The Rendlesham Forest event, on or around the night of Saturday to Sunday, 27/28 December 1980, is one of the most famous 'UFO' incidents in Britain. More than fifty witnesses, both military and civilian, have come forward to give their impressions of what happened, and the case prompted the disclosure of one of the few official defence documents relating to a UFO sighting. Explanations of the event range from crashing alien spaceships to wild drug parties, and from distant lighthouses to bizarre secret military experiments.
Put simply, the theory I am presenting here suggests that the men of the 67th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery squadron, based in Rendlesham Forest, were just doing their job. It is known that a spy satellite was orbiting at that date, and it is known that the 67th was one of the units assigned to collect the film capsules dropped from the satellite. Here I am putting these two facts together.
While the mother satellite carries on in its orbit the capsule begins re-entry over the North Sea, heading SSW. Some Lockheed HC-130 Hercules aircraft and a group of HH-53C helicopters of the 67th ARRS are on station over the Dogger Bank, waiting to retrieve the falling capsule, either from mid-air (by Hercules) or from the sea (by helicopter). But the parachutes on the capsule fail to open. Whereas the parachutes would have slowed down the satellite substantially, changing its trajectory, the capsule still continues along its original descent path, flying fast and high above the waiting (and now redundant) aircraft.
The possibility of a parachute failure had already been explored by Big Bird's controllers, and re-entry for film capsules had been calculated in such a way that if everything went wrong, and the capsule did become a free-falling rock, it would still land at a site where the recovery team can collect it. In this case the back-up recovery site is RAF Woodbridge itself. Only a few minutes after the 67th learn of the parachute failure, the capsule, recovery lights blazing, flies over Lowestoft (getting noticed on radar in the process) and crashes into Rendlesham Forest at the end of the airfield's runway. The emergency base crew start rushing about in the forest to find the thing, and a cover story is put into immediate effect.
Neither the USAF nor the MOD want people to know that they've been aiming satellites into Suffolk, yet many civilians (and military personnel at the base not privy to the secret Big Bird recoveries, too) are bound to have seen something come crashing in, and have noticed the base burst into a flurry of activity. The cover story spreads deliberate misinformation about the incident, claiming that a 'UFO' has landed. Any other story (eg. a meteor or a plane crash) would need some sort of hard evidence the 67th would later have to show investigators, but a 'UFO' story is implausible enough to discredit witnesses. The bare bones of the story are: saucer with lights, jeep engines failing, cows going crazy in the fields etc. Deliberate confusion is spread about the date and the specific location of the incident. Depressions are dug in the ground, and shown later to the police. The radar tape is taken. Engineers come in to repair the damage done to the runway lights by the capsule's crash. Base personnel not in on the truth hear the rumours and organise their own 'sky-watching' parties in the next few nights. Senior base personnel similarly unaware of the 67th's activities insist that Colonel Halt sends a memo to the MOD, which he does. The MOD refer researchers to UFO stories, both now and in 1983 when the incident blows up in public again. Halt is later promoted. Over time the whole thing becomes a mass of claim and counter-claim.
Discussion of the theory looks critically at the basis of the theory, and the Appendices (The 67th ARRS, Big Bird, Satellite Recoveries, RAF Woodbridge and Bentwaters, A Soviet Satellite crash?) contain supporting information.
I would like to thank Richard Kidd and Michael Akeroyd for comments and suggestions.
August 1996
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