Britain’s most well-known UFO sighting may have been caused by a bout of electromagnetic-fuelled psychosis, a top researcher has claimed.
The Rendlesham Forest incident, where members of the US Air Force stationed at RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, reported seeing unexplained lights and a craft in the forest in December 1980, has left people puzzled for decades over what the cause of the lights could have been.
Witnesses, including high-ranking officers, described seeing a glowing, metallic, triangular object hovering and emitting strange beams of light.
Yet despite official investigations by the U.S. and U.K. militaries, no conclusive explanation was found, fueling decades of speculation and conspiracy theories ranging from alien encounters to secret military tests.
It remains one of the most well-documented and controversial UFO cases in British history, and now one UFO expert believes he has the answer.
Philip Mantle, the former Director of Investigations for the British UFO Research Association and an author, said he is convinced something happened over those fateful nights in 1980 – but doesn’t necessarily think aliens were involved.
‘If you look at what those involved said to begin with, the only concrete info was that they saw some strange lights in the forest. That’s what we start off with,’ he told Metro.
‘Now Jim Penniston underwent hypnosis a few years back. And under hypnosis, he said the craft was a time machine from the future.’
Penniston, a US airman who not only claimed to have not only witnessed the craft but actually touched it, is considered one of the most credible UFO witnesses in history.
Yet even his testimony has shifted over the years from seeing strange lights in the woods to claiming to having encountered time travellers.
‘What we’re looking at is contemporary folklore in action,’ said Mantle. ‘In 100 years’ time, people will look back at this incident and it will be classed as a myth and a legend, just like the Loch Ness monster or encounters with the Faerie Folk.
‘We class those things as myths and legends, but the people who experienced them at the time didn’t, it was very real to them.’
When giving his verdict on some of the common theories about the encounter, Mantle is sympathetic to some but dismissive of others. For example, the notion that SAS troops were behind the incident is ‘rubbish’ he says.
‘These were nuclear facilities, and this was 1980, when the Cold War was getting very hot. This isn’t the kind of place you’d just start pranking when the stakes were so high,’ he said.
So what did happen at Rendlesham, and is there any explanation that can make sense of all the contradictory testimonies?
‘Between 1997 and 2000, the Ministry of Defence conducted their own investigation into UFOs, known as the Condign Report. One of the authors of this report, Dr Ron Haddow, said the source of these phenomena was not aliens or anything like that, but a form of unknown plasma.
‘He was concerned that this plasma emitted some kind of electromagnetic energy, which could interfere with aircraft communications or cause some sort of cognitive impairment.
‘It could be that these soldiers came into contact with this strange plasma…and one of them got too close and suffered from some of the electromagnetic effects.’
Mantle added that the soldiers may have ended up having hallucinations as a result of the plasma.
Referring to the work of Albert Budden, a member of the British UFO society who has written two books on the subject, he continued: ‘According to [Budden’s] research, the Earth naturally produces these electromagnetic forces, and sometimes gives off these strange lights; this plasma.
‘Some people can be hypersensitive to these lights – in other words, they’re allergic – and if you come into contact with these things, you can have the most bizarre experience and you’ll think it’s absolutely real.’
Despite this, one soldier managed to receive a payout following the incident, which Mantle suggests this means they believe he saw something that evening.
‘John Burroughs contacted the US Air Force a few years back over injuries he claimed he’d received that night, and he got a payout. He’s never revealed what the payout was actually for, but it goes to show that the military agrees that something did happen to him that night.’
Whether we’ll ever get the definitive truth remains to be seen, but as far as Mantle is concerned, it’s the space between the lines which makes Rendlesham such an enduring mystery.
‘One of the things a lot of UFO researchers are totally ignorant of is a thing called confabulation, where sometimes you’ll take in information from an external source but over time come to believe it actually happened to you.
‘That’s how myths and legends grow – by storytelling. It gets changed and altered over time…not on purpose, but completely by accident, and that’s a natural thing.
‘UFO researchers- myself included- all suffer from confirmation bias, and we subconsciously look for things which confirm our bias.
‘Whatever happened at Rendlesham is a fascinating incident in its own right, and I’m sure its legend will only continue to grow in the years to come.‘
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