So, is the theory likely?
Although the 67th ARRS is recognised as a satellite capsule recovery squadron, few people seem to have considered that the incident might be based on the unit trying to recover a satellite. The 67th was a specialist space capsule and aircrew retrieval unit, it was one of the very few in the whole of Europe specialised for such a purpose, and it was so important that it did not even report to the USAFE like the vast majority of American squadrons here, but reported directly to the DoD in Washington (see The 67th ARRS). And the Rendlesham Forest event involves something 'crashing out of the sky' right at the end of the 67th's runway. Out of all the places where this object could have landed, it did so on the very runway of a satellite retrieval squadron.
Some UFO commentators have noticed this, but the reasoning used to account for this appears less plausible. Jenny Randles suggests that the Americans could have successfully stolen a Soviet satellite from orbit and somehow guided it down into the forest, but this is unlikely for several reasons (see Soviet satellite crash). More outlandish theories are that visiting aliens crashed there because they found a satellite retrieval base intrinsically interesting to visit; or that RAF Woodbridge was sufficiently secure to arrange a meeting between earth representatives and space alien envoys.
But these all seem to get way from the point a bit.... The 67th was in Suffolk to recover American satellites. That was its job. At the very least we should consider the possibility that the 67th was trying to do just that in December 1980.
Did it go up, or down?
The witnesses into two groups: civilian and military. Overall there were at least fifty witnesses in some form or another, which is why Rendlesham Forest has become the most famous and best-attested 'UFO' case in Britain. But they do not all come out with the same story.
The military witnesses reported saucers, aliens, strange lights, jeep engines failing, cows going berserk, radioactive marks on the ground and on tree trunks etc. They saw an alien spacecraft carefully and quietly ease itself through the forest before finding an open field, and soaring back up into the sky again.
The civilian witnesses restrict their account to seeing something come down - a light crashing in from over Lowestoft, falling into the forest. And then they saw the airbase burst into frantic activity. But no one seems to have seen the object go back up. For this, all we have to go on is the word of people who would have an interest in keeping the real reason secret.
Would the Americans really have done this?
A great deal rests on whther the US military could have been capable of staging such an operation, and on how accurate is the science of pin-pointing satellite re-entry. Could anyone predict so precisely where a satellite would fall? The answer in this case is probably yes. The Americans knew exactly the orbit the craft was in, because they had put it there. They knew exactly when to fire the de-orbit engine on the film capsule, and exactly how fast it was going. They had gained much experience in plotting both manned and unmanned spacecraft re-entry trajectories. If anything, the back-up recovery site would be more precisely known than the primary mid-air one, as for the back-up there would be no chance of the parachute-borne capsule being blown by high winds. The film capsule wasn't coming in from far, either - only 170-ish kilometres. And they had given themselves plenty of room for error at Rendlesham, as they could be out by a good few miles and still crash the thing into uninhabited forest or farmland.
But would they have done so? The Americans could organise a film capsule drop into the North Sea, granted; that does not really affect anyone. But what this theory demands is that they chose as their back-up recovery site an area in civilian Suffolk.
Clearly this was an dangerous and stupid thing to do, and it could well have been fatal if it had gone wrong. If they did do this then it is no surprise that they tried to cover the whole thing up. Dropping a large, heavy lump of metal at 27,000 km/h into a suburb of Ipswich would be an scandal, if true. Why would the Americans think that the recovery of a film capsule was worth the risk?
Perhaps they never really believed that the parachutes would fail. They never failed on any of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, after all. These were good, strong, US-built parachutes; so the question of placing the back-up recovery site never seriously arose. They believed, firstly, that they could indeed target a satellite so accurately that it would land on the very runway of the airfield itself; and secondly, that this belief would never be put to the test. But on 27/28 December the parachutes did fail. Fortunately for everyone, the first belief was true, and the capsule stayed on course. But perhaps it scared them, and they never planned a recovery this way again.
More research
It should be easy to prove this theory wrong. The most important aspect to research is to discover precisely when Big Bird 16 dropped its film capsules. I have yet not been able to find this out, but of course that's not to say the information is not around somewhere. If Big Bird did not do a drop on or around the 27/28 December 1980 then there is no way a film capsule can account for the event. (If BB 16 did drop one, however, then the theory becomes a great deal stronger.)
On to The 67th ARRS
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