by puddlepirate » Tue Aug 18, 2009 1:52 pm
From taking a step back and comparing the two principal nights, i.e. #1 (JP, JB, C and Ch) with night #2 (Halt et al) it seems very likely that there were two separate incidents that happened on consecutive nights.
Ignoring for a moment the number of personnel deployed to the forest, the three things that stand out most are the facts that:
a. it was dealt with entirely by the USAF
b. they took geiger counters with them
c. that two USAF/NSA investigators went to RAF Watton but found nothing
Possible explanations for a, b and c:
a. This strongly suggests that it was an internal USAF disciplinary issue that was contained within and dealt with by, the internal procedures of the USAF.
There are international protocols that govern excursions into a host nation's sovereign territory so I suspect that the USAF placed a courtesy call to Suffok Constabulary stating they were going off base to deal with an incident involving USAF personnel. As it was only a courtesy call, the full detail of the call was not logged and as it was purely an internal matter for the USAF, the police did not get involved other than perhaps a visit to the forest to liaise with senior officers to check everything was under control.
b and c. These are entirely different matters, undoubtedly linked but almost certainly related to something else. Something far more serious than (a) per se. Whether (a) was the reason for (b) and (c) is not known but given the whole RFI was dealt with by the USAF acting independently of either the local police or British security services, then it is very likely that (a) was indeed the reason for (b) and (c). Could it be that whatever was in the forest was something heavy, possibly containing radio active material and usually fitted to an aircraft and because of that, the investigators sent to Watton were somewhat bemused to discover that there was nothing on the tapes. Hence their insistence that there should be.
Does this mean that someone was playing a prank? Perhaps on night one they were delivering something, placing something in the forest that was either the real thing or looked very much like it and that whatever it was, it was something usually delivered by an aircraft? Could it even have been an act of potential sabotage by a group of USAF personnel? Did they use a tripod with a block and tackle fitted at the apex to hoist whatever it was from the back of a truck to the ground (i.e. lift it up, drive the truck away, then lower it) - was it this tripod, combined with the weight of whatever it was lifting, that left the marks in the ground?
One other thing that baffles me slightly is why did Halt bother to continue the chase as far as he did? He had no positive ID of anything other than odd lights and even those were in the sky, so why continue for what must have been almost a mile beyond the forest? That just does not make any sense at all.
You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time (Winston Churchill)...causa latet, vis est notissima