UFO Lands in Suffolk and That’s Official – Attempts to Explain Away the Memorandum
Over the night of December 25/26, 1980 the re-entry of space debris, and subsequently a bright meteor, were seen by many people in the eastern counties of England . Bright meteors and space debris are sometimes mistaken for UFOs. It is always convenient for those who abominate UFOs to discover that there has been something of the sort in the immediate (or even rather remote) neighborhood of an alleged UFO sighting. It has therefore suited some skeptical commentators (for example, Ian Ridpath at a meeting of the British UFO Research Association on December 10, 1983 and again in the Guardian, on January 5, argue that the first event reported by Halt (item (a) in the above summary) took place in the early hours of December 26, when there was a brief but conventional bright light in the heavens, and not on December 27, as Halt tells us, when there was, alas, nothing important of an astronomical nature going on.
Efforts have been made to sustain the ‘ ‘meteor hypothesis’ ‘ by references to an entry in police records in the neighboring village of Woodbridge on the morning of December 26, recording a telephone call from the Wood bridge airbase to the effect that they were anxious about “a light in the forest. ” And at least one television documentary has dropped the broad hint (by way of visual innuendo) that the consequent arrival in Rendlesham Forest of a police car with flashing lights a little later that Boxing Day morning accounts for at least the first paragraph of Halt’s memorandum.
A long chapter could be devoted to untangling this peculiar story, in which one commentator after another has repeated, apparently without much checking, whatever was last printed by his predecessors, and in which many allegations have been made on little documentation. Suffice it to say that the police found nothing on their two sorties into Rendlesham Forest on December 26 (according to the report which Ian Ridpath very creditably obtained from them in 1983); and that, even if Halt had made the extraordinary error of mis-dating his “first event” (and Service officers, if nothing else, are well trained to be meticulous about dates and times), a police car can hardly be mistaken for a “strange, glowing, triangular object, two to three meters across the base and two meters high,” skittering about a pine wood. Finally, the “meteor hypothesis’ ‘ leaves utterly unexplained the occurrences which Halt felt it was his duty to report to the British Ministry of Defense as having taken place two days later on December 29/30, 1980.
This “second event” has proved something of a problem for most commentators. Even those of us who are inclined to take Halt’s memorandum at its face value find it surprising: UFOs, like lightning, rarely strike twice at the same place. But skeptics are faced with a far greater difficulty. If they are to seize upon that bright meteor as the likely trigger for some flight of hysterical hallucination among a sizable number of American servicemen, they then have a strong temptation to cook the books in favor of assuming that both the first and second events reported by Halt took place on the same night, preferably December 25/26 (or, less plausibly, December 26/27) when there was not only a recent meteor and/or police car but also, perhaps, some spirits of the season acting in support of them!
But very tortuous arguments are needed to sustain this approach. A thoroughly blinkered view lias to be taken of the strong collateral which exists for the occurrence of events on two separate occasions (there is ample material in Above Top Secret and Skycrash). And Halt has to be assumed as totally incompetent about dates and/or as possessed of an inexplicable wish to mislead the British Ministry of Defense in a document intended solely for them.
Skeptics have accordingly tended merely to toy with the ‘ ‘single night’ ‘ view and to pass rapidly to a search for some additional ‘ ‘trigger’ ‘ which can be invoked for the second occasion.
The front runner in this somewhat breathless search has been the Orford Ness lighthouse (though the hazard-lights on a nearby MoD establishment have also sometimes been invoked). The lighthouse, which is roughly five to six miles from the likely site of the events of both December 26/27 and 29/30 and on a bearing of between 90 and 100 degrees or so, can certainly be glimpsed through the pine trees of Rendlesham Forest-so readily, indeed, that it must seem like an old friend to anybody who has served at the Wood bridge airbase for more than a few days. Its color is white; it makes one revolution per minute; its flash is five seconds long ; it is as regular as clockwork. The theory of those skeptics who wish to invoke it as an explanation is that Lt.-Col . Halt and “numerous individuals” misperceived this cozy old acquaintance as a complex series of remarkable light-phenomena, including “a red, sun-like light” which “moved about and pulsed, ” threw off “glowing particles,” broke into “five separate white objects” . . . etc .
Much ingenuity, verging on the deceitful doctoring of television film, has been used by those who see the light house as their refuge against the marvelous. Connoisseurs of tormented explanations should read the enjoyable ac count of these follies (or dishonesties) given by Randles et al. 3 and Good. 1 One only regrets that Charles Fort, that assiduous collector of the ridiculous statements made by ‘ ‘experts, ‘ ‘ was not alive to see these choice specimens of his favorite indoor sport.
Attempts have also been made to explain away the concluding ”sentences of Halt’s memorandum in which he de scribes some prolonged phenomena in the sky at a very late stage in the morning hours of December 30, 1980. I happen to share at least some of the doubts of the skeptics about these relatively unexciting events toward the end of Halt’s unusually busy night. It seems possible that these belated celestial objects were, indeed, bright stars . . . .
Perhaps Halt and his ‘ ‘numerous individuals, ‘ ‘ emerging from the most momentous occasion of their lives, were somewhat conditioned to see wonders in the skies where possibly none existed-just as I, groping my way into Piccadilly from a Royal Academy exhibition of the Post Impressionists a year or two ago, continued for a while to see trees and even buses pulsating with the extraordinary energies which Vincent van Gogh had, on behalf of us all, perceived in Provence a century before. But in conceding this point (if concession it is) I think it should be stressed that, at this point in their argument, our worried skeptical colleagues have already had to advance an extraordinary hotch-potch of explanations: space debris, a bright meteor, a police car, drink and drugs, a lighthouse, other lights on the coast, dear old Sirius . . .
Occam, you will remember, urged us to cut away un necessary complications in our attempts to explain phenomena and to look for the simplest explanation. The simplest explanation of Halt’s memorandum is that he was reporting-as precisely as wondrous events permit-what he and ” numerous individuals’ ‘ encountered on December 29/30, together with such facts as he had been able to ascertain from his subordinates about the occurrences of December 26/27.
But if you cannot “explain away, ” the next most useful step is to discredit-a process somewhat analogous to that old lawyer’s saying, ‘ ‘No case ; abuse the plaintiff’s attorney. ‘ ‘ Let us consider the discreditors.