Rendlesham Forest: reassessing the Halt memo line by line

On 13 January 1981, Lieutenant Colonel Charles I. Halt, deputy base commander at RAF Bentwaters, wrote a one-page memorandum headed "Unexplained Lights" describing events in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, over two nights the previous month. It was addressed to the Ministry of Defence and released under the US Freedom of Information Act in 1983.

Almost everything written about Rendlesham since traces back to that page. It is worth reading as a document rather than as a symbol, because its actual claims are narrower and more specific than the case that has been built on top of them.

What the memo states

The memo describes patrolmen observing unusual lights outside the back gate of RAF Woodbridge in the early hours of 26 December 1980, an object described as metallic and triangular, and its departure at high speed. It records three depressions found in the ground the following day, and readings taken at the site with a radiation survey meter.

It then describes a second night, with lights observed at varying elevations and a beam of light seen to come down near a weapons storage area. Halt notes throughout what was reported to him and what he observed himself, and the distinction is maintained more carefully than most summaries of it preserve.

The lighthouse question

The best-known conventional explanation, argued at length by the astronomy writer Ian Ridpath, holds that the primary light was the Orfordness lighthouse, visible along the forest track from the direction the witnesses were facing, with a bright meteor accounting for the initial alert.

Supporters of the case respond that experienced personnel on a base near the coast would not mistake a lighthouse they saw nightly, and that the explanation accounts poorly for the second night. Both positions have been held for four decades by people who have walked the ground.

What the memo will not settle is the question it is most often used to settle. It is a contemporaneous, signed account by a senior officer of what he and his personnel reported, and it is unusually restrained. It is not an analysis, and Halt did not offer it as one.