<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

The Rendlesham Forest UFO incident took place in Suffolk, East Anglia which lies in the rural backwater of southeastern England and is only a two hour drive from London. While Suffolk is best known to many for its charming towns and villages, rolling countryside and world class bird watching, it has a far more sobering association for a select number of locals and former United States Air Force personnel. On three successive nights in late December, 1980, this area was the setting for what is now regarded as the most significant, and best documented military UFO incident in history. And at the time in question Suffolk was also one of the most highly fortified and secured concentrations of military installations in the entire NATO establishment.

What made, and continues to make the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident so significant? Almost everything. Ground to air sightings confirmed by radar; evidence of abduction among some of the men involved; confirmation of a major nuclear treaty violation; documented physiological changes to organic material in landing zones; the undeniable animal reactions (wild, domesticated and livestock) to the 1980 events; the burns to the retinas of the eyes of one of the co-authors of the main book on the subject, confirmed in his Air Force medical records; the beams of light which shot from the unknowns to the ground, both within the (nuclear) Weapons Storage Area and the surrounding countryside, and the knowledge that they “adversely affected the ordinance”; the unnerving suspension of the passport of the first eyewitness to blow the whistle on events, and the resulting meetings with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark who helped him get it back. Then there were the many, often moving personal accounts of the military and civilian witnesses; the trail of military documents and the historic evidence gathered along the way in researching the book. In the field of UFO studies, as well as in the broader territory of investigative journalism, this is about as good as it gets.

The first hand-accounts of the men involved read like something between a first rate spy novel and completely unnerving science fiction. And had the particulars of the three nights of events been made public in the first years following the incursion, the then-special relationship that existed between the United Kingdom and the United States. The main reason for this had nothing to do with unidentified flying objects – it had to do with a major, undisclosed treaty violation which existed in 1980: deep below Suffolk’s RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge, something like three hundred and fifty thousand kilotons of American nuclear ordinance was being secured, in full violation of a U.S.A. treaty with Great Britain. This was a truly chilling backdrop against which to be facing a seeming invasion of unknown craft from who knew where.

Once the story broke in 1983, specifically through the efforts of one of the honorably discharged Airmen, there was no going back; almost every newspaper in the United Kingdom and much of the broadcast media covered the events in as much detail as was available. Another blast of media interest followed Her Majesty’s Ministry of Defence’s 2000 release of event-related documents. This pattern was repeated after the Ministry’s even larger 2002 document release. The last wave of press and broadcast interest in the incident occurred in December, 2005 when a small but dedicated cadre of individuals met in the snowy woods the night of the twenty seventh to mark the twenty fifth anniversary of one of ufology’s seminal events.

Many students of this subject are hopeful that more information will emerge with the passage of time and that more of the people who were involved will come forward to make their accounts public. Eyewitness and whistleblower Larry Warren nailed the significance of the Bentwaters-Woodbridge UFO incident in a remark he made on a 1994 ITV (UK) documentary: “This one will never go away.” Indeed it won’t. Not for anyone who cares about the truth about UFOs or is concerned with the lengths governments will go to in keeping such truths from us. Nor will it ever go away for any of the men and women whose lives were so drastically changed in Suffolk twenty five years ago.

For more information on the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident, consider an online search, or read any of the available books on the subject, which include You Can’t Tell the People by Georgina Bruni (Pan Books) Left At East Gate: A First-Hand Account of the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident, Its Cover-up and Investigation by Larry Warren and Peter Robbins, published by COsimo Books.

Provided by Peter Robbins.