UFO Lands in Suffolk and That’s Official – Attempts to Discredit the Memorandum
In June 1985 I attended a meeting of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) held at London University in Gower Street. It has done sterling work in exposing fraud, gullibility and misperception in many areas of superstition, and it is greatly to be valued on this account. It also has its own shabby record of cooking the books when faced with any thing truly remarkable which appears to breach the “continuity of nature” as understood in its own curiously nineteenth-century terms.
At that June meeting I discussed the Rendlesham case with a notable UFO-skeptic (whose name I won’t mention lest it involves him in a suit for damages!). “Halt, ” he said, “is an overgrown boy scout. Everybody knows that you cannot trust a word he says once he’s got involved with some freaky obsession .
This was not my first encounter with attempted character-assassination: former Whitehall officials (of whom I am one) are familiar with this kind of thing among politicians, journalists, and even civil servants. What struck me on that CSICOP occasion was that not one word was uttered by my informant which bore directly on the Rendlesham case; he rested himself entirely on seeking to discredit the unfortunate officer who had the glum responsibility of recording the facts as he saw them. The attempt struck me as crude-but probably effective. How many others, I wondered, had now written off the Rendlesham case on nothing more than this? As it happens, I have every reason to believe from many other sources that Halt is a reliable USAF officer and a valued colleague: his pro motion to full Colonel in November 1983, while still serving at Bentwaters/Woodbridge, is testimony enbugh. I mention the CSICOP incident merely to convey how perilously easy it is to get damaging innuendo about the place if one’s motive is to rubbish remarkable reports. Naturally, I discounted the innuendo entirely, and I continue to do so.
Other, less crude attempts have been made to discredit the Halt memorandum, and by people who are genuinely seeking the truth (and who must therefore be forgiven!). The following are the main contenders, selected from the references at the end of this chapter. In each case the Halt memorandum is interpreted by the “discreditors” as in tended to conceal some non-UFO event by way of offering a cover-story plus disinfonnation. On this theory, Halt (perhaps under instruction) was trying to divert attention from:
- (a) Something nasty which the military had lost in Rendlesham Forest (nuclear? chemical? biological?).
- (b) Something secret which the military had lost in Rendlesham Forest (a new quick-descent helicopter? A pilotless drone of astounding new abilities? Space-gear/ space-specimens? Or the Stealth aircraft?).
- (c) Something intrusive from the “Other Side” (a crashed Bear or Badger? A crashed pilotless probe?).
As a former Defense official, who had responsibilities for designing and frequently reviewing the procedures for handling major mishaps (e.g. the possible loss of nuclear contraptions, the crash of aircraft, the “going-spare” of other troublesome items), I have no doubt at all that we and our American allies would never have been so foolish (or irresponsible) as to conceal our problems by propagating peculiar stories of a kind hard to believe. We would either have kept the whole thing secret (if the public hadn’t heard of .it and we were also satisfied that no public damage would ensue), or we would have conspicuously cordoned off the area and braced ourselves for the inevitable questions. In neither case would we have engineered the release of some strange narrative to, for example, the authors of Skycrash by way of anonymous airmen in local pubs.
But there is a far more convincing argument than any thing which can be uttered from the suspect throat of a former Defense official! Halt’s memorandum was sent to the Ministry of Defense; it was not given any public circulation; it was clearly never intended for public release; and it was more than two years before it leaked into the public domain. It can, therefore, never have been intended as a piece of disinformation . (And I cannot resist adding that if good officials had really wanted to conceal some thing, the last thing to cross their minds would have been to stimulate the susceptibilities of over-excitable ufologists! ) So I reach the conclusion that Halt’s memorandum was not designed to serve any ulterior purpose; that it was the carefully considered document of a wholly competent USAF officer; and that we must take it at its face value.