Episode 242: Rendelsham Forest: UK’s Roswell Incident
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On this episode of The Sofa King Podcast, we cover the biggest UFO case in the history of the UK, The Rendelsham Forest Incident. Known as the Roswell of the UK, this event took place in late December of 1980 over the course of several days. Most UFO events can be ruled out as delusion, mass hallucination, or foggy memories, but this one has some teeth. It is recorded in the official logs of both the British and U.S. air forces as well as local police, and it even had radar confirmation from multiple towers.
So what happened? Rendelsham Forest was a nature conservatory situated between two Royal Air Force Bases in the county of Suffolk. These bases were both jointly occupied by the RAF and the USAF. On the night of December 26th, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston (U.S. airmen) went into the forest to investigate strange lights that had been reported by several people in the area. They were joined by a few others, and the nigh was pretty wild. Their radios quit working, so two stayed behind to inform the base what they were seeing, but allegedly, Burroughs and Penniston saw the lights descend and were in fact a triangular craft.
This craft apparently hit Burroughs with a beam of light that knocked him unconscious and then landed allowing Penniston to touch it. Then it got weird. Penniston claimed to have seen hieroglyphs on the craft, and when he touched it, a light glowed at the top. Oh, and a 6 page binary code was burned into his brain that he couldn’t stop thinking about until he wrote it all down.
The two men finally got back to the base and allegedly were missing 45 minutes of time. The next night, lights came back, and this time, they were tracked by multiple military radar towers. A lieutenant colonel Halt sent a bigger team to investigate, this time with an audio recorder and a Geiger counter. The tape, and the memo Halt sent out are some of the strangest and best evidence of the Rendelsham Forest event. How long is the tape, and what does it include? What do skeptics say about this particular case? How did the British Ministry of Defense’s UFO Project head, Nick Pope, get involved? How did the local police get involved? What did the UFO do over the air force base? Why did the airmen think they saw a giant glowing eye that dripped molten metal? Listen, laugh, learn.
The Halt Tape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KChGKhJ4Ro
The Halt Memo: http://www.therendleshamforestincident.com/The_Full_Report.php
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