UFO Lands in Suffolk and That’s Official – What Happened at Rendlesham?
Great difficulties have dogged all students of this case, partly as the result of deliberate obfuscation by the USAF, the Pentagon, and the British Ministry of Defense; partly because the wide range of alleged witnesses (many of them demanding anonymity) have told an equally wide range of conflicting stories; partly because UFO-skeptics have strenuously sought to distort facts in favor of their own views; and partly, alas, because some serious researchers have allowed their prejudices and suspicions (and, in some cases, sheer lack of judgment) to introduce wholly unnecessary complications.
Credit must always go to the authors of Skycrash3 for the immense efforts which they devoted to this case and for producing the only full-length book we yet have: nothing can detract from the dedication with which they pursued an exceptionally difficult investigation. But the book remains irretrievably marred by the attempt of the authors to combine their account of the case with a travelogue of their researches and to report a number of irrelevancies which range from the naive to the unwittingly comic. (The ladies’ pursuit of the unfortunate Col. Halt and his teenage son-see, for example, Chapters 16 and 30, and pages 186-9 and 194-7-is the stuff of which high farce is writ ten. To take merely one example, I doubt that any of us has much to learn from the account on page 35 of the unfortunate mishap which two of the authors suffered while driving their car along a rutted, dirt-track road at a considerable distance . from the supposed UFO landing-site more than a year later.) The book remains a mine of potential information-but also a minefield of dubious speculation, without so much as an index or an attempted calendar of events.
The most convincing attempt to give us a connected narrative, while at the same time fully exposing the difficulties which beset us, is given by Timothy Good. ‘ This is indispensable reading for anybody coming fresh to the case.
Since Above Top Secret was written, we have had the interesting research undertaken by Dr. Jamison of the State University of New York. It is surprising that Jamison fails to indicate any awareness of Good’s book or of the highly significant investigations undertaken in the United States by Raymond W.Boeche, but his article is useful in clearly establishing the USAF chain of command at Bentwaters/ Woodbridge at the relevant time, and in placing beyond reasonable doubt that it was Halt-the fourth down in that top echelon-who led a party of his subordinates into Rendlesham Forest on December 29/30, 1980. This provides further collateral for those of us (myself included) who have always held, since the release of Halt’s Memorandum was secured under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act in June 19 .
83 (two and a half years after the events it re ports), that Halt was an eyewitness to the events of December 29/30 and that his memorandum is the key document. In answer to the question which heads this section, “What happened at Rendlesham?”, I believe that we are right to take Halt as the one and only first-hand source whose report is on the official record. All else, important though much of it is, rests on hearsay and requires the caution with which we must always approach the second hand.