RADAR Development

[Observer]

Vince Thirkettle retracted his statement about the light house on a recent documentary.
Obs

[AdrianF]

Obs

I think that you're refferring to the Sci Fi Channel doc that Robert M has quoted above. It appears that Vince Thurkettle was put on the spot a little and probably didn't know what to make of this sudden new development.

Going back to the original witness statements and our fury friends, this excerpt from JBs original statement shows that he was aware of 2 types of animal noises ie; screaming sounds and then farmyard animals:

We stopped the truck where the road stopped and went on foot. We crossed a small open field that let into where the lights were coming from, and as we were coming into the trees there were strange noises, like a woman screaming. Also the woods lit up and you could hear the farm animals making a lot of noises, and there was a lot of movement in the woods.

Also, JB states that they crossed a small open field before entering the trees. As we all know, if you go down the logging roads as they are today, you wouldn't cross a field before entering the forest and this is where a lot of this confusion on the route to the landing site has stemmed from. It is possible that they crossed an area of forest that had been cleared and described this as a field, or they crossed the farmers field at the end of the logging road and then entered a small patch of trees further to the south. John, maybe you could comment on this?

Vince Thurkettle, being a forester at the time, might be able to remember which parts of the forest had been cleared at the time, or the logging records at the Forestry Offices, might shed some light on this. Probably a very long shot, but if anybody could come up with an aerial photo from the Christmas/New Year period 80/81 then it would really give more of an idea on how the forest appeared then.

Adrian

[Observer]

Adrian
A lot of the forest changed in design and routes when re planted after the great storm and it can be very confusing for those visiting it now who may still remember the old lay out.
When i went shooting in that forest at night we heard the odd Fox 'scream' and it was uncannily like a woman screaming. There screaming during mating is the best example.
I think this thread is getting a tad farcical.
Obs

[puddlepirate]

The 'screaming' JB referred to fits with the noise the muntjac make when startled plus JB refers to farm animals so Halt and his men knew the difference between farm animals and wild life. JB's statement also serves to confirm the fact they must have been near a farm with livestock. Consequently, it now seems pretty certain the landing site Halt was taken to is near Oak Wood.

I believe that in 1980 the area to the right of the east gate road, when facing east, was devoid of trees giving a reasonably clear view to the south from the east gate sentry post. I also understand from a photo on Lori Rendfeldt's website that in 1980 the gatehouse at east gate was a simple fibreglass sentry box, not the brick/glass gate house of later years. It would have been a spooky place to be at night in December.

If the forest near track twelve was also clear of trees it might have been possible to see lights in the clearing near Oak Wood from a position at east gate. I mention this because although the location of the landing site appears to have been resolved what has not been answered is:

what did P,B & C witness - in particular what attracted the attention of the sentries on the first night.
why were lightalls and a substantial number of personnel needed
what were they searching for
what was the C5 up to
what caused the burnt areas that Andy referred to
why was an area of forest cordoned off and guarded by the USAF
what did LW witness
etc, etc

From a sky map it can be seen that the moon was in its third quarter and quite low in the sky at the time Halt set off across the fields. Add that to the Cosmos re-entry, the meteors, the lighthouse, the Shipwash light and you have a whole host of lights, some in the sky, some at sea level or just about. Therefore and from the info in these recent posts, it would seem that Halt's pursuit across the fields is an irrelevance as far as the incident at the centre of the RFI is concerned.

I now suspect that by focusing on the Halt tape and memo, we are being diverted from the principal event. I also suspect that by pure coincidence there were two quite separate incidents, the first being what P,B&C witnessed allied to what LW saw and the second the lights that Halt saw - and it is this second incident that is causing confusion and diverting attention from the first.

It is my belief that to move this forward we need to forget about what Halt saw and concentrate on what JB and his colleagues witnessed and how that fits with what LW saw and other associated activities such as the symptoms experienced by JB et al, Orfordness, closure of Cobra Mist, the scorched areas, the prison evac alert, the C5 etc..

[Observer]

Puddle
I was told by some one who was employed at BW that when a C-5 Galaxy visited and if it was parked in a secure area with it's own security, it was invariably to do with munitions delivery/transfer.
When a C-141 or C-5 visited and was not parked in a secure area it was other cargo.
Obs

[puddlepirate]

Thanks Obs but I seem to recall from previous post on the forum (possibly from LW but apologies to LW if that is incorrect) that this C-5 was not on a regular run and that whatever was unloaded/loaded either went into or came from, the forest. This one came in on the Monday 29th and left on Wednesday 31st (New Year's Eve - an odd time to go if it was a regular maintenance flight).

With regard to the regular C-5 would I be right in thinking that the same aircraft or perhaps one of a group of three or four would be operating on a standard route between UK bases and wherever the weapons were taken to? If so, then the same tail nos would be seen on a regular basis.

Would I also be correct in thinking that the tail / registration nos plus DTG of arrival/departure of all aircraft visiting the bases would be recorded in the tower flight log?

[Observer]

Puddle
You and Larry Warren are right, it was an unscheduled visit mainly due to the dates involved.
No body has been able to establish though from which command/fleet the C-5 was from.
I know my mate who worked at the base said no body took much notice of the C-5 visits.

As for tail insignia/numbers, yes, it is probably logged in the tower movement log, but getting at those records may prove difficult. John Burroughs may be able to throw more light on this aircraft and its ID.

There have been suggestions that the C-5 was not USAF, but CIA or even NASA, but the latter would have NASA in huge letters on it and a different colour to camo. I'm not even sure NASA had any C-5's let alone the CIA?

My personal view is that it was a USAF C-5 and it was there because there had been an incident that required the presence of specialist people. I also believe that it was there to 'collect' rather than deliver.

Re the screams in the forest, it was the Muntjac S-----G the Fox.

Obs

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
Arthur C Clarke

[John Burroughs]

All I can say about the C-5 is that i saw it come in IE land and it was not a normal arrival. From where I was I could not see anything different Ie NSA or CIA I was not close enough to see what base or tail number was on the aircraft and it went directly to the hot row area escorted by one of our vehicles. As far as where I was in the forrest I will say it again it been alsmost 28years and I was out there at night. My statement is a true account of where we went in. I did get wet going threw and I say this after 28 years a small creek. I remember going through a farmers field after climbing over a small fence. I was cold and wet but I was driven by finding out what it was we had just encountered. And I will add somthing else you need to figure out what caused the engery spikes that we encountered. Something had to cause the whole forrest to light up the way it did. And there was nobody on duty at the east gate steefens and I were on patrol in a police car when we went to check the east gate and we then saw the strange lights. And it was just a small bldg on the side of the road not in the middle.

[Observer]

John
There is no doubt why the C-5 was there and parked over near the WSA. The lights in the forest, the WSA and the C-5 are all linked.
Bentwaters is a couple of miles from Woodbridge so did these guys from the C-5 drive over to Rendlesham Forest and who took them? SP maybe?
Obs

[John Burroughs]

They ran there own show and from what I was told they had there own equipment and vechiles....

[Observer]

Thanks John
Thats very helpful, so the C-5 carried vehicles and equipment which they used.
Some body must have shown them the way to Rendlesham forest from Bentwaters and that would have to be by public road?
Obs

[puddlepirate]

I believe LW mentioned vehicles being off loaded from the C-5 and more vehicles leaving Woodbridge via east gate but declined to comment on what type of vehicles.

Interesting comment from JB that the tree damage might have been caused by something going up, not down. Initial thoughts on that are something being launched from the forest. If something went up then how did it get into the forest in the first place and what goes up usually comes down. To consider a hypothetical forest launch for a moment - what would that look like? What would be the purpose? It would be something small(ish), covert (or why launch from within a forest), with rocket engines, rocket fuel (hydrazine?) and some kind of launch vehicle. It would be interesting to know a bit more about the scorch marks on the forest floor that Andy reported. Not sure if a missile hitting the forest canopy immediately after launch would send it off track or whether it would simply break through and rely on onboard computers to recover its trajectory.

Be a bit of a hoot if the red lights in the forest were the tail lamps of a launch vehicle - and the yellow flashing light nothing more than its turn indicators. As an ex-mechanic I'd find that totally hilarious (Hey, Mick - are the indicators working? Yes...no...yes...no....)

Being serious though... JB:if I'm not sure if I've understood the sequence of events correctly. perhaps you could confirm...

The guard post at east gate was not manned. Yourself, Penniston and Cabansag were on patrol in a squad car and had reached east gate. You then received a call from the CSC that Bentwaters tower had seen lights hovering over the forest in the area of east gate. Did CSC instruct your patrol to go off base to investigate or did your patrol see strange lights, confirming what the tower had seen, then suggest to CSC that you leave base to investigate (I assume Penniston was patrol commander?). In either case did you leave the base in the squad car of did you leave the car at east gate then proceed on foot? If you left base in the car, where did you park the vehicle before approaching the craft that Penniston saw? One last thing - on the second night, when the lights came back, who saw them first?

From the flight controller's desks in the Bentwaters tower there is a good view of the treeline in the direction of Woodbridge, some two and three quarter miles to the south. However, at night it is very difficult to establish the size of any light - it could be a small light nearby or a large light some distance away. Therefore it would have been extremely difficult to determine the location of the lights over the forest, much less to pinpoint them as being near east gate, nor would the observer in the tower have been able to see any lights actually in the forest at east gate. To pin down even an approximate location of the lights would have required at least two observers in different locations, possibly even three, to provide independent co-ordinates, i.e. if the tower saw lights on a bearing of 180 they would not know how far along that line the lights were. It would need another observer at a different location to provide a sighting reference on, say, 035. By plotting the two sightings on their respective bearings, where the tracks intersect is where the lights would be (approximately). Did anyone report the lights being on a specific bearing? If not, then there is a high probability that the lights the tower saw were not the lights seen in the forest and that to come across the lights in the forest was coincidental.

I realise some contributors to the forum will consider pursuing this to be as farcical as the animal noises but I believe it is important to remove anything peripheral to the core event. This is simply to get to whatever it was - ELF/EM or whatever - that gave rise to the symptoms experienced by JB, LW et al.

One last comment. If there was no flying - as we have been told many, many times - why was the Bentwaters tower manned?

[Observer]

Puddle
To add to your observations, the 'scorch' marks reported by 'forgotten' who? This adds to the theory that some thing may have been launched from the forest.
During the cold war all operational airfield control towers were manned 24/7/365. On non flying days it was a skeleton duty crew. The twin bases had closed down for Christmas, but one had to have a duty crew which was BW. I'm not sure about the early cruise missiles, but more recent ones are launched by a solid fuel propellant which was considered much safer.
My only concern with this scenario is that if a cruise was launched then it was an act of war [which would have been suicidal] and i don't remember any retaliatory responses from the Soviet Union at that time. So yes its possible some thing was launched but not necessarily a weapon.
However, could an accidental launching have occurred in which case you either shoot it down if thats possible or you warn the Russians it was an accident, which i doubt they would buy.
Obs

[puddlepirate]

Hi Obs. Not sure it would have been Cruise - I put that theory forward some time ago on the basis that circa July 80 permission had been granted to site Cruise in the UK but this was dismissed out of hand by the forum.

The reason I proposed Cruise was because it seemed to me that although the storage facilities at Molesworth hadn't been completed in Dec 80 that might not have deterred the US from getting them here asap (perhaps they were already here, prior to permission being given). Cruise was fired from a truck mounted launch platform, from locations such as forests where the launchers and support vehicles could obtain maximum concealment. However, we (US/UK) would not have launched a Cruise missile - as you rightly said, that would have been unnecessary and suicidal. But if Cruise was here (and the final decision by Parliament to allow Cruise to be sited in the UK seemed a tad hurried so there could have been something going on) it might well have been brought up to a forward position as (a) an exercise to run through the deployment and launch procedure at a time when very few people were around and / or (b) just in case things in Poland got out of hand.

A Polaris launch would have been from an SSBN out in the Atlantic and a bit heavy handed to say the least. I believe Cruise came in various flavours which could be matched to the situation in hand. So bringing a couple of them up as a contingency should events in Poland escalate, would - if they were here of course - make strategic sense. Deploying them in Rendlesham forest would meet the concealment criteria and shorten the range to target. Plus support could be close at hand from WSA tecchies.

Deployment of Cruise missiles in Rendlesham forest in Dec 80 would be so incredibly sensitive that it would had to have been covered up. There would be no option. The local population would have gone ballistic (excuse the pun) and would have been doing walls of death around Whitehall for months. Maggie would never have allowed that to happen.

They could not use the airfields because there was no cover - a spy satellite would have pinged the launchers in minutes - so the forest was ideal. In another hypothetical situation perhaps they raised the launcher, hit the flippin' trees and damaged a missile warhead or two (would it have been possible to knock a warhead off the end?) Enter specialists from the C-5......

[AdrianF]

The guard post at east gate was not manned. Yourself, Penniston and Cabansag were on patrol in a squad car and had reached east gate. You then received a call from the CSC that Bentwaters tower had seen lights hovering over the forest in the area of east gate.

PP
I believe that JB stated he was on patrol with Steffens, when they saw lights go down in the forest. Penniston and Cabansaq were then called over to the east gate to investigate.

One last thing - on the second night, when the lights came back, who saw them first?

If you mean the night of Halts patrol, then good question, as I've never been very clear on this. It could have been Rick Bobo, who saw a large craft over the forest from the BW tower. Also, Jerry Valdez Sanchez reported Georgina Bruni, that he and Mark Beaucham that he and Mark Beaucham called this in. I also think the Greg Battram was put on the scene first in the forest, so why was he there in the first place?

Adrian

[Observer]

Peter
I like your last paragraph, perfectly possible.
Just as a point worth noting, if you launched a cruise it would have woken the neighbourhood up!!!
If this was the case, the British government would have sactioned it as how do you explain to the gangs of forestry workers not to mention local dog walkers what you were doing on their property. They would have said F--K off and fight your war somewhers else.
You can imagine the scenario. They get one in place on its launch vehicle and start raising the platform, it collides with some branches and the whole missile falls off broken, there is fuel every where and the war head is leaking radiation. OH SHIT. They were powered by a miniture jet engine that ran on Kerosine/paraffin as jet engines do.
Do some research on the cruise to see what launch motor they used as i do know the more recent ones were solid fuel.
Yes, the C-5 was there after the event for obvious reasons.
Obs

[puddlepirate]

Adrian, thanks for that. I'm trying to get a handle on the sequence of events when the lights were first observed, by whom and from where. Ditto the second night when Halt was called from the social event. It is very, very difficult to accurately identify the position of lights at night. The same goes for an object carrying lights - it could be large, it could be small. It could be moving away or simply turning. There is a very good video at the BCWM which shows what at first glance is a UFO - a yellow oval shape hovering over the Bentwaters runway. After several seconds it becomes clear that the object is an A-10 coming in to land in the pouring rain with its landing lights on. The aircraft cannot be clearly seen until almost the point at which it touches down. Therefore, at night unless the lights are obviously an aircraft's navigation lights it is virtually impossible to determine identity and precise location.

Thus even a patrol at east gate, advised by guys in the Bentwaters tower, would not be able to establish if the lights were actually coming down in the forest or at a place some distance beyond. Something simply overflying the forest at low altitude, if it were moving away on a direct line ahead of the observer, could also be mistaken for something coming down.

My view is that what was in the sky is a diversion. It is what JB and his colleagues saw on the ground that is important - and I believe they happened upon that by pure accident.

[Observer]

Just to clear up a few things concerning the vehicles that came off the C-5.
The C-5 landed at Bentwaters and was parked in a secure zone not far from the WSA.
In order for the vehicles plus equipment to drive to Rendlesham Forest they would need to go by public road. It was over two miles by road.
These drivers would not have a clue about navigating strange roads possibly at night in a foreign country and driving on the left, so it would be logical that they were escorted by BW SP or some other unit with local knowledge from BW to Woodbridge airfield, the main entrance/ guard room being off a 'C' class road that forks off the B-1083 at Sutton Hoo. They then exited WB airfield at East Gate and into the forest.
The only other way is left out of BW down the A 1152 and left up the B 1084 and forking right for Capel Green. As JB said he saw these vehicles coming and going through East Gate, so i assume that my first idea is how they got from A to B.

Obs

[John Burroughs]

Puddle
The gate was not manned. Steffen and I were on patrol and spoted the lights and reported them. Bentwaters tower did not report seeing the lights. LT Burren sent us off base Heathrow tower and the eastern radar was called by CSC and reported they spotted a object on radar over Woodbridge and then lost it on radar that is why we went into the forrest based off of that and what we saw looking for a downed aircraft. Bentwaters tower sometimes shut down but most of the time it was manned by one person. I once busted a guy who was on his way to the tower on Sunday night driving drunk it turned into a big deal and they had to get somebody in right away because the sembock shuttle from Germany was due in. We went in Penniston pickup truck and drove as far as we could until we had to go on foot...

[puddlepirate]

Hi JB - many thanks.