirius among them. The fireball covers the first descent.
Halt has never accepted it. He has said in public that he knew what the lighthouse was, that he could see it at the same time, and that it was not what he was looking at.
What is left of the evidence
Forestry England marks a UFO Trail through the forest. The marker most visitors photograph is not standing on the ground described in the memo, and the pin that map apps label as the landing site refers to the marker.
The Orford Ness lighthouse was switched off for good at the end of June 2013 and demolished in 2020. Nobody can go back and repeat the observation.
Visiting Information
Forestry England keeps the forest open year-round, with parking at the Rendlesham Forest Centre and a marked UFO Trail looping out from it that takes most people 1 to 2 hours at a walking pace. The walking itself is free.
Two things are worth knowing before setting out. The trail markers are interpretive rather than surveyed, so the spot signed as the landing site is a decision someone made for visitors, not a location from the memo. The forest also borders working military land, where the fencing and the signs are not decorative.
Late December draws people to the anniversary, and the forest after dark in that week has a noticeable number of flashlights in it.
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