The Halt Tape, and a Conversation
USAF Lt. Col. Charles Halt, deputy base commander at RAF Woodbridge, felt skeptical about the December 26 sightings. On December 27, he entered Rendlesham Forest with an audio recorder, expecting to discover nothing at all, or something easily explainable. Instead, he was dazzled by a display of bright lights in the forest, and above the Woodbridge air base. The audio runs for eighteen minutes, and throughout most of Halt’s running commentary, he refers to the lights as “it.” And then comes this remarkable sentence: “[H]e’s coming toward us now.” The lights had become “he”—evocative of a living thing or, alternatively, technology controlled by an unrevealed intelligence.
In a January 13, 1981, memo, Halt described the event with reasonable dispassion, but in a tone suggesting that he took the sightings seriously. In a notarized statement from 2010, Halt said,
I believe the objects that I saw at close quarter were extraterrestrial in origin and that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted—both then and now—to subvert the significance of what occurred at Rendlesham forest [sic] and RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practiced methods of disinformation.
Twenty-five years after the events, Halt claimed that British radar operating on December 27 picked up strange objects. Radar techs on duty that night remained mum for fear of ridicule, or worse, but once retired, they felt free to share their stories with Halt.
Lieutenant Colonel Halt’s superior, Col. Theodore Conrad, commanded the twin bases near Rendlesham. Like Halt, he conducted a brief personal investigation immediately after the events of 1980. In 2009, Conrad agreed to speak with academic journalist and folklorist David Clarke. He remarked that Halt “should be ashamed and embarrassed” by his allegations of an international cover-up.
The Rendlesham Forest had still more to tell. After 11:00 p.m. on December 28, one or more trucks carrying British military men trundled to the forest edge.
Larry Warren, a teenage enlisted man, witnessed what he called “disaster- preparedness officers” with Geiger counters, bending over an object on the ground near the tree line. And then a small red light—about the size of a basketball, Warren recalled—heralded the landing of a craft. Warren and another man, Sgt. Adrian Bustinza, observed as Wing Commander Gordon Williams subsequently engaged in quiet conversation with a humanoid kitted out in “bright clothing.” When superiors called Warren away at about 4:30 a.m. on December 29, Bustinza remained to witness the craft’s queerly silent departure. After some moments of hover, the craft “went up and, like, took off at about a forty-five- degree angle.” The thing disappeared in an eye-blink.
The next morning, radiation levels at the forest site registered unusually high.
Gen. Charles Gabriel, commander in chief of United States Air Forces in Europe at the time of Rendlesham, visited the bases not long after the initial reports. Some sources allege that the papers related to Gabriel’s visits were snatched from the MoD files by the U.S. military.
In 1992–93, when the Cold War was presumed to have ended, the USAF departed Woodbridge and Bentwaters. The RAF closed both bases in 1993.
Rupert Hawsley’s 2014 article for London’s Daily Telegraph revealed that since 1980 “nearly half” of all UFO correspondence and inquiries directed to the Ministry of Defence pertain to Rendlesham. Despite the high level of public interest, the MoD has not modified its stance.
Throughout the USAF presence at Woodbridge and Bentwaters, speculation arose that America secretly stored nuclear missiles there. If the USA had indeed sneaked another cache of missiles close to the European Continent, the MoD denials would have been equal parts military and political.