It's bullshit of a high order, a burning lorry load of fertiliser is easy enough to check on police records and it would have made the local papers, if not the nationals, at the time. Someone would have made the connection years ago!
Checkable?Mr Turtill said the wagon's burned-out chassis stood in the forest for 20 years until it was finally removed.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z0QKFIVKRe
Rendlesham Forest UFO mystery still leaves questions
Thirty years after claims that UFOs had been spotted in Rendlesham Forest, experts and enthusiasts still can't agree on what happened.
Mysterious craft and lights around the airbases of Woodbridge and Bentwaters in Suffolk were reported around 26/27 December 1980.
BBC Suffolk's Mark Murphy presented a special 30th anniversary radio show from the forest in December 2010.
Mr Murphy promoted his favourite theory, but questions remained.
Theories
Aliens from outer space, beings from another dimension, testing of secret military projects, a helicopter carrying something, light from Orford Ness lighthouse, pranks by airmen - just some of the theories of what happened when the bases were being used by the US Air Force during the Cold War.
The first reports relate to sightings of strange phenomena on 26 December. The second reports relate to lights on 27 December.
Nick Pope used to run the British government's UFO Project and he undertook a review of the incident in 1994.
He said: "The military is an inherently secretive organisation and if anything happens such as these theories about secret classified aircraft or drones, there certainly would have been scope to cover something up and that would have been the default position."
You can listen again to the Rendlesham Revealed special two-hour broadcast on the BBC iPlayer until 24 December 2010.
rynner2 said:"There really are many strange phenomena in the sky, and these are invariably reported by rational people. But there is a wide range of natural explanations to account for such phenomena."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12613690
linesmachine said:Oh dear, I've become a quiet sceptic...
It did have a whiff of the less-serious X-Files episodes about it tooeburacum said:For the sake of completeness, I should mention that this week's episode of New Tricks (write the theme tune, sing the theme tune) was fairily obviously based on the Rendlesham case.
Quite amusing, too.
Back in 2005 when colleague Joe McGonagle and I revealed the loss of numerous Defence Intelligence files the news was received with virtually no interest or response from UFOlogists. At that time the MoD intended to destroy their entire collection of surviving DI55 UFO files, dating from 1975-2000 because – like many hundreds of thousands of other non-UFO related intelligence files – they had been contaminated by asbestos whilst stored in the basement of the Old War Office building in Whitehall. Eventually, the campaign to save all the contaminated files was successful and substantial amount of public money was spent to scan the papers for eventual release.
But decades before the asbestos contamination was discovered, records officers at the MoD had decided to dispose of dozens of older UFO files. Almost the entire run of Air Intelligence files on the subject, covering the years 1947-67 were lost because government policy – before 1967 – was to destroy all UFO files at five yearly intervals as they were deemed to be of “no historical interest”. Even in 1967, when MoD told MPs it would henceforth preserve UFO files due to increased public interest, desk officers ignored this ministerial commitment. One collection of S4(Air) and DS8 (UFO desk) files, containing papers dating from 1955-1968, went into the incinerator as recently as March 1990. Evidently, desk officers felt the contents were so tedious and mundane that they were not worth preserving.
The new releases show that Defence Intelligence files containing UFO sightings reports covering 1967-1975 (Parts 1-8 ), 1976-78 (Parts 10-20), 1980-82 (parts 26-31) and 1982-83 (Pt 33) were destroyed around the same time. It is simply an accident that the remaining files (parts 24 onwards, or 1984 to present) have survived for release at TNA. Seen in this context, there is no special reason why parts 26/27 – covering the 1980-81 period in the which the Rendlesham sighting occurred – can be said to have been singled out for specific destruction, as part of some conspiracy to hide “the truth.” These were not files specifically about the Rendlesham incident, simply reports received during those years, that may have included papers on the RAF Woodbridge sightings.
Furthermore, as the surviving DI55 files demonstrate, their contents are largely duplicates of the sighting reports found in the Secretariat (Air Staff) ‘UFO desk’ files. The UFO desk was the focal point for UFO reporting at Whitehall and simply copied the reports they received to DIS and RAF. Therefore, it’s unlikely that the lost DI55 files from 1980-81 contained anything substantially different to what has survived in the famous ‘Rendlesham File’ itself, released at TNA last August as DEFE 24/1948/1. Indeed, this file actually contains papers and minutes from DI55 and DI52 officers copied from the “lost” files.
So in actual fact nothing of substance has in fact been lost at all! A big fuss about nothing. If anyone out there wants to make a big deal about the loss of these files, they first need to do some real research and get their facts right.
Yes, one of Ufology's more interesting synchronicities. It's been mentioned on FTMB at least once before.Ringo_ said:I've just finished re-reading "Open Skies, Closed Minds" by Nick Pope. I know he doesn't carry much weight but he does mention that on the same night as the Rendelsham incident, a similar craft was spotted in the US, accompanied by lots of black helicopters. Several witnesses saw the same thing from different locations.
Ian Ridpath contacted the manufacturers of the Geiger counter used at Rendlesham, who said that the readings obtained were probably not significant.Ringo_ said:Apparently the witnesses to the US incident all showed signs of exposure to radiation and elevated radiation levels were found in the tree and soil samples from Rendelsham.
eburacum said:As far as the Cash/Landrum case goes, no radiation was detected at the scene, and the symptoms persisted far too long to really be radiation poisoning.
http://www.qtm.net/~geibdan/a1999/cash3.htm
Justin_Anstey said:http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk/news/reviews01.html
Just think for a moment, if you were the USAF or the British or American governments and you were pushed to into an absolute corner, which story would cause you the most embarrassment in the tabloids: "Drug crazed American servicemen fired on a lighthouse thinking it was an ALIEN SPACESHIP (shock horror), and these are the men guarding the CRUISE MISSILES" (even more shock horror); or, "Brave lightly armed US servicemen confront an ALIEN SPACESHIP, risking all to do their sacred duty and protect their precious charge".-J
“We got up to a fense (sic) that separated the trees from the open field and you could see the lights down by a farmer’s house”. Col Halt was to describe the same sight two nights later – see points 8 and 10 on this page. Burroughs’ statement continues: “Once we reached the farmer’s house we could see a beacon going around so we went towards it. We followed it for about 2 miles before we could see it was coming from a lighthouse”.
His colleague Ed Cabansag concurred: “We got to a vantage point where we could determine that what we were chasing was only a beacon light off in the distance.”
I suspect that the Starscope was the cause of the high strangeness of this second event, and it is quite possible that in the thirty-one years since the event the witnesses have largely forgotten that a light-amplifier was used at all.All versions agree that, having reached the eastern edge of the forest, Halt estimated the light was “two to three hundred yards away”. At this stage Halt looked at the flashing light through a Starscope, which is an image intensifier (night vision scope) used by the military for seeing in the dark; specifically, it seems to have been a first-generation device known as an AN/PVS-2. On the tape he says: “It’s like this thing has a hollow centre, a dark centre. It’s a bit like a pupil of an eye looking at you, winking. And the flash is so bright through the starscope that it almost burns your eye.”
The reflections seem to be a late addition by Halt, and could be a post-rationalisation.webplodder said:Also, how could the lighthouse have produced reflections in the nearby farmhouse windows where the reported UFO was supposed to have 'exploded' in a field in front of it? The windows in question were facing away from the lighthouse light and hidden from it!
Following a visit to the site with a TV crew, Halt has finally realized that the lighthouse is not 30 or so degrees off to the right from where he was standing, as he had claimed for so long, but almost in line with the farmhouse in front of him, as my photographs show. So he has now changed his story. What he now says is that the flashing UFO was to the left of the farmhouse and, moreover, that its light was reflecting off the farmhouse windows – a new detail we have not previously heard (see this YouTube clip from a talk he gave in 2009 October).
Unfortunately, this revised position does not match his compass bearing of 110 degrees, which places the flashing UFO firmly to the right of the farmhouse. So Halt’s change of story, an obvious attempt to avoid admitting that his UFO lay in the same direction as the lighthouse, introduces a glaring contradiction with the position of the flashing light he reported at the time.
AngelAlice said:Always felt as if Rendlesham was more about collective hysteria than anything else. Also thought I read somewhere that some of the confusion may have been due to there being a light ship operating off the coast as well as a lighthouse, or did I just imagine that part?
That would be Jim Penniston, not Col Halt.In the opening set, one of the main characters in the event, Halt I think, with the glasses? Said he not only touched the object, but also photographed it using his "standard issue camera?".
Ian Ridpath mentions this hereAngelAlice said:Always felt as if Rendlesham was more about collective hysteria than anything else. Also thought I read somewhere that some of the confusion may have been due to there being a light ship operating off the coast as well as a lighthouse, or did I just imagine that part?
Why, then, did Halt think the lighthouse was in the southeast? The reason is surprisingly straightforward. Halt’s quarters and office were not at Woodbridge but at neighbouring Bentwaters, 2 miles to the north. From here, the Orford Ness lighthouse does indeed appear in the southeast.
This is perhaps the crux of the whole misidentification issue. Halt was conditioned to seeing the lighthouse in the southeast, so when he saw a flashing light virtually due east he did not think of Orford Ness. Halt’s own words (“the lighthouse was...30 to 35 degrees off to the right...We knew the Orford Ness lighthouse beacon beamed from the southeast”) undermine his claim that he recognized the Orford Ness lighthouse on the night of the sighting and make it more likely, rather than less, that he mistook it for a UFO.
If Halt and his men saw a second light off to the right, this must have been something other than the Orford Ness lighthouse. Most likely it was the Shipwash lightship (now replaced by a buoy), which is more distant and hence fainter. Halt’s tape does confirm that a second light was seen to the right of the main flashing light, although no compass bearing is given and it receives only passing mention. Oddly enough, at no stage does anyone on the tape mention seeing a lighthouse, even though the Orford lighthouse is, by its very nature, the most obvious nocturnal reference point for miles around.