UFOs - Leslie Kean [91]
But he never did. He, too, encountered the UFO, becoming one of the highest ranking military officers ever to go on the record about a UFO sighting. As he and his men tracked the UFO, their radios began to malfunction and powerful mobile “light-alls,” brought along to illuminate the forest, mysteriously began to cut out. One piece of equipment that didn’t malfunction was the hand-held tape recorder that the colonel took with him to document his investigation. The tape recording still survives, and one can hear the rising tension in Halt’s voice and in the voices of his men as the UFO approaches: “I see it, too … It’s back again … It’s coming this way … There’s no doubt about it … This is weird … It looks like an eye winking at you … It almost burns your eyes … He’s coming toward us now … Now we’re observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground … one object still hovering over Woodbridge base … beaming down.”
At one point the tension in their voices almost seems to become panic as the UFO makes a close approach and fires light beams down next to Halt and his men. Following these events, Charles Halt wrote an official report of the incident and sent it to the Ministry of Defence. Although somewhat innocuously entitled “Unexplained Lights,” his report described the first night’s UFO as being “metallic in appearance and triangular in shape … a pulsing red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath … The animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy.” He went on to detail the radiation readings taken from the landing site and set out the description of his own sighting.
Halt’s report was received by the same Ministry of Defence section where, a little over ten years later, I would spend three years researching and investigating UFO sightings. The report went to my predecessors, who began an investigation. But they were hampered by a critical mistake that was to have dire consequences. For whatever reason—and it may have been nothing more than a simple typographical error—Charles Halt’s report gave incorrect dates for the incident. So when the MoD checked the radar tapes, they were looking at the wrong days.
Looking at radar evidence is a critical part of any UFO investigation. There have been plenty of spectacular UFO sightings over the years, many correlated with radar. The MoD’s comprehensive UFO files detail several such cases, including ones where RAF pilots encountered UFOs and gave chase—unsuccessfully, I might add. In the absence of any radar data that might confirm the presence of the Rendlesham Forest UFOs, the investigation petered out. Yet, as I was to discover years later, the UFO had been tracked, after all.
I spoke to former RAF radar operator Nigel Kerr, who had been stationed at RAF Watton at Christmas 1980 and had received a call from somebody at RAF Bentwaters. The caller wanted to know if there was anything unusual on his radar screen. He looked, and for three or four sweeps, something did show up, directly over the base. But it faded away, and no official report was ever made. It was only years later that Kerr even heard of the Rendlesham Forest incident and realized he might have a missing piece of the puzzle.
At the time, however, in the apparent absence of radar data to verify the presence of the UFO, arguably the most critical piece of evidence was never followed up: The Defence Intelligence Staff had assessed the radiation readings taken at the landing site and judged them to be “significantly higher than the average background.” In fact, they were about seven times what would have been expected for the area concerned.
In reassessing the case during my review, I was disappointed by what