UFO Lands in Suffolk and That’s Official – Is the Halt Memorandum a Truthful Account?
Halt’s statement to the British Ministry of Defense, signed on January 13, 1981 (see Figure 2:2) reports the following, roughly a fortnight after the events it describes:
(a) In the small hours of the morning of December 27, 1980 three USAF patrolmen encountered a ”strange glowing object’ ‘ of not inconsiderable size in a part of Rendlesham Forest adjoining the “back gate” of the Woodbridge airbase. The object possessed some of the characteristics of a structured “vehicle” : it was “metallic in appearance and triangular in shape,” two to three meters across the base and roughly two meters high. As the patrolmen approached it, it maneuvered away from them and dis appeared. An hour later, however, it was briefly seen again outside the back gate.
(b) “The next day, ” three depressions in the ground were discovered where the object had been sighted. [‘ ‘The next day ‘ ‘ could conceivably mean the daylight hours of December 27, or possibly the day of December 28. Some commentators have made heavy weather of this ambiguity. My own view is that it is wholly unimportant.]
(c) On the night of December 29, Halt and ‘ ‘numerous individuals’ ‘ took radiation readings in the area of the sighting; and later (over a period extending into the small hours of the morning of December 30) they saw a succession of complex light-phenomena, both within the forest and subsequently in the sky.
This, in essence, is all that Halt tells us. There are strong indications that other, much stranger, things were taking place on the night of December 29/30, and that the mem orandum is, to say the least, deliberately tight-lipped and low-key. This has interesting implications on which I shall comment later. Immediately, however, we have to con sider two possibilities which have been much discussed: first, that Halt seriously misperceived something quite ordinary (or was even the subject of hallucinations); second, that he wrote his memorandum as a deliberate piece of misinformation for the concealment of some wholly mundane accident or military embarrassment.
Those who want explanations of this kind have sought either to explain away the events which Halt describes or to discredit the memorandum on some other grounds. Let us consider these ploys in tum.