UFO Lands in Suffolk and That’s Official! RALPH NOYES
Ralph Noyes was born in the tropics and spent most of his childhood in the West Indies. He served in the RAF 1940-46 as a navigator, engaging in active service in North Africa and the Far East.
He entered the Civil Service in 1949 and served in the Air Ministry and subsequently the unified Ministry of Defense. For nearly four years he headed Defense Secretariat 8 (DS8) which among other tasks logged UFO reports from members of the public.
Ralph Noyes retired in 1977, leaving in the grade of Under Secretary of State. He has since pursued a writing career, and has written a number of articles and science fiction stories. A Secret Property (Quartet Books, 1985) deals largely with UFOs, including-in fictionalized form-the Rendlesham case. In 1989 Country Life published several articles by him on the mystery cornfield circles.
These were the words in which a British Sunday newspaper told us, in October 1983, of one of the most remark able UFO cases in British history. The events they were reporting had taken place nearly three years before, in December 1980, in Rendlesham Forest in the English county of Suffolk. Now, almost a decade after these events, much more has come to light, and we have had time to draw conclusions. No apologies need be offered for retelling this extraordinary story : it encapsulates many of the central problems of ufology. I call these incidents ‘ ‘The Rendlesham Case, ‘ ‘ after the pine forest in which the events took place. Other commentators have used other names, including ‘ ‘The Bentwaters Case’ ‘ and ‘ ‘The Wood bridge Case. ‘ ‘ A glance at the references at the end of this article will remove any doubts about which case is meant.
Why Is the Rendlesham Case Important?
In most UFO cases we have nothing more to go on than what a witness is able to tell us, often some days or weeks after the event and not infrequently after the lapse of months or even years. If we are lucky, there may be two or more people who claim to have seen the same event.
At the end of the investigation we are left with our notes of what the witness(es) have told us, supplemented per haps by a rough sketch of the site and an artist’s impression of whatever “entities” and/or “vehicles” formed part of the narrative. Increasing shrewdness, painfully learned over several decades, forces us to reduce most of these laboriously gathered stories to the probable misperception of something quite ordinary (or, rather rarely, to hoax). What remains when these “IFOs” (Identified Flying Objects) have been eliminated makes up the hard core of our “great cases, ” those bizarre and puzzling reports for which no conventional explanation seems possible and which continue to interest those many of us who suspect that behind all this ‘ ‘smoke ‘ ‘ there must be some important ‘ ‘fire. ‘ ‘ But the hard evidence which might convince our critics-or even persuade our selves !-tends to remain woefully absent; as elusive, in deed, as the clinching facts which, for more than a century, have been sought by those engaged in psychical research in pursuit of their own (surprisingly similar) dreams, hunches and El Dorados.
The crucial importance of the Rendlesham case is that we have the signed statement of a relatively senior officer of the United States Air Force, Lt.-Col . (now Brigadier General) Charles I. Halt, the then Deputy Base Commander of the important USAF complex at RAF Bent waters/Woodbridge in Suffolk, submitted to the British Ministry of Defense shortly after the alleged events occurred. The receipt of this document by the British MoD has been formally acknowledged in the British House of Commons by the responsible Minister (even though it took more than two years to wring out this statement, following a long period of denials and prevarications) .
And Colonel Halt has repeatedly confirmed that it was indeed he who signed it. Whatever interpretation we care to place on this document, and much of this article will be concerned with interpreting it, there can be no doubt that it was officially issued .by an officially appointed U.S. authority to an official British governmental agency.
The importance of this fact can hardly be exaggerated. It is unique in British ufology. Although diligent research by ufologists has turned up some interesting cases in which the British MoD were undoubtedly involved, for example the Bentwaters/Lakenheath incidents of August 1956 and the occurrences at RAF West Freugh in April 1957 (of which good accounts are given in Above Top Secret1 and have since been supplemented elsewhere), no definitive statement has ever been issued about them, and I doubt, as a former official of the Department, that any thing ever will be. The Halt memorandum is altogether special in being an official-and officially authenticated-statement. Few other documents match it in this respect. I can think of nothing except certain of the re leases made in the United States under the American Freedom of Information Act and reproduced by Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood in Clear Intent, and, to a greater extent, by Timothy Good in Above Top Secret.
As that Sunday paper put it, “UFO Lands in Suffolk And Thats Official” It was those last three words which persuaded me, for the first time in my life, to buy that particular scandal-sheet. Having bought it, I knew that the case was crucial .