The Rendlesham Forest Incident with Jeff Butchko

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Ep. 104

The Rendlesham

Forest Incident

 

Tonight we talk about what is perhaps the most well documented ufo sighting, and depending on who you talk to, one of the best examples that aliens have been to earth! Hot damn! Not only is it well documented, the credibility of those involved, with a few exceptions which have weeded out, is pretty much as good as it gets. Not only that, but... it wasn't just a couple of people that witnessed part of this event. At least 80 people saw it, first hand, and that doesn't include people from the town and area surrounding where this incident took place. We're of course talking about the one, the only, the Rendlesham forest incident!!

 

    Most of our story and info today comes from an amazing book we found called Encounter in Rendlesham Forest written by Nick Pope with assistance from two of the main players in the incident, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, both retired from the United States air force. Nick Pope actually worked for the British ministry of defense investigating UFOs, alien abductions, crop circles and more. So, basically Moody’s dream job.

 

So, the Rendlesham forest incident was actually composed of two, count em two, sightings in just a couple of days span. We’ll discuss both incidents and then talk about theories and such. So let's dive into it.

 

The Rendlesham area was home to two military bases, Bentwater and Woodbridge. The two bases were separated by roughly 300-400 yards of forest… The, you guessed it, Rendlesham forest. The forest itself was pretty thick and dense. Both bases were run by the US. Both bases were speculated to house nuclear weapons. It was never confirmed or denied. Many people believe that's the reason for this UFO visit. Nuclear power seeking aliens! Amazing. Also it gives even more credibility to those involved being that they were in charge of a pile of nukes. Or were they?

 

On the night of December 26 1980, John Burroughs, who was an airman first class, saw strange red and blue lights on Rendlesham forest outside of the gates of the base  while patrolling the east gate of the Woodbridge base. At first Burroughs thought the lights may have been a civilian aircraft that crashed. He began the prices of running the report through the proper channels to investigate the lights. First he reported to staff sergeant Bud Stefans, who then ran it too sergeant Crash McCabe, who in turn got a hold of sergeant John Coffey, who then ran it up to the on duty flight chief which was staff sergeant Jim Penniston. 

 

At this point Penniston decided to head out and check out the situation himself. He headed out to the east gate with his driver Edward Cabansag. As they arrived at the east gate, Bud Stefans would make a strange remark. He said "it didn't crash… It landed." White this was going on they had the control tower check around with their radar and also contact other air force bases in the area as well as Heathrow airport to see if they saw anything. Turns out about 15 minutes before the lights were seen, a "bogey" was seen on radar but disappeared as it got directly over Woodbridge. Penniston, Burroughs, and another dude named master sergeant Chandler headed into the forest while Cabansag hung bag. As they got closer to the lights all of their radios began to malfunction. It was as if something was trying to interfere with the radio signal. In order to trust messages back to the base, Chandler went back to the Jeep while Penniston and Burroughs pressed on. As they walked further into the forest they described a change in the air as they drew closer to the lights. They said it felt like the air was charged with electricity and the hairs on the back of their necks and arms stood up. After this they said it became hard to walk, as if they were wading through deep water. They finally made it to the source of the light in a small clearing. They say there was a sudden explosion of bright light except that it was completely silent. Both men hit the deck and waited for a minute to be sure it was safe. When the men stood up they saw something unbelievable. Penniston claims they were looking at a small triangular craft roughly 9 ft tall by 9ft wide resting on tripod-like legs. He said the way it looked was similar to our lunar lander. On the side of the craft he says there were a bunch of blue lights while a white light was on top. The craft was completely silent. Penniston decided to approach closer. He described the area around the craft as a "bubble field". As he entered the field he claims that all of the ambient noise in the area ceased. He described it like the air was dead. The static charge he had felt earlier was even stronger. He claimed to turn and yell to Burroughs but Burroughs was just standing and staring at the object. Penniston said he thought he was going to die. In his head he thought this object a weapon. He didn't know if his radio was working so he decided to pull out his notebook and start documenting the incident that way. As he got nearer to the object he said he saw strange symbols on the side of the craft. They appeared to be etched into the side of the craft. Penniston said the symbols were not recognizable. He said at best there was a passing resemblance to Egyptian hieroglyphs. 

 

     Being a real man's man, Penniston then decided it would be a great idea to touch the object. He said that it was smooth like running your hand over glass but the symbols were rough like sandpaper. He then claims that as he touched the symbols the lights became blindingly bright and when he took his hand back the light went back to normal. After this Penniston stood there and just tried to document the situation as much as he could in his notebook.

 

After a bit the craft began to lift off the ground. Penniston said everything seemed to move in slow motion. After a few minutes the craft made it over the top of the trees. After clearing the trees it silently flew away at what was described as an impossible speed. Literally…Penniston wrote in his notebook "speed-impossible". 

 

So you may be asking yourself… What about Burroughs… What the hell was with him? Well, despite standing only about ten feet from Penniston his recollection of the event was completely different. Burroughs maintains he saw something. He claims that after the silent explosion of light and he hit the deck, he saw no craft whatsoever. He said he saw a red oval sun like object in the field. He also claims that unlike the up close encounter that Penniston had, his encounter lasted only seconds. Oddly enough this was his official statement. In his original statement taken roughly 72 hours after the incident occurred, he had included a speech of a craft that looked very similar to Pennistons sketches from his encounters. Since people will point to this as a sign that this was definitely a real event and that his official statement was cleaned up a bit to try and cover up the true nature of what happened. 

 

At this point both men agreed that after the initial silent light explosion they saw a light rise into the sky and headed ready over the coast. After the craft took off the two men noticed something else. Although this was the middle of winter and the ground was essentially frozen, they were able to see three indentations on the ground. This told them that something extremely heavy had been there. On top of that the indentations created an almost perfect equilateral triangle, claimed Penniston. As they looked around more they noticed that there were many broken branches on the trees around the clearing where the supposed craft had landed. These branches were broken from low on the trees all the way to the tops!

 

When they returned to the Jeep to meet up with Cabansag and Chandler, the two men would find out something else that's pretty crazy. The two men figured they were gone for five or ten minutes out of radio contact. In all actuality they were out of radio contact for a whopping 45 minutes!  What's more, not only was there lost time, the two men's watching were running 45 minutes slow, it's like time stopped for them during the incident.  Cabansag and Chandler had been in contact with the base checking in, which was even more proof the men had been gone much longer than they thought.

 

On top of all this they found that others had seen something crazy as well. We'll talk about the things they might actually have seen later when talking about possible explanations! 

 

That night there was another incident reported. Two other men reported seeing lights in the forest as well. They claim that when they went to check it out a bright light engulfed them and their jeep stalled out. They could not get the Jeep to start again. 

 

The USAF was obligated to call British authorities to report that they had gone off base to investigate the incident. So instead of informing the military they called the local police for some reason. The police in their official report that upon receiving the call they had found a place where it appears that a craft had landed. 

 

As one would expect the next day the men involved were getting quite the ribbing from everyone else. At this point another major player would enter the picture. That morning Colonel Charles Halt reported for duty at 5am. The aforementioned Sergeant Crash McCabe, when asked by Halt what was going on, said "Penniston and Burroughs were out chasing UFOs all night. Halt recommended that they use the term unexplained lights instead of UFO so that things would not get out of hand. Immediately paperwork concerning the night's escapades were pulled and classified as secret. This included indecent and complaint reports as well as security blotters. The off thing about this is that normally this would have to go through Colonel Halt, but he was not made aware of any of this when it happened. They were pulled by base commander Ted Conrad. 

 

Major Edward Drury thought that the entire thing was just a Christmas prank, but after talking to Penniston and Burroughs, and getting more of the story, as well as hearing about the bogey on the radar, he decided to investigate a bit. He took some guys with him and went and took some pictures and checked out the site. They kind of figured this would be the end of the whole situation but in actuality it was only the end of the first of the two incidents!

 

The next day on the 27th, there was a combat support group awards ceremony scheduled for the evening at the on base bar called Woody's. That night during the festivities lieutenant Bruce England who was on duty came in and grabbed Colonel Halt, pulled him aside and told him that the UFO had returned.  Halt decided that he would check this out for himself. He gathered a team of men that were still sober and called in sergeant Monroe Neville's and Master sergeant Bobby Ball to join the group. Halt had the men grab some floodlights. But mysteriously the floodlights were not working. Now while it must be said that some of the portable flood lights were out of gas, not all of them were. The ones that had gas and by all accounts should work were simply just… Not. At this point Halt took his team to the original landing site instead of where the men were setting up the lights and where the new sighting was. While all of this was going down Halt was recording everything with his portable tape recorder. They used Geiger counters on the area to see if they could detect any kind of radioactivity in the original landing area. While they did find a little bit of a spike in the reading it was definitely not a significant sign regardless of what some people would have you believe. Another issue is that they were actually using the wrong type of Geiger counter to get the readings they got. Now you can hear this on the 18 minutes of recordings that were made available to the public. 

 

Also in the recordings you can hear the point when the men again see a strange light. One man refers to how there's light that is there and gone then returns again. The men sound legitimately dumbfounded by what they are witnessing. Halt behind to describe what is going on on the tape. The last roughly 4 minutes of audio available is this prob of the encounter. Halt at one point describes the light as shooting a break of lights to the ground, which you can hear on the recordings. Later, according to Halt's memo, three star-like lights were seen in the sky, two to the north and one to the south, about 10 degrees above the horizon. Halt said that the brightest of these hovered for two to three hours and seemed to beam down a stream of light from time to time. The other strange thing about Halt's recordings is that while only 18 minutes of recordings were made available Halt supposedly had around 4 hours or more of recordings from that night which he claims will probably never be released for us to hear. 

 

Not really knowing what to do with all of this the Halt sent a memo to the Ministry of Defense and tried to get the British involved but they were not having it. The memo can be found online and we will post a picture of. Halt claims that the U.S got rid of the copy her head sent to the higher ups as they deemed the incident did not warrant further investigation. 

 

So what the fuck happened in Rendlesham forest. Well it depends on who you want to believe. There's a ton of skeptics obviously, then there's guys like Moody who are fully on board for the UFO theory. This incident is rude with theories, detractors, conspiracies, people who claim they were the ones perpetrating the hoax… It's kind of crazy. Let's look at some of the theories on what happened and what the skeptics say. 

 

   There's one story that we can put to rest for you right off the top. In December 2018, David Clarke, a British UFO researcher, reported a claim that the incident was a set-up by the SAS as a revenge plot on the USAF. According to this story, in August 1980, the SAS parachuted into RAF Woodbridge to test the security at the nuclear site. The USAF had recently upgraded their radar and detected the black parachutes of the SAS men as they descended to the base. The SAS troops were interrogated and beaten up, with the ultimate insult that they were called "unidentified aliens". To enact their revenge, the SAS "gave" the USAF their own version of an alien event; "....as December approached, lights and coloured flares were rigged in the woods. Black helium balloons were also coupled to remote-controlled kites to carry suspended materials into the sky, activated by radio-controls." However, Clarke's investigation concluded that the story was itself a hoax. This story still gets tossed around in some circles even though there is absolutely nothing to back it up.

 

  That's were several locations that claimed they had a hand in the hoax. One man claims he rigged an old cop car with  lights and sound equipment and drove around in the forest to essentially fuck with people. No evidence of this was ever proven. Another man that local people described as "a character" claims that he was driving his truck around with a load of manure in the back and what the men saw that night was… Wait for it…. Burning shit. Also no evidence of this being true was found. As far as these two cases go… We would like to think that if you're approaching this case, that either way you believe, real or fake, you would at least agree that these airmen would be able to tell if it was a car driving around or burning manure In the back of a truck! 

 

Speaking of knowing the difference between things… Some skeptics like to blame this whole incident on a lighthouse. Y day that the strange lights were actually the beacon from a lighthouse on the coast. Now we can concede that on the second night, some of those guys probably mistook the lighthouse beacon for something more. In the Halt recording you can hear someone say that he sees a light, then a short time later it's gone, then a short time later it's back. The intervals actually live up with the revolving time of the lighthouse beacon. So at that moment in time yes it's likely that those men saw the lighthouse beacon but the lighthouse didn't account for the rest of the witnessed phenomena. 

 

As far as the lights in the sky that Halt said they watch in the sky…the skeptics say nothing more than stars. The bright lights off in the distance are often blamed on stars when talking to people looking to disprove the incident. But what of the beams of light coming from the stars? According to many it was atmospheric distortion causing it to merely look like a beam of light coming from a craft. As far as the scientific basis of these arguments, we can't speak to that. While they sound good we don't know. Could be plausible explanations for sure. But again it feels like a high ranking long serving airman  would be able to tell the difference between a star and a strange light.

 

Another explanation often offered for the lights seen the first night is the debris from a Russian satellite falling to earth. This is confirmed to actually have taken place on the night Penniston and Burroughs had their experience. This could definitely explain lights in the sky but how did it explain the craft they saw and the speed and maneuverability of what they reportedly saw.  Granted that's if you believe the men. Also that same night there was some meteoric activity which some point to what the men saw in the sky. This activity was also confirmed to have been actually taking place at the time. 

 

So while these explanations all seem like possibilities to explain perhaps some of what was seen, they don't really explain everything. 

 

Then there's the  cover up talk. Many of the witnesses have conflicting statements. The statements they made the night of the first incident are different from the official statements the government has on file. Burroughs' original statement included a sketch of a craft that very closely resembled what Penniston also sketched and described. Only problem is in his official statement he claimed to see no craft, only the ball of light. Edward Cabansag, who was there with the other gentleman that night, would later claim that his official statement wasn’t actually his. He said that as he was waiting to give his statement officials came to him with an already prepared statement that he was persuaded to sign. He claims he never even read the statement. Then there are the missing reports and paperwork the next morning when Halt had arrived. Why did they take them so quickly and mark them as secret without him being informed as he was usually a part of that sort of thing on the base? Were they trying to hide something or, as some would say, prevent embarrassment. Another odd thing is that Penniston and Burroughs have been fighting to get health records released for years. They have been blocked at every turn. We have a picture of one request sent to then president Barack Obama, asking for the records to please be turned over to the men. Why will they not let these men have these medical records? We could go into some of these things in much more detail but for now we just want to get these things in here without making a 4 hour episode. Maybe a bonus will get into all of these little side quests. 

 

As the years went by both men have stood by their stories. Some say that Pennistons story had become inconsistent throughout the years. And while some things may be a little different from here to there the bulk is consistent according to most. A couple of things about Penniston. Penniston usually refers to what he allegedly encountered as being ‘a craft of unknown origin’ but has specifically and repeatedly denied that it was extraterrestrial. So where was it from? After undergoing regression hypnosis in September 1994 he seems to have become convinced that it was a craft from tens of thousands of years in the Earth’s future. According to what Penniston told the hypnotist, it contained our distant descendants returning to obtain genetic material to keep their ailing species alive: ‘They are time travellers. They are us,’ he said. There's Jon's favorite theory! Another thing is his binary code. He had filled many many pages in his notebook with binary code that he claimed was being sent to him telepathically. Penniston claims to know nothing about binary code. And from what we've read, they were supposedly able to date the pages and writings to the right time frame as people claimed that he wrote this much later in his notebook as a hoax to further his story. The crazy thing is when he finally had the binary decoded it did reveal a message. It is supposedly as follows :

 

EXPLORATION OF HUMANITY unclear 8100

 

52 0942532 N 13131269 W

 

CONTINUOUS FOR PLANETARY ADVANC(E)

 

FOURTH COO(R)DINATE CONTINUOUS unclear

 

BEFORE

 

16 763177 or 26 763177 N 89 117768 W

 

34 800272 N 111 843567 W

 

29 977836 N 31 131649 E

 

14 701505 S 75 167043 W

 

P

 

37 110195 N 25 372281 E

 

EYES OF YOUR EYES

 

ORIGIN 52 0942532 N 13131269 W

 

ORIGIN YEAR 8100

 

So where are these coordinates? 

 They are as follows: Caracol, Belize) (Sedona, Arizona) (Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt) (Nazca Lines in Peru) (Tai Shan Qu, China) (Portara at Temple of Apollo in Naxos, Greece) (Hy Brasil)

 

 Brasil, also known as Hy-Brasil or several other variants, is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland. Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it becomes visible but still cannot be reached. So what does it all mean? Well if you're up on ancient aliens theory these sites hold some water… If you are not a believer then it doesn't matter that much but still very compelling. The origin year 8100, did that mean this craft was from the future? 

 

To this day there is no shortage of people constantly calling Penniston a liar and trying to poke holes in his stories and pointing out any type of inconsistency they can. That is all to be expected. You can dig deep into this incident and find support for whatever side you believe in. We wanted to present the facts as told by the men who lived it. Whether they were lying, saw something and extrapolated things from there, or truly had an extraterrestrial experience isn't ours to say. None of us were there so we'll never truly know. But given the amount of people that witnessed something that night and who since of these people were out measures for a very compelling tale.