The possibility of the Americans stealing a Russian satellite has already been suggested as an explanation for Rendlesham Forest. Jenny Randles speculates that the USAF could have 'guided down' a Soviet satellite from its orbit, perhaps one with a 'nuclear engine', which would be enough of a secret for the Americans to concoct a UFO cover story. The fact that a Russian satellite did re-enter on the night of 27/28 December 1980 seems to support this. However, I think enough is known about the Russian satellites at the time to rule this out.

There were only two Russian satellites in orbit at the time which could be serious contenders, C1227 and C749.

Cosmos 1227

C1227 was a third generation photo reconnaissance spysat, designed to take high resolution photographs of a single area, and was essentially a spherical-cylindrical shape, weighing about 5,900 kg or so. It was launched from Plesetsk in NE USSR on an A-2 launcher on Tuesday 16 December 1980, at 3.15 pm local time (12.15 GMT), and was put into a standard low-level polar spysat orbit, like Big Bird.

C1227 had a much shorter life span, however. Like all third generation Russian spysats, it was designed to stay up for only 13-14 days or so. (For this reason the USSR needed to launch dozens of satellites to offer permanent coverage - 34 were launched in 1980 alone.) Once in a 350 x 420 km orbit it only needed eleven days in which to cover the whole of the earth's surface in 2% wide strips. C1227 lasted 11.8 days, in fact; it re-entered at 7.00 GMT on Sunday 28 December, and landed in Kazakhstan.

Are the Americans likely to have tried to capture it?

No. A cheap expendable capsule like C1227 would not have been worth the bother. It certainly would not have had a 'nuclear engine', as the Russians would not have needed to go to the trouble of putting one on board if they knew it would be coming back down in eleven days or so. Third generation spysats did not even have solar arrays, as they could happily run off a battery for the short time they were in orbit. Nuclear fuels are used only rarely in satellites, and certainly not for anything which even has a slim chance of coming back into the earth's atmosphere.

Moreover, if we are to believe that the US did successfully capture a satellite from its orbit, then we would expect the Soviets to freeze their launch programme until they figured out a way of combating this threat. But the Cosmos launches carry on as normal after C1227, implying that nothing odd had happened at all. And, despite all the revelations of the USSR's space launches which have emerged since 1989, nothing has appeared about a 'stolen' satellite.

Finally, a 7.00 GMT re-entry time is a bit late for an event supposed to have occurred around midnight.

Cosmos 749 C-1 upper stage

C749, on the other hand, was a much better piece of kit. This was a small ELINT (electronic intelligence) satellite, only weighing 2,200 kg or so, and had been launched on top of a C-1 booster from Plesetsk years previously, on 4 July 1975. C749's orbit was higher and lasted longer: 1,911 days, according to the RAE satellite tables. On the other hand, C749 was not heat-shielded, and would have burnt up in the upper atmosphere had it not already been detonated by its ground controllers on 26 September 1980.

The important thing about C749, from the Rendlesham Forest point of view, was its upper stage booster, the part of the C-1 rocket which had put it into its final orbit. Instead of falling back into the atmosphere as intended, the upper stage went into orbit on its own, even being given an international satellite designation number (1975-62 B). The lifetime of the upper stage lasted 2,001.84 days, only decaying on 25 December 1980.

It is this decay which has caused much speculation. The RAE tables comment that it was "observed over Sussex, England", and Jenny Randles in Sky Crash states that its break-up was seen over the Thames estuary. Randles wonders whether US helicopters picked it up from the sea, then accidentally dropped it over the forest, causing all the panic.

But it must be stressed that the 25th December re-entry was not of a satellite, only a charred piece of upper stage rocket, barely a cylinder of metal, surely not worth the effort. And there is no suggestion of the 67th guiding the thing back; the upper stage was free-falling.

Could anyone steal a satellite from its orbit, anyway?

How likely is it that the Americans had the technology in 1980 to 'steal' a foreign, orbiting satellite, and to guide it back to earth? Admittedly they knew precisely what was up there, and what orbits satellites were in, as in 1980 the 'Spacetrack' system at NORAD headquarters in the Cheyenne Mountains was working well, making thousands of satellite observations a day, logging decay and predicting re-entry. And both sides collected each other's space debris whenever possible - hence the necessity of blowing up redundant military satellites while still in orbit.

But nothing has turned up to suggest that either side could bring a force to bear on a satellite in its orbit (or a re-entering capsule) to actively force it down. The efforts made by the US to develop Star Wars technology as a way of destroying satellites while still in orbit suggests that no such system existed. And even if the US military did have such a system, would they have aimed the incoming satellite at Suffolk? (Of course, they could have aimed it at the North Sea, and it hit Rendlesham Forest as its back-up, but then we are back to the Big Bird theory anyway.)

There remains the possibility that a Russian satellite crashed onto the end of the runway at RAF Woodbridge by accident, but this coincidence - that a satellite should by chance fall into the hands of the only satellite retrieval unit for thousands of miles - just beggars belief.

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