It is impossible to research the hypothetical. That said, there are many stories and images which suggest strange craft have visited Earth. Some of these stories date from thousands of years ago, e.g. the Bible and Ezekiel (you can open a Bible and read it for yourself or go here: 
http://www.bibleufo.com/zezekiel.htm). Then of course there is 'Chariot of the Gods: was God an astronaut?'; Von Daniken, E; ISBN-10: 0808511122 / ISBN-13: 978-0808511120). There are also several ancient paintings which show strange aircraft. Some can be found here: 
http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgur ... n%26sa%3DN. There is a book of such artwork: 
http://www.ufoartwork.com/bookproject.html. Interestingly, many such paintings date from the 15th cent. and at least one ("The Annunciation" by Carlo Crivelli) hangs in the National Gallery, London. The painting depicts a disk shaped UFO-type object throwing down a beam of light down onto Mary's head. Thus, these are not paintings knocked up in someone's backyard but respected works of art. Of course, the fact that UFOs appear in old paintings is not evidence of alien beings or alien craft but it is odd to say the least.
Then there are the extraordinarily intricate crop circle designs. Many such circles appear in England and are claimed to have been created by a couple of guys with wooden planks tied to bits of string. But given the complexity and apparent accuracy of these intricate designs and that in England in midsummer there are only a few hours of darkness, probably no more than five at the most, then it stretches belief that these circles could have been created by a couple of blokes creeping about fields between 11pm and 4am after a couple of pints in the local pub.....
However, to get back to basics. Research has to be built on hard fact and uncovering evidence, not any number of constantly changing hypotheses. Unfortunately, the forum appears to have shifted from being a focal point of serious research to a debating society, discussing endless 'what if' type scenarios centred on unknown weapons technologies, time travel and so forth. 
Worthy though such discussions might be, they overlook the fact that a senior USAF officer sent a memo to the MoD and the US DoD, in response to an FoI request, instead of simply stating that 'we do not hold any information relating to that event' took the peculiar step of forwarding the enquiry the MoD in the UK. A most unusual response to an FoI request given that, allegedly, only MoD were aware of the existence of the Halt memo.
To me at least, it is not what happened in the forest that is odd, it is what happened afterwards and as Observer has pointed out, what did not happen during the daylight hours. As Sherlock Holmes once remarked - but the dog did not bark in the night time! Apparently, despite the fenzy of activity in the forest at night, nothing appears to have been going on in the forest during daylight hours and that has to be strange to say the least. Also, one would have thought that on seeing the lights in the forest and deploying a number of personnel off base to investigate, both bases would immediately have gone to full alert. But they did not. That is also very strange.
 
			
				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