Something Landed In Rendlesham Forest And Left Three Marks In The Ground

RENDLESHAM, England — Three depressions in a clearing, seven inches across, in a triangle three metres on a side. A deputy base commander with a Dictaphone running. A radiation reading at the top of the background range.

And a lighthouse, 8.4 kilometres away, on a bearing of 106 degrees, flashing every five seconds, directly along the line the patrol was walking.

Every one of those is true. Most accounts of this give you some of them.

What is on the record

Lt Col Charles Halt's memo of 13 January 1981 is a real document, written by a serving officer, released in 1983, and it says what it says: unexplained lights, three depressions, and readings his team took with a hand-held meter.

The tape is real too. He recorded the second night as it happened, which is the single most valuable thing about this case and the reason it is not like the others. You can hear men working a problem in real time, and what you mostly hear is professionals being careful.

Nobody in this story is lying. That is worth saying at the top, because almost every account of Rendlesham is built on the assumption that somebody must be.

The lighthouse, stood in

Ian Ridpath-Salas has argued the lighthouse explanation since 1983 and agreed to walk our correspondent out there at night.

It works. From the eastern edge of the plantation, through the trunks, the Orford Ness beam does exactly what the witnesses described: it appears to hover, to move between trees as you move, and to be much closer than it is. Our correspondent, who spent nineteen years in air traffic control and has watched a great many lights, wrote in his notebook: "If I did not know, I would say four hundred metres."

Then he wrote the next line, which is why this story exists.

"But it does not account for the marks."

The map nobody pulled

We asked the Forestry Commission for the 1981 stand map. They sent it in nine days. As far as they can tell, nobody had asked before.

It matters because the lighthouse argument depends on sightlines, and sightlines depend on what the trees were doing in December 1980. The map shows the plantation as it stood: a 1958 planting, thinned in 1974, canopy closed, with a felled ride running almost exactly east.

That ride points at the lighthouse. It is in the diagram above and it is the strongest single thing we found for the lighthouse case, and we found it by asking a forestry office a boring question.

The notebook

Staff Sergeant Jim Penniston says information was put directly into his mind when he touched the object, and that he wrote it down as sixteen pages of ones and zeroes.

He produced the notebook about thirty years later.

That gap is the whole problem and this newspaper is going to be plain about it. There is no way to establish when ink went onto those pages. Not by chemistry — the ink and paper are ordinary and were available throughout. Not by provenance — it was in his possession the entire time. Not by testimony — nobody else saw it in 1980.

That does not make him a liar. It makes the notebook unusable, which is a different and much less interesting thing.

The decode

The binary is said to spell phrases and a set of coordinates.

We tried to get two people to decode it independently and could not get them to agree on where the string starts. Move the start by one bit and the whole thing changes. The coordinates that circulate were produced by a decoder making a choice about the offset, and a different choice gives different coordinates.

That is not a criticism of the decoder. It is a fact about binary with no framing.

What is left

Take away the notebook, because it is unusable. Take away the decode, because it depends on an arbitrary offset. Take away the lights, because a lighthouse eight kilometres away on the right bearing accounts for them and our own correspondent said so standing in the field.

What is left is three depressions in the ground, a radiation reading at the top of the background range, and an official memo written by a man who had no reason to write it.

Dr. Priya Achterberg-Nwosu sampled that clearing for us in May and found nothing at all, and asked us to print that a null soil result in 2026 tells you almost nothing about December 1980, because forty-six years of Suffolk rain is a very effective process.

So: three marks, one memo, and a lighthouse. This newspaper cannot get past that and is not going to pretend it has.