UFOs in Suffolk
Did little green men visit Rendlesham Forest in 1980? Find out with a walk on the weird side, exploring the event dubbed ‘Britain’s Roswell’.
Did aliens visit one Christmastime night in 1980? You’re free to roam Britain’s Roswell and decide...
03:00, 27 Dec 1980 RAF Woodbridge, East Gate 52° 5' 24" N, 1° 25' 39" E
“THERE, IN THE TREES. Can you see it?” Out of the tar black Suffolk sky, pulsating lights descend into the hushed gloom of Rendlesham Forest.
The year is 1980 and it’s the early hours of December 27th. Near the east gate of RAF Woodbridge, a US Air Force patrol is alerted by strange activity in the forest. Believing they’ve seen an aircraft crash, they radio for backup and get permission to head outside the perimeter and investigate. But what they find in the forest is not what they’re expecting.
The three airmen report seeing a glowing metallic object shrouded in mist, two to three metres across and triangular in shape. It has a bank of blue lights underneath and a palpitating red light on top. As they approach it, the hovering, otherworldly object whizzes away through the trees and up into the night sky, sending nearby farm animals into a frenzy. The screams of unseen women chill them to the bone.
That was how it started: a series of UFO sightings over Suffolk collectively known as the Rendlesham dlesham Forest incident. The most famous UFO event on British soil, it was dubbed ‘Britain’s Roswell’,
likened to what some believe was a flflflying flying saucer crash in New Mexico, 37 years before. Various sceptical theories have rationally explained what the Americans saw here. Others (including a former Chief of the Defence Staff) believe the government covered up what really happened. Was it an alien spacecraft? Retracing this intriguing story on foot, I set out to investigate.
It’s at east gate of RAF Woodbridge that I meet up with Brenda Butler – Suffolk local and coauthor of the earliest book about the Rendlesham Forest incident, Sky Crash: A Cosmic Conspiracy. The first researcher on the scene back in 1980, Brenda has investigated UFOs and paranormal activity in the area since 1979 and leads interested groups around the forest.
With the former air base in its midst, Rendlesham Forest covers about 3700 acres. Twinned with nearby Bentwaters Airfield, RAF Woodbridge opened in 1943, when over a million trees were cleared to make way for the extra-wide runway and aviation facilities. From 1952 until 1993, it was home to United States Air Force units, and the site remains in military use today, as a base for the British’s Army’s parachute engineers.
Part of the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the forest is thick with conifers, supplemented by a smattering of oak, beech, sweet chestnut and silver birch. Rubbing branches with pencil-straight Corsican Pines, you find wide-girthed and knobbly natives. Here and there, bracken-choked clearings break up the regimented lines of timber. We’re following the UFO Trail around the forest – a three-mile, waymarked route opened by the Forestry Commission in 2005. It retells the events of the Rendlesham Forest Incident, from the location of the first sighting to the UFO landing site.
‘ We’ve seen ETs in here’ says Brenda, pointing to an opening in the trees. She explains that the area around the gate was newly planted back in 1980, giving air force patrols a clearer view to the east. Extra-terrestrial lifeforms have visited Brenda from an early age, and during her many outings in the forest she’s witnessed ghosts, big cats, a yeti and mysterious figures she calls ‘the greys’. Brenda comes to Rendlesham Forest every
week, often with friend Beverley, who’s joined us for the morning’s walk. We mosey down one of the many numbered tracks and rides which crisscross the forest. Broad and level, they divide up its plantations like the streets and avenues of a North American city. Sunlight streams between the branches, strobing our path. Crossing the forest road, we walk in the direction of the lights seen by US servicemen 39 years ago.
Brenda points out a concrete structure halfswallowed by vegetation. She tells me it was part of the Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation (FIDO) system installed around RAF Woodbridge. During the Second World War, the airfield was an emergency landing site for bombers. To receive aircraft that were low on fuel or damaged in raids over Germany, its single 9000-foot runway was five times wider than a conventional landing strip. When obscured by dense fog, fuel was pumped into pipes along either side and ignited at intervals by burner jets. The ensuing inferno rapidly cleared the fog, guiding stricken planes safely home, but this weatherbusting set-up proved hellishly expensive. It burned nearly 100,000 gallons of fuel every hour.
Perhaps Rendlesham’s wartime past made it attractive to extra-terrestrial visitors with faulty spaceships. Today, bats have moved in to the derelict FIDO fuel stores. Another extraordinary legacy of the war was the dynamite-laced runway, which RAF Woodbridge’s American tenants only discovered in 1983. Had Axis forces overrun the air base, its runway could quickly be put out of action, preventing it falling into enemy hands.
Among the ghosts Brenda has met in the forest are RAF aircrews who never made it back. She’s met uniformed apparitions near ‘the portal’ – a junction of forestry tracks where beings from other dimensions can apparently enter our world.
“The best time to experience these things is at night – that’s when the energies come out” she explains, with a lilting East Anglian burr.
The best time to experience these things is at night – that’s when the energies come out.”
“This is where stuff comes through – if you get a mist, sometimes it turns into a wall of orbs.”
Further on, the UFO Trail briefly overlaps with the Sandlings Walk – a 60-mile long-distance path from Ipswich to Southwold linking fragments of east Suffolk’s Sandlings Heath, much of which was lost to forestry plantations in the early 20th century. This lowland habitat is home to groundnesting birds, like the woodlark and nightjar (which appears on the trail’s waymarkers). Ruts in the forest track reveal the area’s sandy topsoil, which supports flowering ling heather and acidic grasslands favoured by rare reptiles and butterflies, including the silver-studded blue.
Without counting its extra-terrestrial inhabitants, the forest teems with Earth-bound life. As we turn south and pass an old sand pit at the forest’s edge, a roe deer breaks cover, springing noisily into the shadows. We divert into a clearing and come face-to-antenna with a strange black metallic object.
Much to my disappointment, it’s not actually a UFO. Beverley calls it ‘’the orange squeezer” (the resemblance is uncanny). Yet it’s neither an oversized kitchen gizmo nor an extra-terrestrial spacecraft. The truth isn’t ‘out there’, but instead is helpfully displayed on a nearby sign, which explains it’s a sculpture. It marks the spot where the US airmen saw “a craft of unknown origin” back in 1980. Installed by the Forestry Commission in 2014, it’s based on the eyewitness sketches made by Sergeant Jim Penniston, including the hieroglyphs on the craft’s hull.
When dawn broke on December 27th, air force personnel returned to the scene. Conducting a thorough search, they discovered broken branches in the treetops, singed wood and three small triangular depressions in the ground. The local police dismissed these as animal markings, but when Geiger counter readings were taken the following night, radiation levels around the holes proved to be 10 times higher than normal. That same night, the strange lights returned and the air base’s deputy commander was there to witness them. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt made a tape recording, reporting what he saw as it happened. A ‘sun-like’, pulsating light appeared in the east behind a farmhouse and was later joined by three star-like lights, which moved rapidly across the forest, flashing red, green and blue.
“I could not move – it was dreamlike” recalled another witness. “I felt slower on that night. Everything was on half speed and something was wrong.” A few weeks later, Halt sent an official report to the Ministry of Defence. The Halt Memo is seen by ‘Ufologists’ as recognition of an extra-terrestrial incursion by a senior military officer. But there are other explanations for what Halt and his men saw.
At the time of the Rendlesham Forest incident, Britain was gripped by Cold War paranoia. Across western Europe, NATO forces prepared for nuclear war and any unusual activity around military installations was deemed suspicious. Alien technology could easily be a Soviet secret weapon. In 1980, RAF Woodbridge was home to fighter bomber squadrons flying A-10 Thunderbolts, but some believe the USAF was secretly storing nuclear missiles here. Sceptics have suggested that the airmen saw either meteors, pranksters or the powerful, rotating beam of Orford Ness lighthouse, located five miles east of the supposed UFO landing site. The screaming women were probably muntjac deer.
With my little grey cells puzzling over the facts of the case, we backtrack to the main path and follow the last mile of the UFO Trail back to the car park. Whether or not a UFO really visited Suffolk back in 1980, we may never know. But even in daytime, Rendlesham Forest feels eerie. When dusk descends, its maze of tracks and trails is especially unsettling. Walk here if you dare.