Rendlesham Forest

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There's some type of strange road light hill.

I saw, y'all a tang in it too.

Weird, It maybe a little bit funny.

Yes, it's be not aspat thrill is coming its way.

Also, it's definitely coming its way. It goes back out into the farmer's field directly overhead a very high speed. At least fifteen people in the weapons storage areas saw the objects.

In the sky.

Here's something very very strange.

It's not aspen.

I said, let's try and approach it.

We move up to the edge of the forest, and when we.

Tried to get close, it went back out into the field. They knew we were trying to get close.

It's kind of tourist house.

Sparks are coming off and so bright.

It was like looking at the sun coming down to the ground.

This is beyond anything that we're familiar with.

Welcome to high Strange. The year was nineteen eighty Suffolk, England. Tensions between Russia and the US were high.

There is imminent danger of some kind of Soviet military action.

There were two bases in eastern England ran by the US Air Force.

This invasion is an extremely serious threat to peace.

They house the most advanced weapons in the world, there ready for deployment at any second. Right around Christmas time that year, the forest behind this US military base will become the location of Britain's very own roswell event known as the Rendlesham Forest incident. Charles Holt, a military commander on the base, headed into the forest to investigate rumors of lights in the sky when he experienced an encounter

This guy, yeah, it's perfect for you.

This is Jim Piniston.

So how many guys believe in UFOs.

At this point, I'm convinced that UFOs are not a matter of believing, but rather the question is what are they? There are outlier cases like this one that still puzzle our government today. The real question we're asking ourselves is do you believe these are extraterrestrial or are they some other natural phenomenon we don't fully understand yet. Or are these guys simply mistaking what they saw, embellishing their stories, or just flat out making them all up.

That's the real question here.

You've told this story a thousand times, I'd say over times.

We're fascinated about.

Story, and they don't have a story. Though I don't have a story. The story sounds like something that you read when you're in grade school.

What is it?

This is an investigation by the United States Air Force. I'm December twenty sixth, nineteen eight. This is gonna be a rough night sleeping tonight. Well, I could talk. I'm talking about these are triggers. So everything you hear is a trigger. Nothing, there's no way around it. What I was seeing was stuff I had never encountered in my life or since then.

In the trauma of dealing with it.

I've always been able to tell you everything it wasn't, but there is a problem because of what wasn't.

I don't know what it was.

Jim's story begins on December twenty sixth, nineteen eighty, shortly after midnight.

I was a fifth generation military at that time. I was in charge of base security for Woodbreach. Our job was to protect aircraft weapons plus the personnel on the base. The night started pretty much as usual. I had done my guard mount, which is a briefing that you give your fifteen guys that are going to be working with you, putting my stuff down and grabbing a cup of coffee. Sarry mccaully says, did you hear that call on the radio?

What it is? I don't know he wouldn't tell me. I arrived at the east gate.

I contact the senior law enforcement patrolman staff Sargen, Bud Stephens. He said, what's going on, Bud? He just sort of points over maybe preiriy yards over to render some forest adjacent to the gate. I could see lighting above the forest and in the forest. I turned around to him and said, well, what is it? He says, oh, inside the forest you could see orange light. You see a red light. You could see flickering like that. It would

The trees and Redntlesoome Forest at the time were used as a crop hundreds of trees planted about five feet apart from each other, which would make it nearly impossible for conventional aircraft to land there. He went back to the east gate and called in to report what he was seeing in the forest.

Reached central security control. It's now security problem.

Five guys pick up. We got five guys online.

I says, well, I think this is a possible aircraft crash in the forest. They lost contact. Was a unidentified bogie on radar. They know where it came from. It came from our ease. And all this stuff is happening megafast. We were giving permission to go off base. We had a crash kit. I pulled out the camera. Security control was starting to break up and I couldn't really understand what they were saying.

On base, they used repeating systems for their radios, which allowed their walkies to cover a much longer distance.

Basically, there's never a dead spot.

But for the first time in his career on that base, Jim was having trouble reaching the command post on his radio.

Even though I wasn't hearing nothing in the radio, I'm talking. I'll get to the edge of the tree line was coming out of the forest was a white light. It was so intense that you couldn't really see anything inside the center of that light. Started taking pictures. I could feel static electricity on my face and skin. At first I thought it was maybe adrenaline, but it continued. My movements felt labored, like walking waist deep and a pool of water. I'm starting to wonder now, is this a rust?

Own well being.

I know that what I'm seeing is nothing I trained for. I personally thought, this is an unsurvivable situation. Everything out there is something I haven't seen. Before I get up off the ground, the white light started to dissipate, and when it did, I could see nothing but this black aircraft, this black triangular craft inside this white light.

Did you ever see anything like that before?

Craft like that didn't exist.

He pulled out his pen and notebook and started documenting as many details as he could about what he was seeing. Itself was warm to the touch, he described it feeling very smooth like black glass.

Well, I looked the underneath it. I could see white beams of light. There's three of them coming out from underneath the craft. I wonder if that's stable. I wanted to secure, so I tried to move it, and I pushed on it, tried to give it a shove to see if it would move. This didn't move at all. It was solid, fixed to the ground. Somehow, with this technology, how can this be? I started to look for things that aircraft needs to fly, exhausts and intakes and things

I go out to record all that stuff down in my book.

The craft itself was warm to touch, smooth, glass like metal. Still doing my security checks on the radio, but I'm getting nothing back. During my interaction with the craft, the air fell electric. I don't know how to explain that. Boy, the hair was lifting in the back of the neck and arms and face come back around and I could see writing.

On the side of the craft. That's a good thing.

I'm thinking, I'm hoping this says Nassai or something. As I got closer, it was a writing light we had. It was like gliffs. Victoria Bliss was put the emotion back into a panic.

What it looked like the writing.

There's five symbols. They were different shapes. The one that stood out the most it was the one that was above those five. There was another one which was larger and had a circular a circle around it, and it was a triangle with this huge circle around it, the size of a big dinner plate.

The circle.

I put my hand on the circular triangle that was above the other Gliss. All of a sudden, I have a blinding, pure white light. I cannot see nothing else. That eliminated all my visions. I start to see things that don't make no sense at all. That more, things that don't make those sense, like one and zeros and things like that.

It terrified me.

I gained my wits back, lift my hand back off, and it stops.

Was it in your head or physically there?

I was trying to determine whether or now it was physically there or in my head? Okay, When I took my hand off, that symbol I had my night vision, which is impossible. I had perfect night vision once I took my hand off the craft. After that happened with the light, I was never going to touch that craft again. All of a sudden, I started to see what I

Jim Penison was the head of security at the time, not just some on duty guard, the head of security on a US military base that held nuclear bombs ready to drop on Russia at any given moment. He spent his career in the Air Force and specialized in recognizing aircraft. Multiple witnesses saw the same things over the course of three days on the base. After the incident, Jim typed a report recounting his experience, submitting it to the higher ups.

Just go to at High Strange.

I'm no expert on anything aircraft related, but even to the layperson, Jim's sketches of the aircraft looked nothing like the US Air Force has then or now.

After I had my encounter in the forest, I went back and talked to all the participants that were involved.

The first night.

Here's Charles Holtz again, the man who recorded the third night of the incident on his tape.

Recorder, Peniston Burrows Cabana sack. They told me a cleaned up version of what happened.

They were told what to tell me.

In fact, Cabanasak brought me a typed statement. He didn't type it. He couldn't type words that he would not have used.

Holtz seems to think, or is at least hinting at the idea, that the reports submitted by his buddy were merely a cover story.

Basically said, we saw the Lighthews.

I think.

The British tabloid press had a field day with reports of the incident, with stories of flying saucers, mysterious lights, and even aliens. The Times of London, however, dismissed the incident and poked fun at the other newspapers. It quoted this man, Vince their Kettle, a forester who works near the alleged landing site. Their Kettle told CNN that the UFO was merely a beam of light from the nearby Orford Lighthouse.

But if you didn't know as a lighthouse, if you short, it was something small, maybe two three meters across, pulsing white in the forest. Yes, it looks as if it's within the trees, and it does appear to light up the trees as well.

When your senses are heightened, adrenaline pumping, and you're out in the woods at night looking for something weird. Common sense says there's a good chance you might find it.

I don't think we're ever going to get very far with the Renation Forest incident.

This is Mick West again, an investigative UFO skeptic.

I don't know if this is ever going to be a determination of exactly what happened to that. I think there are laws of all explanations a certain aspects of it. There was a lighthouse, that's crazy.

It wasn't the lighthouse. I'm very familiar with.

The lighthouse, and the lighthouse is at orford Ness. Orford Ness is a little small fishing village on the coast out on the island. Two little pubs out there have very good food and reasonable prices. I have pictures of me standing here. The lighthouse is over there, and the object was out here. How could the lighthouse reflect off the windows of the farmhouse when the lighthouse is two or three miles out that way.

The lighthouse theory quickly became the easiest and most rational explanation. But why would all these highly trained men interpret a lighthouse as some strange foreign object.

Three days in a row. I mean, what's the point.

The lighthouse was always there anyway, a little strange to suddenly take note of it and make a huge deal out of it all.

The game warden was also familiar with the cars and dismissed the lighthouse theory outright.

At the moment, We're standing on the orphored key, and quite clearly you can see the lighthouse over there flashing. The light from the UFO was totally nothing like the light from the lighters.

We know that people make mistakes.

We know that people, even with the best of intentions and with the best of observational abilities, can sometimes perceive things to be other than the way they actually are. There are classic cases like the Cottingly Fairies, where these two girls took photographs of fairies and they managed to convince a whole bunch of people that these were genuine photos of fairies, including Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a big investigator of such things at the time. They stuck

Once they told the same.

Story over and over again, it almost becomes like a memory. They're not really lying as such, they're simply just telling the same story, which happens to be false.

How could so many credible people from the military come up with the exact same lie, the same exact misinterpretation of something so completely normal. What are the odds they were all just mistaken or hallucinating. If their job is to guard and protect a military base, and they're dreaming of fantastical stories of foreign lights in the sky that didn't actually exist, then that would be pretty concerning on its own, wouldn't it.

I met the lighthouse keeper, Keith Simmons, met him and talk with him. Light house has three lenses, red and green, shine out to sea and white to land. He said, if you saw a red light, you couldn't have seen the lighthouse. You had to be out the sea to see the red lights. So people say that red light you saw was the lighthouse. There's no way it's not the lighthouse. The lighthouse is in a different location, twenty five or thirty degrees away. There's agencies that have a

Unmarked planes are not unheard of.

There's a company known as Janet Airlines that shuttles employees from the Las Vegas Airport to Area fifty one. You'd at least think that if unmarked planes full of unknown uniformed employees were landing on the based to collect information day whoever they are seem to find this incident just.

A little bit interesting.

Seems like a lot of extra unnecessary work for a lighthouse.

It was obvious nobody else was going to investigate. Nobody else was going to do anything, even though they did do things in the background, behind the scenes, so to speak. So I didn't know anybody else was in the background playing games. I didn't know any of this. I wasn't told to be quiet. It was sort of inferred that I should be quiet, and I already knew that. But I still got to three and four star endorsements on my report cards and still got promoted because they knew it was credible.

When it comes to trolls Holts. I'll be honest, it's hard not to believe him.

I get disappointed with all the disinformation that's out there, but I can't know anything about it except just tell the truth.

He doesn't claim to know what he saw that night, but that it was certainly something they were beyond unfamiliar with.

I have not ever said I saw a little green man. I never saw any entity that I could identify. I know what I saw, but I don't know what it was. I'd sure like to know. So Obviously, whatever we're seeing in the sky has the ability to do phenomenal things change shape, change size, change calor going phenomenal speed, do things that we just can't even imagine.

He wrote down in his own memo that he and several other military personnel saw multiple objects in the sky, a quote redlight sun object that pulsed and shed into particles before splitting into five separate white lights and then disappearing in the sky. It's hard to imagine someone of sound mind running around with a cassette recorder chasing a stationary lighthouse all night. The tape itself feels genuine. It sounds like they really don't know what's going on.

I wish I knew more, but I don't.

I am firmly convinced that we're not alone.

I can tell that, but I don't know what we're faced with.

Charles Holt went on to investigate the supposed landing site of the unknown aircraft, and he found indentations in the frozen ground, So something, whatever it was, had to have physically been there, or someone went out of their way to make it look like there was. That feels like we're entering conspiracy land a little bit. Holt and his

Never once device in a lighthouse move. So what else could these things be? Exactly?

Were they truly under intelligent control? Are they extraterrestrials, aliens, spirits, ai from the future. I could go on and on, or is it none of those things at all? Something simpler and much more rational, but easily misinterpreted as something strange.

However you feel about it.

A case like the Reynolsome forest incident is a hard one to just blindly dismiss as nothing at all.

Let's take a step back.

Forget the X files, forget popular culture and all the alien visitation and stories.

Here's political journalist Brian Bender.

Take this at face value.

Sightings reported by credible people over sensitive facilities, and we don't know what they are, just an air safety hazard. The military should probably try to find out what those things are, if for nothing else, to protect its own personnel.

Our job is to protect our troops.

If our troops are seeing things that they think are potentially dangerous or is upsetting to them, it's our job to do whatever we can do to figure out what that is. Let's get scientists together and deal with what can potentially.

Be a safety hazard.

If we really want to maximize our resources, let's get the government to be more transparent, share more of what it might have and its ability to gather more data. You know, maybe not publicize all of that, but what if you shared that data with some scientists. If what we get out of this is a society where we pride ourselves on the search for knowledge. This is a

That would be a real victory.

We're at a time in human history where technology is advancing. Assuming we can harness the technologies and they don't kill us first, I think it'd be a victory if there was a real career path, approach UAPs as a discipline and be successful. That's the way to get down the road of knowledge.

In nineteen fifty an article was published in True magazine titled The Flying Saucers Are Real. It was written by former pilot and retired Marine Major Donald Keho. Donald Kehoe is likely the very first citizen researcher of UFOs. Unlike most of his peers at the time, he didn't rely on the government to provide him all the answers, but

In numerous high ranking military officials.

He became convinced that some of these UFO sightings were of unearthly origin.

Keiho would go on.

To sell millions of books about the UFO mystery, and his diligent approach to the subject helped create a much more pragmatic conversation that still exists to this day. The road to knowledge is a long one, filled with roadblocks and potholes. But if we stopped looking to the military to provide us all the answers and instead turned to independent scientists from around the world who can collect all their own data, we might have a much better shot at the truth.

When we say the size of the universe, that's the size of the region that we can see. The universe is expanding, so if we go back in time, it was denser. Back in time. Eventually you get infinite density. That is the Big Bang when the density was infinite. So that's the beginning of time thirteen point eight billion years.

This is Abby Lobe, professor of science at Harvard University.

Within that volume that we can see, which is basically the distance that light could have traveled in thirteen point eight billion years, there are about a trillion galaxies.

Like the Milky Way.

Within the Milky Way galaxy, there are tens of billions of stars. You have more habitable planets like the Earth than there are grains of sand on all beaches on Earth? Are twenty one just a huge number?

Well, that's a brain buster for you.

The chance of.

Us being specially and unique is extremely smart. We know that most of the stars formed ten billion years before the present time, and the Sun only four point six billion years ago. Most stars like the Sun formed billions of years before the Sun.

Most planets that are habitable would be orbiting stars that are billions of years older than ours. Of these tens of billions of stars, many of them have what we call Goldilock zones, a fancy term for the areas that contain habitable planets like Earth. As of today, we've found fifty nine of the estimated eleven billion planets that could be inside these Goldilock zones.

If the technological clock started ticking around the same time as here, then the civilizations predated us. I think that it's very likely there could be probes visiting us. They had plenty of time to send probes that would fill up the Milky Way Galaxy. Most likely there was a scientist smarter than Albert Einstein on another planet who existed a billion years ago. They could have launched probes that arrived to us by now. And that's what we are trying to find out. Let's find the smartest kid in

Since two thousand and eight, the pant Star's Telescope in Hawaii has been using astronomical cameras and telescopes to track moving objects in the sky. Near Earth objects, the kind that Hollywood loves to make movies with. Bruce willis about big asteroids that could potentially wipe out the planet.

Well, I'm glad that someone is doing this.

I mean, remember what happened to all those dinosaurs.

The hard purpose of it was to find ninety percent of all the objects bigger than one hundred and forty meters the size of a football field.

On October nineteenth, twenty seventeen, the telescope spotted an objects roughly twenty one million miles away.

Here was an object that passed close to Earth, within a sixth of the Earth's sund separation and was about the size of a football field.

The data they were receiving started splitting the science community. Its characteristics were different. It didn't seem to look or behave like a typical space rock. It's believed to be somewhere between three hundred and three thousand feet long, and avi Low became increasingly convinced that the object was of interstellar origin. It was given the name a Mua Mua, and it's likely the first object we've ever seen from

Far far away, but where exactly.

The more data they collected, the more science pointed to the possibility that this wasn't a rock at all, and maybe it was actually a piece of machinery.

They flagged it and then they measured its speed and they realized, oh, it's moving too fast to be bound to the Sun. It's actually interested up. The more we found about it, the more unusually it looked. And I said, well, maybe it's artificial. They said, no, this must be natural, and then try to explain that anomali is and always concluded that it's something that we've never seen before.

According to NASA, they concluded the object has vents on its surface that emit jets of gases, giving it a non gravitational boost in its speed. Because of how insanely forward is from Earth, all we can see with our own eyes is a little speck of light, so the shape itself was.

Determined by its light curves.

On a graph, a muahmua is said to be ten times longer than it is wide, like a pancake. Astronomers have never seen an object with such extreme proportions at this rate of speed inside our solar system.

My colleagues suggested that maybe Omua Mua, this first object from twenty seventeen maybe it's a hydrogen iceberg, a nitrogen iceberg, or a dust bunny. I noticed that the object is so unusual that it couldn't be a rock or a comet. It was moving too fast to be bound to the sun, and astronomers at first thought that it's a rock that originated from another star. As we collected more data, it looked very strange because the amount of sunlight reflected from

It's either the weirdest space rock scientists have come across, possible, likely even or it's something different, possibly even artificial in origin.

And other people said, oh, well, maybe it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before. And I said, well, if that's the case, it could be also artificial origin. It was not a comet. It just shows that the game is not fair. A fair game should be to say, this object does not appear to be a comet. We didn't see any evidence for that. It could be something unusual. It could be a rock of a type we've never seen before, which some people claim that's fine, but don't

In nineteen fifty an Italian physicist name Enrico Fermi, the creator of the nuclear reactor, was on a lunch break with his coworkers. He was discussing in the recent UFO sightings in New Mexico, and he randomly blurted out, where is everybody? This question inspired him to do the math. If aliens do exist, well, then why haven't we all seen them yet?

I mean, what are they waiting for?

Fermi's calculations concluded that if they were real, then we would have been visited a very long time ago and many times over since then, and out of the billions of planets potentially growing civilizations, there should have been some evidence of them by now, But where are they? Why haven't they made contact if the probability is so damn high.

You could look at this two different ways.

To me, the easy, more ignorant approach is the whole Well, why haven't they reached out to us yet? To me, that screams were so special, I'm offended, why haven't you introduced yourselves yet? If aliens were in fact real, and it could travel to Earth from places so far away that we literally can't see them with our most advanced telescopes, then that would clearly mean they are incredibly more advanced than us. In this case, we're like the cavemen in

Ets, and he believes it actually happened.

The heart of Project strat is the broadcast operation. There are sixty thousand voltes running through his basement, powering a signal that's been straight out into space. The possibility that something out there might hear and perhaps respond, keeps John going.

John lives in a quaint little town in northern Michigan. Now, for over thirty years, he has literally been trying to contact aliens, send.

And now a signal, trying out a lure, trying to get some more information by luring the men close enough to get accurate electronic measurements, some hard data, something on instruments.

He built a radio transmitter so enormous that it took up two floors of his house, with generators the size of cars, an unbelievably powerful homemade machine you'd only expect to find at NASA. After decades of beaming signals into space, collecting data, and tweaking his instruments, one night he experienced something that remains hard to rationally explain to this day. After years of sending his own signals into space, he was suddenly getting something back.

Contacted our local Sheriff's firement. They sent out a deputy. I showed him on the cell scope screen what was coming.

On a frequency on the machine that was far more than just some strange anomaly. Something was out there intentionally causing it.

There shouldn't be that other frequency in there. That's not part of it. Something caused that amount of energy. I think something was attractive for.

The spaceship nor space conditions. The White legend in a habitat and states like a rich smokers, I ain't need.

A weed player, didn't take a lean it. She been on there Gen.

This is a bean back. I've been going Gene because her cool. Right now she was over. She was pending up to Japan.

The bands of very T shirt sleeve button our top ten of bird riding. Then you whether you gotta being down and saying the pear peller. We spend a diecop and God sweaters drive.

John n and nine helped. It was booming out of guys.

We are not the devil.

High Strange is an eight part series released weekly for free every Thursday. But if you'd like to binge the whole series right now, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus on Apple podcasts. To get all the episodes right now, follow the show on TikTok and Instagram at high Strange, and you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Payne Lindsay. If you have your own UFO story, email

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This episode features the song space Cadet by metro Booman featuring Gunna, written by Wesley Tyre Glass, Sergio Kitchens, Leland Tyler, Wayne Alan Ritter and Jack Queis Webster performed by metro Booman featuring Gunna courtesy of Republic Records under license from Universal Music Enterprises for metro Booman in three hundred Entertainment for Gunna Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station sixteen, Beck Media

Thanks for listening.