Rendlesham Forest

A colonel taped it as it happened, and a lighthouse matches the flash rate

Rendlesham Forest is about six square miles of Forestry Commission conifer plantation, heath and wetland in Suffolk, some eight miles east of Ipswich, and in December 1980 it became the setting for Britain's most famous UFO case, sometimes called Britain's Roswell. At the time two airbases flanked it, RAF Bentwaters to the north and RAF Woodbridge on the west, both run by the United States Air Force.

Around three in the morning of 26 December, a security patrol near Woodbridge's east gate saw lights apparently coming down into the trees. Thinking an aircraft had crashed, they went in. According to the later memo of the deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, they found a glowing, metallic-looking object with coloured lights that seemed to move away through the trees, while animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy. Sergeant Jim Penniston later claimed he had touched a warm craft of unknown origin, though nobody else corroborated it and he made no mention of it at the time. Local police called out shortly after four saw only the Orford Ness lighthouse on the coast. At daybreak the airmen found three small depressions in a clearing, with burn marks and broken branches nearby.

Two nights later Halt went out himself with several men and a micro-cassette recorder, talking as he went. With a standard military radiation meter they measured readings slightly above background in the depressions. They watched a flashing red light across the fields to the east, and later three star-like lights low in the sky, the brightest seeming to beam down streams of light for two or three hours.

The sceptical case is strong. The first lights coincided with a bright fireball over southern England. Police and foresters identified the landing marks as rabbit diggings. The flashing light lay in exactly the direction of the Orfordness lighthouse, then one of the brightest in Britain, about five miles beyond the forest's edge, and on Halt's own tape it flashes every five seconds, the lighthouse's rate; two of the first night's airmen later said they had followed it and found a beacon. The brightest star-like light matched Sirius. In 2003 a former security policeman, Kevin Conde, said he had once shone modified patrol car lights through the trees as a prank, though nothing ties that to these nights. The Ministry of Defence concluded the events posed no threat to national security, even as a former chief of the defence staff warned in 1985 that they could prove a political banana skin.

Today the Forestry Commission runs a UFO trail through the forest, ending at a metal sculpture based on one serviceman's sketch.