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The Rendlesham Forest incident is among the most credible alien encounters ever. The witnesses were working for the US military and the evidence is striking. There's a reason it's called the British Roswell. But not everyone believes it was aliens. Not even all of the witnesses. Witness John Burroughs said that he isn't sure he really saw a flying saucer that night.
He even wondered whether the military was behind the UFO story in the first place. He said, "I believe the alien part was planted by both governments at the beginning to cover up what was really going on." So today we're looking at Rendlesham from a different angle, covering theories that the incident didn't involve aliens at all, but the government covered up something just as big.
if not bigger. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday and be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us.
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Hello there, I'm Mike Flanagan, and welcome to Spectre Vision Radio's production of Director's Commentary. Director's Commentary is a deep dive into a film through the eyes of the filmmaker or filmmakers who made it. It combines an in-depth interview format with a classic Director's Commentary track, the likes of which used to be common on physical media releases, but sadly are becoming more and more rare these days. Filmmakers talking about film with filmmakers. For people who love film.
and filmmakers. In late 2007, Charles Halt took the stage at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to give his UFO spiel. In the nearly 30 years since Rendlesham, Halt's story had become one of the most famous and trusted UFO accounts. Most of the D.C. audience knew the major beats of his story already.
305, we see strange strobe light flashes to the, uh, outer sporadic, but there's definitely something, uh, some kind of phenomena. 305, at about, uh, 10 degrees horizon, uh, directly north, we've got two strange objects, uh, half-moon shape, dancing about with colored lights on them, but, uh, guess to be about 5 to 10 miles out, maybe less. The half-moons have now turned into full circles.
There was an eclipse or something there for a minute or two. But that night, Halt shared something that sent shockwaves through the room. He saw an alien spacecraft that night. The US and UK governments knew it and they covered it up. In the book he co-authored with John Burroughs and Nick Pope, Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, Jim Penniston agreed. There was a cover-up. Halt is right.
According to Staff Sergeant Jim Penniston, the cover-up started almost as soon as he and Airman First Class John Burroughs arrived back at the base on December 26th. The two men had managed to snap a series of photos during their bizarre encounter in the forest, and they rushed the film to the base's lab to be developed. They knew their story was hard to believe, but here was proof.
Or what would have been proof if anyone ever had a chance to see them. Penniston said that the photos came back overexposed, washed out, and entirely indecipherable. The lab said something went wrong in the photo development process. Normally you could take the original film negatives and attempt to develop new photographic prints. But somehow the negatives disappeared and so did the photos.
Years later, the UK Ministry of Defence received a Freedom of Information Act request to see the washed out Penniston photos. In response, they said, "The Ministry of Defence has never been in possession of any photographs relating to this alleged incident." Now, it's possible the film negatives were unsalvageable. According to Penniston's own account, he was trying to photograph something that gave off a blinding white light.
That could easily overexpose film, leading to images that are just mottled blobs of off-white. And if that was the case, they probably wound up in an Air Force trash can before anyone in the lab realized how important they were. We could chalk the ruined and missing photographs up to chance if it was the only sign of a cover-up. But it wasn't. It was just the beginning. In the days following the Rendlesham incident,
Jim Penniston sat down to write a statement about his close encounter in the woods. At the time, Penniston was only a mid-level officer in the Air Force, but he'd been in the military long enough to know he had to be professional, clear, and precise in an official report. It was difficult to stay professional when explaining things that seemed to defy any explanation, but Penniston wanted to follow protocol, so he tried his best.
In a four-page document, Penniston laid out his experience in graphic detail, from the alleged spacecraft, to its hieroglyphic markings, to the way the ship seemed to bend space and time. Then he dated and signed the statement and delivered it to his superiors. But in his recollection, the men barely glanced at Penniston's document. Instead, they handed him a statement that they'd written for him.
According to Penniston, this document was short, vague, and missing just about every strange or compelling detail of his sighting. It only briefly mentioned a "metallic craft" and claimed that Penniston had only seen it from a distance. Penniston was confused. He told them he'd touched the aircraft and he'd lost 45 minutes of time. But the agents insisted he sign the sanitized report.
This was his story, they said. He better stick to it. Penniston knew not to refuse a direct order, so he swallowed his objections and signed the document. In their book, Penniston and Burroughs recalled that they sat down with their commanding officer, Colonel Gordon Williams, later that same night,
Penniston gave Williams a copy of the official statement. Then he and Burroughs told Williams the full story of what happened. Williams listened as they walked him through every bizarre detail of their experience. When they finished, he thanked them for their time and abruptly excused them. Penniston wrote, "...the account never stirred one question at all, nor comment."
It was as if he knew about the phenomenon that I had just briefed him on. According to Halt, Penniston and Burroughs, a dozen airmen or more witnessed the lights over Rendlesham Forest over the course of both nights.
But for some reason, the government only collected five men's statements, two of whom were Master Sergeant J.D. Chandler and Lieutenant Fred "Skip" Buran, who claimed they didn't see anything. The last statement was from Airman First Class Ed Cobbinsag, who initially joined Penniston and Burroughs in the woods before heading back to wait in their jeep.
According to Cobbinsag, he struggled with typewriters, so he asked one of the investigators if he could dictate his statement. The investigators made it even easier for him. Cobbinsag alleged they handed him a pre-written statement, just like with Penniston. This statement downplayed the night's events even more and said that some of the lights were from way out in the distance.
It also claimed that Cobbinsag was with Panniston and Burroughs for almost the entire night, completely discrediting their version of events. Cobbinsag was so nervous in the interrogation, he didn't notice any of that. He barely even looked at the statement they gave him. He just scribbled his signature at the bottom and left the room.
Strangely, none of the men who reportedly joined Colonel Halt on his journey the second night were even asked to make statements. Either the military was doing a surprisingly sloppy job with their investigation, or someone was intentionally trying to suppress evidence. So the question becomes: evidence of what? Aliens are the popular answer, but according to Sergeant Penniston,
The visitors might have been closer to home. Let's flash back to December 1980. On the first night, Jim Penniston and John Burroughs chased flashing objects into the woods. From the very minute they entered the forest, Penniston knew something strange was going on. The air crackled with electricity. Walking felt like wading through a swamp.
When Penniston finally made it to the strange craft in the middle of the woods, he felt like he passed through something he called the Bubble Field. Penniston has never fully explained what he meant by Bubble Field. He may not have been able to if he tried. It was seemingly invisible but tangible. A strange force surrounding the triangular object in the forest clearing.
But as Penniston stepped into the field, Burroughs stayed behind. When Penniston turned around to look back at him, the other man seemed frozen in place. Penniston swore he spent a good while inside the bubble field, taking notes and photos of the craft and even running his hand over the alien markings on the ship's hull. But outside the field, Burroughs felt only a second's passing.
At first, Penniston couldn't believe that something affected their perception of time. Even when the men left the forest and learned that their long experience in the woods only took minutes, Penniston wrote it off as a trick of nerves or adrenaline. But that explanation fell apart as soon as Penniston and Burroughs checked their watches. They were both running 45 minutes behind.
Penniston finally had to admit that the craft bent space and time around it. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that the ship wasn't from another planet. It was from the future. You're probably wondering, if Sergeant Penniston saw a time machine,
Why did he report an alien spaceship? Let's time travel again to 1994, 14 years after the Rendlesham encounter. At this point, Penniston had been retired for a year. But retirement wasn't the easy, relaxing time that it was supposed to be. Penniston found himself struggling to sleep. So he reached out to a hypnotherapist to see if they could help. Through hypnotherapy,
Penniston had a major breakthrough. He claimed that two government agents had used hypnosis to force him to forget details of his experience in Rendlesham Forest. But now, in his trance, it all came back. He told the hypnotherapist, they are time travelers. They are us.
According to Penniston, the future humans had journeyed millennia into the past to study our modern-day genes. The government agents allegedly knew all about it, and they wanted to make sure Penniston kept quiet. Penniston said, "...they tell me that I will hurt the world. It will breach national security and can destroy the system, cause wars, chaos in the streets."
That's why it's important to keep it quiet. It doesn't make any difference if I talk about the story. It's too unbelievable." Finally, Penniston remembered that the agents mentioned one more thing during his interrogation. Apparently, when he touched the ship, a string of numbers flooded his mind. At that moment, Penniston paid no attention to them.
He had more important things to think about. But days later, the numbers still rattled in his head. He couldn't focus. He couldn't sleep. Finally, he had enough. Penniston leapt up, reached for his notebook, and started to write. He filled page after page with the numbers, scribbling them down as fast as he could for nearly an hour. When he finally stopped, the digits in his head disappeared.
And Sergeant Penniston didn't think about them again for nearly 15 years. Until his hypnotherapy session. In 2010, a TV production crew interviewed Penniston for an episode of "Ancient Aliens." In between takes, Penniston pulled out his Rendlesham notebook to double-check some dates. As he flipped through, the producer asked him about the long section of pages filled with numbers.
He told her that it was the string of numbers he'd gotten stuck in his head after the incident. After all these years, Penniston had nearly forgotten about it. But the producer didn't see 16 pages of random numbers. She saw it for what it really was. A message written in binary. A binary code. And when Penniston translated it to English, the results were shocking.
In "Encounter in Rendlesham Forest," Penniston released the fully translated code to the public for the first time. The message opened with the title "Exploration of Humanity" and a line about planetary advancement. It also claimed that the time travelers were from the year 8100. The binary code also included a series of GPS coordinates
Most of these coordinates pointed to ancient landmarks: the Great Pyramid in Egypt, the Nazca Lines in Peru, and a temple for the god Apollo dating back to ancient Greece. But there was one set of coordinates that appeared to be pointing to a random spot off the western coast of Ireland. The message said this was the location of something called High Brazil.
According to the Library of Congress, High Brazil is a magical island from Celtic folklore that would rise out of the ocean once every seven years. Today, it's mostly thought of as an Irish equivalent of the Atlantis myth, but according to Penniston's code at least, the island of High Brazil was as real as the pyramids in Egypt. But what does it all mean?
And why was the message important enough for a group of time travelers from 8100 to beam it into Penniston's mind? He couldn't say. In his book, Penniston admitted that the translated code still left him with more questions than answers. He wrote, "I have my own beliefs, but in no way expect you to blindly go with my thoughts or my beliefs on this. You must decide.
Is this as Jim Penniston believes, that time travelers from our future came back in time to 1980? Or is it something totally different? It is for you to decide. Here's where I pause. Penniston gave countless interviews about Rendlesham over the 30 years between 1980 and 2010.
In all that time, he never once thought to mention the 16 pages of numbers he wrote down immediately after the incident. Not until he went to hypnotherapy. It feels a little convenient. And that's if you even believe that hypnotherapy can unlock repressed memories.
In modern times, it's been widely discredited. In a 2002 interview, psychologist Susan Clancy discussed how hypnotic regression can actually create false memories, specifically about fake alien encounters.
But Penniston's revelation isn't the only alternative explanation for the Rendlesham Forest cover-up. The US and UK governments had plenty of other possible motives for discrediting their own officers. According to Sergeant Jim Penniston, government agents hypnotized him so he'd forget his encounter in Rendlesham Forest to avoid mass chaos. But there might have been a simpler motive. They wanted to save face.
Because some people think the Rendlesham Forest incident was a hoax. And when highly trained servicemen fell for it, it was a massive military embarrassment. Think about it like this: Military officers who see aliens or time travelers are a quirky story. Officers who fall for a hoax are a security threat. Let's look at the evidence.
In 2003, an Air Force policeman named Kevin Condé told the BBC that he was stationed at the base near Rendlesham Forest during the sightings. But he said the whole incident wasn't a close encounter, it was a prank that got wildly out of hand. A prank Condé pulled. Condé wanted to play a trick on the guard stationed outside the base that night.
So he grabbed a few friends and some red and green lenses for his police car's spotlight. Then they headed out towards Rendlesham Forest. Conde said, "We just drove through the forest flashing the lights through the fog." Eventually, Conde and his partners in crime headed back to the base, with no idea how big the story would grow. When the news of an alleged UFO started to spread, Conde stayed quiet.
presumably out of fear that he'd get reprimanded for wasting everyone's time. When he finally talked to the BBC, he swore that the whole thing was just meant to be a joke. It wasn't a UFO. It was a 1979 Plymouth Volare. According to Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, Colonel Charles Halt knew Condé and said he was definitely a prankster. But the story still doesn't quite add up.
Condé only pulled this prank once, and the airmen at Rendlesham reported seeing lights on two separate nights, so they must have seen something besides the Plymouth. And sure enough, a few years after Condé's interview, another man came forward with an explanation.
In 2009, the Daily Mail published an article about a Suffolk man who claimed that he caused the Rendlesham incident. The man, Peter Turtil, lived in the nearby town of Ipswich. Turtil told the Daily Mail that on the night of the UFO sighting, he had, let's say, come into possession of a truck filled with stolen fertilizer. As he was driving near Rendlesham Forest, the truck broke down.
Instead of getting help or returning the stolen goods, Turtil decided to do the next best thing. He set the entire truck bed full of fertilizer on fire. Turtil said that the fertilizer made the fire burn in unusual colors, and he thinks the Air Force officers mistook the vibrant light for a UFO. He said, I admit it probably looks spectacular, but it was hardly a spaceship.
Though once again, even if both Conde and Turtel stories are true, and they occurred on consecutive nights,
they still don't explain everything. I saw a yellow tangent in the tube. Weird. It appears that he may be moving a little bit this way. It's brighter than it has been. Yellow. It's coming this way. It is definitely coming this way. Pieces of it are shooting off. Halt reported seeing moving lights in the skies, not just a police spotlight shining through trees or a truck full of burning fertilizer.
And neither of them began to explain the craft that Jim Penniston saw in the forest. But there's yet another factor in play here. In 1985, journalist Ian Ridpath did a story on the Rendlesham Forest encounter. But instead of only interviewing American officers, he spoke to some British locals, including a man named Vincent Thirkettle. Thirkettle told Ridpath he'd seen the lights on December 26, 1980. He saw them all the time.
They were from the local lighthouse. You see, Rendlesham Forest is only about 15 minutes from the English Channel.
Ridpath didn't just take Turkel's word for it, he also confirmed the stories with police officers patrolling the area that night. No aliens, just the Orford Ness Lighthouse. Now, Ridpath does give the Americans some credit. Rendlesham Forest is at a much higher altitude than Orford Ness, so the light beam that shines above the water enters the forest at ground level.
Most people don't look into a forest and expect to see a lighthouse beam, especially so low to the ground. So combine the lighthouse, the prankster, the flaming stolen manure, and you get aliens. Or time travelers. And most importantly, freaked out officers. Once the Air Force higher-ups realized this, they had to keep it quiet.
If the story got out, the US Air Force would have looked like a joke. And during the Cold War, looking weak was not an option. So they covered up the truth. But here's where I have a problem with this theory. First, none of these three explanations account for the ship Henniston and Burroughs saw. And second, I've seen a lot of flashing lights and pyrotechnics in my time. I wouldn't call it a life-changing experience.
Yet, all the witnesses say those two nights changed their perspective on the universe forever. So the incident probably wasn't a simple prank. But that doesn't mean it wasn't caused by humans. According to author Nick Pope, it might have been a military experiment. Pope claims that a few months before the Rendlesham incident,
The US military held a symposium to discuss the safety of the government's nuclear weapons. One document from the time recommended using what they called "active procedures" to test the security of weapons storage areas at an unnamed Air Force base. And what's a bigger security threat than visitors from another planet?
Pope theorized that the government may have used top-secret holographic technology like a so-called "ghost gun" to simulate the lights in the sky. They also had the resources to create a fake alien ship and plant it in the forest.
To make everything more believable, Pope suggests the Air Force secretly dosed officers with hallucinogenic drugs like LSD or psilocybin. These drugs may alter the connective pathways in the human brain, potentially changing how the user's minds work. Many people who've taken them report it as a life-altering experience.
It may sound far-fetched, but long-time listeners will know that the government drugging soldiers isn't beyond the realm of plausibility. The US government admitted to conducting secret human drug experiments during the Cold War in Project MK-ULTRA.
Though they claim that stopped in 1963, more than 15 years before Rendlesham. But here's the thing, just because they stopped experimenting doesn't mean they stopped drugging people. They knew what the drugs would do and used them for that. Perhaps making the soldiers believe aliens had arrived. However, Pope also acknowledged that the government would probably have chosen an air base in the US for a test like this.
and leadership likely would have told Halt's, Penniston and Burroughs the truth afterward, at least we hope so, it leaves us wondering: What would the US and UK government most want to lie about? What's a rational explanation for betraying your own people? How about nuclear war? In "Encounter in Rendlesham Forest," co-author Nick Pope laid out one final possibility:
that the UFO was actually a spy plane from the Soviet Union. In 1980, the US was still locked in the tense final years of the Cold War.
The USSR may have wanted intelligence about the twin US military bases in the UK since they'd be the first to respond if war broke out in Europe. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to think that the country may have tried to send a spy plane to Britain. If they were caught, it would have caused an international incident.
Remember that Chinese spy balloon in early 2023? It would have created a media frenzy like that, but much scarier, because both the US and the Soviets had nuclear bombs at the ready. But if no one found out, the bombs didn't have to go off. As Pope put it,
Perhaps a small group of Soviet, American, and British military intelligence personnel conspired to keep this event from their political masters and mistresses, aware that this could quickly escalate matters to a dangerous level. And the Soviet spy plane angle solves another piece of the puzzle. The shapes that Penniston saw on the hull of the craft, maybe they weren't alien hieroglyphics,
They were Russian words written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Penniston copied down the shapes in his notebook and included scans of the pages in Encounter in Rendlesham Forest. They don't look like a regular typeface, but words printed on the side of a plane would be in big block letters. To an untrained and more importantly panicked eye, they could read as shapes.
And Penniston did compare the placement and spacing to hieroglyphics. On some level, he interpreted the symbols as writing. We looked at Penniston's drawings and the Cyrillic alphabet side by side. And they line up. If you want to examine them for yourself, you can find images on our Instagram page. If it was a Soviet plane, it might be another 50 years before that information is declassified.
Which isn't so long when you compare it to the other theories. If it was an alien, we'll have to wait for them to make contact again. And if it was a time traveler, well, I'll see you in 8100. Regardless of which explanation you believe, two things are true. The experience profoundly affected just about everyone in Rendlesham Forest that night.
Colonel Charles Halt turned from a skeptic into a UFO believer, and Jim Penniston and John Burroughs are still wrestling with the aftermath all these years later. Penniston put it best in Encounter in Rendlesham Forest when he said, "...what I once believed is no more, and what I've witnessed defies all that I have ever imagined. I am truly in awe over the whole incident."
And no one can fully understand the magnitude of such an event unless they were there. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. And be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod. We would love to hear from you as well. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
For more information on the Rendlesham incident, amongst the many sources we used, we found Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, the inside story of the world's best documented UFO incident by Nick Pope, Jim Penniston, and John Burroughs, extremely helpful to our research. Do you have a personal relationship to the stories we tell? Send a short audio recording telling your story to conspiracystoriesatspotify.com.
Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth.
Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by River Donahay, researched by Bradley Klein, edited by Maggie Admire, fact-checked by Laurie Siegel, and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau, our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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