The Lighthouse

left right after we passed him. Probably In the days following December, Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Halt, the deputy base commander, was asked to write a memo describing the events of the three night encounter to give to the Royal Air Force representative at R A. F. Bent Waters. The memo was sent up to the Ministry of Defense, but Halt never heard anything back. I was relieved to be very honest with you, and that was I thought at the end of it until two or three years later, whenever

the memo got released. And then it hit the fan. I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals Episode three, The Lighthouse. It hit the fan on October two in the English newspaper called The News of the World under the headline UFO lands in Suffolk and that's official, the article began, a UFO has landed in Britain and that staggering fact has been officially confirmed. Despite a massive cover up.

News of the World investigators have proof that the mysterious craft came to Earth in a red ball of light at three am on December. You might have noticed that they have the date of the first night wrong. Not and we'll get to that later. In addition to the article, the paper ran the text of Chuck Halts memo. The Rundel Shim encounter was now publicly known. Even if the News of the World's journalistic standards weren't always of the

highest quality. The News of the World Sunday tabloid a bit like the National Inquiry when they're not quite as bad. I'm in mid Path, I'm in English. Amateur astronomers, science writer and UFO skeptic. Redpath read the article and became perhaps the leading investigator into the encounter. Now, as an amateur astronomer, I always like to try and explain things

with some celestial event. Because the investigations show that the great majority of UFO cases are actually caused by natural and man made objects, and the biggest culprits are usually bright stars and planets, satellites, meteors, sometimes aircraft as well. But I couldn't find anything to explain what this flashing light might be that the airmen had seen among the trees out in Randols from forest. Unable to find an explanation, he decided to go to a local source. The area

is a forest. It's a cultivated forest run by the British Forestry Commission. So I rang their office and I spoke to the forester, who at that time lived in a cottage not very far away from where the m and had gone out to investigate. And he said to me, you know, I don't know of anyone around here thinks anything strange happened back then. And so I said, well, what do you think it was that must have seen something? And he said to me, I think it was the lighthouse.

And I nearly fell off my chair, because despite all the talk in the press and everywhere else, no one had ever mentioned a lighthouse. This was the Orfordness Lighthouse on the North Sea coast, about five miles from the base. It was built in the last of a series of beacons dating back to sixteen thirty seven. It's not there anymore. It was torn down in the summer of so I thought I have to go out and see this for myself. At the time, Ridpath was doing some work for BBC Television.

He asked them if he could go investigate. So I went out there with a film crew. We filmed the light flashing between the trees and we interviewed the forester, who was man called Vince the Kettle, and I came back pretty much convinced that this explained at least part of the sighting, which was the flashing light seen between

the trees on both nights of the event. So this was the first indication that maybe there was another explanation for what had happened over those three nights in But of course there was more to the encounter than the flashing light. So Ridpath began to look at more of the details of the encounters reported by Jim Peniston and John Burrows on the first night and our Halt and

the others on the third night. He wondered what could John Burrows as supervisor Bud Stephens, have seen on the first night to make him think that something had landed in the forest. John Burrows from episode one, we were driving down towards the skate when he saw something strange in the sky that he said whened for the forest later was quoted as saying it landed. I contacted a friend of mine in the British Astronomical Association and he said, oh yes. At about three am on that same morning,

a bright fireball had been seen over southern England. Now this was a natural's piece of space debris burning up high in the atmosphere, and we know from plenty of past cases that bright fire balls give the impression of something coming to Earth much closer than they really are. The firebar was miles up in the sky, probably out over the North Sea, but to Stephens it would have looked much closer, and when it disappeared in the sky behind the trees, it probably looked as though it disappeared

into the trees. Remember the confusion caused by Stephen's claims that the object had landed in the forest and Peniston's confusion because the forest was too dense for anything to land this fireball explains that as well, there was no indication of a crash because the fireball was never anywhere near the forest. It was an optical illusion. So they went out looking for something because they thought that something had crashed in the forest. They saw something they didn't recognize.

He's talking about the light from Orfordness Lighthouse. It was one of the brightest lighthouses in the country out on the coast, and from that part of the forest where they saw the flashing light, the line of the lighthouse could be seen. I know because I went there. How nice to weep myself. But bros and Peniston saw another light as well, one that could not have been the lighthouse. I'm James mcgahey. I am trained as an astronomer, retired United States Air Force pilot, was also in the army

during Vietnam. I've flown around the world. I have studied UFOs for over forty years and debunked the number of

UFO cases and appeared on television. The one thing that did come up originally when they were out there the first night at the end of this time period, when they were out there, they saw a white and blue bank of lights through the forest trees from John Brows has written statement following the encounter, read by an actor we had just passed a creek and we're told to come back when we saw a blue light to our left in the trees. It was only there for a

minute and just streaked away. At four eleven in the morning, there was a police car out there. British police cars are not like US police cars. They have a bank of flashing white and blue lights on the top which were flashing through the forest as they were driving around these forest roads out there. When Burrows and Dennison were out there looking around at lights, and then all of a sudden they see this bank of white and blue lights flashing, which was nothing more than that police car

in the forest. So for the first night, by this accounting, you have three different elements, the fireball in the sky, the Orfordness lighthouse and finally the police cars. The first night also left physical evidence. Remember Umber Jim Peniston returned to the scene just hours after the encounter and made plaster casts of imprints in the ground. On the third night, Chuck Halt and his group went to the scene with a radiation detector and picked up some radiation. First the

marks in the ground. Now, my friend the forest who I spoke to Vince the Kettle said, well, yeah, he'd seen these marks as well. They looked to him like rabbit diggings. They weren't very deep, they weren't even in an evenly space triangle, and they were covered with pine needles, so they were clearly quite old. There was nothing new or unusual about it. It's soft, sandy soil, so it's quite easy for rabbits to dig in, so he didn't

see anything unusual about that either. At the time, the local police concurred that the markings on the ground had been made by forest animals, but Halt didn't know this. On the night of when he led a party into the forest. Now Colonel Holt was taken up and showing these knocks. He took a guangacounter and a guyac counter operated with him. I just trying to meter. Don't say that he can about under ten degrees. The readable about cold clicks, it's a normal background radiation that they were

picking up. It's quite clear from Colonel holtz tape. People were trying and tell you that they were elevated readings. They weren't. Nick Pope, among others, disputes that these readings were insignificant. On June the physicist Frank Close, who was now an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, appeared on a show called Strange but True Live broadcast by the British TV network i t V three. On it, he addressed claims about the radiation levels detected by Halt

and Nevill's. In this clip, he has a Geiger counter similar to the one used on the third night of the Ryndshum Forest encounter. This is the British equivalent of the standard US Air Force issue, which is used usually for measuring huge amounts of radiations like in nuclear blasts and so forth. All you need to notice is is a dial on the front here, and it looks very much like the speedo in your car. Now, the speed in your car is great for measuring whether you're exceeding

the speed limits or not. But you know what it's like, You're stuck in the traffic jam doing nothing, but it's still flickering at the bottom. We know from the report that Colonel Holt made at the time that the amount of radiation they thought they were detecting on their machine was very very small, not point one. And we've checked with the makers of the U S equivalent, and they said. Their quote is that this measurement was the bottom reading of the machine and was of little or no significance

at all. So it was not possible with the device to measure that small amount. So the radiation readings are explainable. Halt also brought the star scope, which was essentially a set of night vision goggles. He clearly didn't understand the equipment. He didn't understand what he did. He was pointing an image intensifier at a tree and said the tree was glowing when he had a flashlight on it. An image

intensifier just intensifies the light, doesn't measure anything. It's quite clear that he pointed the image intensifier at the lighthouse scope that was burned dry. And of course image intensifiers amplify the light twenty thirty thousand times, and a beam every five seconds coming through the image intensifier effectively burned the image out totally. It had been so bright. Halt looked through the star scope at a light source. But what evidence is there that it was in fact coming

from the lighthouse. Well orfard this lighthouse had a rotating light that did a full rotation every five seconds. Now the men then drew Colonel Holt's attention to the flashing light, same thing that had been seen on the first night, and you can hear the men say, look, there it is straight ahead off my flash light. There it is again, and there is a five second gap between the there it is and there it is again, so we know

that the light was flashing at five second indivals. On an episode of his Skeptoid podcast on the Rundel Shim encounter, Brian Dunning sink a portion of the Halt tape with a five second tone to show how the appearance of the light coincided with the lighthouses rotation interval. We are using this tape with his permission. Where right at this position here straight ahead and between the sitter it again in this case the flashing lights. Well, they never got

much closer to it. Colonel Halt said, well, it looks like it's clear off to the coast. So we have a flashing light which is in the direction of the orford Ness lighthouse, because we know from where he was standing the direction he was looking. So although he didn't realize what it was at the time, from Colonel Halt's own words, it seems very clear that he was looking at orford Ness Lighthouse, as were the m n on the first night. But this was not the only strange

light that Hal and his group saw. On the third night, they also saw colored lights down near the horizon. This is from the hot tape three or fire that about ten degrees horizon dirtly north through that two strange objects shape colored lights on them that just to be about maybe less in the full circle. There was an Olympic eclipse or something there for a negative. Now, what's bright star like and flashes colors in the sky? Well? Stars.

Colonel Hawk was out there until it started getting bright in the morning, the dawns started coming up, and they were still there, he said. Actually one of them appeared to be low over the Woodbridge base, which was towards the southwest of him, which was exactly where serious the brightest star in the sky is to be found was to be found at that time. And when a star like Sirius is low down, the air currents in the atmosphere make it twinkle. So yes, you will see serious

flashing red. You'll see it flashing green, You'll see it flashing white, simply because it's light is being broken up by convection currents in the atmosphere. So just like the first night, the encounter on the third night in this explanation comprises three elements. The lighthouse not understanding how the specialized equipment they were using worked, and then the misidentification of the stars. The only thing that's unusual where you don't often get lighthouses involved in in the UFO cases,

the first one I've ever come across. Then, as they moved between the trees, it looked as though the bright light was moving away, zigzagging between the trees in front of them, And it's exactly the same kind of effect that you get when it seems as though you're being chased by the moon when you're driving in in your car. So it wasn't really the light that was moving, it was them that will move in which gave the impression

of the lights receding and zigzagging between the trees. This, then, is the skeptical explanation for what happened in rundel Shom Forest. It seems to offer an explanation for all of the elements over the course of those nights, but it's not actually proof of anything. It's an alternative explanation that doesn't rely on the paranormal. Of course, not everyone accepts the

skeptical explanation that we've just heard. I've heard every explanation for the Randal Show inside in and Look, I'm not here to prove to anyone that aliens landed in the forest and Randell Show post of the Somewhere in the Skies podcast Ryan Sprague. I'm here to try to find the truth, and I'm open to any possibility of what Randal Show was. But I'm not willing to accept is that it was a lighthouse. Was there another way to

possibly verify what had happened one way or the other? Well, this incident involved the military, and where the military is involved, there's paperwork after the break. Strange arrivals will return in a moment. The r a F. Bent Waters and r a F. Woodbridge based complex house nuclear weapons. In a case where an unknown craft or crafts encroached on that complex, you would expect to find a mountain of paperwork. Maybe that paperwork was classified or remains classified, but you would

expect that it would exist. The written statements by Peniston, Burrows and others were not in fact official documents. They did not find their way into the Air Force official accounting of this event. The only official document that was produced from this encounter, which Chuck Halts Memo, and that wasn't for the U s Air Force, It was written

for the British Ministry of Defense. In two thousand, Prime Minister Tony Blair signed the Freedom of Information Act, which provided a means for journalists in the public to request official government information. Sheffield Hallam University Associate Professor David Clark.

At the time, I was working as a news reporter for one of the big regional newspapers in the UK and the Freedom of Information was coming in and my editor was saying everyone, all you journalists, you need to sort of use this is where it's going to be in the future. It's a great tool for journalists forcing the government to release the not released. Before Clark realized is that he needed to find his own niche a subject that he could focus his attention on now that

this new information had been made available. So I just thought, well, what about UFOs. You know, I know that there's this unit at the Ministry of Defense that's existence since the nineteen fifties. I know they've got lots of files on this thing that in the past they've always stone wall.

So I just thought, well, I'm going to use this legislation, and the very first thing I went for was the file on the Randelstrom Forest incident, because up until that point they just said the only thing that they got on file was Colonel Holt's memo one page of A four and I just thought that cannot be true. Clark put in his request soon after this new policy was implemented,

and I really didn't think it would get anywhere. Low and Behold, within a few months they said, oh, yes, we've located a hundred and fifty five page file, and we've also gone back and searched to all the other files covering the period of the sighting, and we've found a whole bunch of other documents as well, so we've copied those for you. We've added those to the file. Here. It is big, thick, brown envelope, just dropped through my letter box one morning and I just thought, Wow, I've

hit jack pot here. But despite the size of the file, the contents were disappointing. The file itself was something that was assembled later when the story going into the news of the world and It largely consists of Holtz memo, a few other bits and pieces, and then the rest of it is just letters from uthologists and members of the public who's seen the story in the newspapers and who were writing in to the Ministry Defense saying what do you know about this? Did the aliens really land?

And their response every time is just the standard, Well, all we've got is Colonel Halt story. We looked into it at the time, our air defense experts decided that there was nothing to be worried about because they didn't see anything on radar. So that's the end of it as far as we're concerned. So that the entire file just a repetition of that statement whenever they received a letter or an inquiry from the media. In other words,

there was nothing. Later, though, Clark became the official spokesman for the government effort to organize and release the UFO files that it had. In this capacity, he was able to access all of the surviving files. This let him take another approach to Reyndlssom documentation. He asked to see the general file of UFO reports for the whole year of Clark says it was a huge file about a

foot thick. And the interesting thing from my point of view as an arcadist historian, journalist, is the report from Colonel Holt was just filed with all the rest of the lights in the sky in that file. So his original memo is in the general UFO file alongside all the other Mr Son So coming out of a public house in London and saw lights in the sky. The

next story is Colonel Hall. Then another story and the guy who was the UFO desk officer at the time, Simon Weed, and I spoke to him about this and he remembered it clearly and he just said, well, it was just another story. We didn't take it seriously. And this is a critical point when looking at the Rundall

Shim encounter. As we've mentioned before, if a craft, any craft had appeared around R A F. Bent Waters and R. A F. Woodbridge basis with nuclear weapons during the Cold War, it should have caused great concern and an intense official reaction, but it didn't. Chuck Halt talks about how we never heard back from the U. S. Air Force or the English Ministry of Defense about his encounter. Why why didn't

the Ministry Defense take this seriously? And There is a two page briefing in the files about this, and basically what they said was, we didn't take it seriously because Colonel Halt and take it seriously. We looked at his memo. Why did he wait two weeks to report it to us in the first place, and why did you get all the dates wrong? If he thought when this was happening that the base a nuclear arm base, was under attack, you wouldn't wait until the British based commander came back

from his Christmas holidays two weeks later. I mean none of what I've said here. It says that something didn't happen. Clearly something did happen, but the time to actually do a thorough investigation of it has passed. You can't investigate something that happened forty years ago when all the records have been destroyed, and when such elementary mistakes were made at the time. He's talking about radar records that were destroyed,

leaving that question forever unresolved. We've heard the accounts of the encounters at Ryndoldshop Forest, and in the next episode we'll hear more from the witnesses. We've also heard the skeptical explanation for what happened. It's safe to say that neither the original nor the skeptical account have become universally accepted. The public understanding of what happened is still up for grabs.

So you've got this inconclusive situation where people come in with other types of explanations when something seems just completely incomprehensible. And so I think that when you don't have a cultural narrative to explain what happens, then you will often have different types of explanations coming forward. My name is Deborah Lotonzi Shutka. I am a folklorist and professor at George Mason University in Fifex, Virginia. I have been teaching folklore for over twenty years and my area of specialty

is narrative analysis. Those types of stories are obviously really great interest to folklore's because it tells us basically how a community or a person is thinking about a set of circumstances. So this is an important point for the rest of the season. In a situation such as Rendall shown, where there are two or more narratives about what happened, why does one narrative eventually become accepted and what does

that tell you about the culture at the time. These are the kinds of questions that folklor's are interested in. Whether the story is literally true or not is beside the point again, David Clark, when it comes to people's stories, I just prefer to just treat those stories as stories and respect them as stories. And to me, it doesn't particularly matter whether they are made up or genuinely believed

or a real experience, that they are all expressions. I mean, the case is almost like re enchantment of the world in that. Yeah, you kind of explain it all as Ian tries to do in down to earth terms. He's talking about Ian Redpath. Yeah, that might be the case. I can accept that, but it doesn't explain the psychology of it. It doesn't explain why people were thinking about UFOs. I mean, it's more like a folk story and the fact it took place in a forest as well. Forests

are enchanted places in folklore. You know, there's loads and loads of stories in British food wall about people going into forests, getting lost, being led astray by will of the whisps. You know, lights that are moving in the distance that people go towards, and the light moves further away and then they end up falling into a bob. That kind of thing that those forests in Suffolk are

just read them with stories like that. Folklorets divide stories into categories such as fairy tales, folk tales, and narratives of personal experience. The Rundelson Forest encounter is what folkloreists would classify as a legend. Basically, what folklore is, it's a body of shared cultural experience that one learns from their parents, their friends, their community. Informally, so, folklore is the things that we learned about life that are not

often taught in schools. Among that, probably the most popular is the legend, and the legend is a story that generally people tell to one another as if it were true, although the narrative itself calls into question the veracity of what's being told. It's not uncommon for someone to hear a legend and then go, did that really happen? So the idea here is that legends are told or shared to share different types of experiential or belief knowledge that

calls into question the very nature of that knowledge. Think about ghost stories. Some ghost stories you hear are very individu ualized I have friends, for instance, who have a neighbor who has stories of lights being turned on at different times of the night. This story will most likely never travel beyond a small circle of friends and friends of friends. But then there are also stories that come

across that are very traditional folk legends. Probably one of my favorite is a vanishing hitchhiker, where a person sees a person hitchhiking. They stopped because for some reason they feel compelled to pick up the person. There's very little interaction between the driver and the hitchhiker, and when they get to the destination that the hitchhikers has to be dropped off at. Usually the hitchhiker disappears. Wherever I go,

there he is. Wherever I stop, I see him. No matter how far I travel or how fast, like calling, he's ahead of me. At the beginning of this episode, we heard a clip from a Twilight Zone episode that is a version of this tale. I believe You're going my way. In the standard vanishing hitchhiker story, the driver finds out that the person they picked up actually died some time ago, often around the spot where they hitch

the ride. It's a creepy story and one that when you hear it begs the question do you believe in ghosts or the supernatural? One of the things that folk culture often does, especially in the genre of legend and belief, is that there is a developing performance of rationality. People know that being seen as a believer can automatically cast out on people's stories. I'm Lynn McNeil. I am a folklorist at Utah State University. I run the folklore program there.

I teach folklore there. I work in the folklore archives that we have there. When someone asked you if you believe in the supernatural or the paranormal, you probably think of this as a yes or no question, either you believe or you don't, And you also understand that how you answer will affect the way the person asking will think about you. You know that the quote unquote correct answer is to say no, because that means you are a rational person. That you're thinking is based in science.

For most people, though, the real answer isn't necessarily yes. The real answer is something along the lines of the story. The real answer to do you believe in ghosts as well? No?

Of course not, I mean who would. But after my grandpa died, there was like this one Christmas light and it was totally the one that he was always into, and it just started blinking like the day after he died, and it never stopped blinking, and we all just sort of knew like that was Grandpa, you know, letting us know that he was still there with us for the holidays. So no, I don't believe in ghost, but I mean, my Grandpa's in that Christmas life. Like that very paradoxical,

very contradictory answer, and that's never on the survey. But when people are surveyed to find out their beliefs about the supernatural or paranormal, the questions aren't looking for that kind of complicated answer. They're looking for the person to answer yes I believe or no, I don't believe. When that's the choice, people check the no box. Thissunderstanding of what people will think of you if you express a belief in these things carries over to how stories involving

the supernatural or paranormal are presented. When someone wants to speak about a supernatural experience they've had, they grow I like the word armor over their story in anticipation of people who are going to say, okay, weirdo you clearly are an irrational thinker. So we see this performance of rationality, this intentional reality testing that takes place, that becomes a part of the story to say, now I thought it could be this, but then I realized it couldn't because

of this. And I also thought that maybe it could be this, but that doesn't make any sense because of X, Y and Z. Think about Chuck Halt and how he characterizes his intentions as he sets out to investigate the return of the lights at Rundel shom Forrest. He says, have him made me a distast preparedness off and spend about thirty minutes, and we'll go ohead and take see what this is all about. And I wanted the document

was nothing there. Whether you believe that Chuck Halt saw unidentified craft in the sky or whether you believe that he saw the Orfanist lighthouse and stars doesn't change the basics of his experience. He went into Rundel shop forest and saw lights. He tried to make sense of what he was seeing and arrived at the conclusion that they

were you fos. They end up at this supernatural or paranormal conclusion that for all that it might not be scientifically testable the way that we think of the scientific process.

It's a rational thought process that they've gone through. And this is something that any folklorist who has done ethnographic work with people on the subjects of belief in the supernatural sees right away is oftentimes these are incredibly thoughtful, observant people who themselves don't want to have to have drawn that conclusion, and yet there's no other conclusion for

them to draw. Sometimes. The other thing about legends is in order for a legend to survive and be successful, there's got to be a debate about his plausibility, about whether it really happened or not. And that's where the clashes between the different factions who are representing the different characters in this play, which is why I see it, and the clash between what they're trying to established and

the skeptics who are saying it's all nonsense. It was a lighthouse and a meteor and all the rest of it. It's that debate, ongoing debate that keeps it alive because once everyone excepts, oh, yeah, it was a lighthouse, and we can all go home now and and be happy, No, it's no longer a legend. It's something that's been explained and that we can put to one side and move

on to the next thing. And it's not just a dispute between people who do and don't believe that Randolsom Forrest was visited by unidentified crafts in as we will see next episode, disagreement among the witnesses over what they saw has grown over the years as new explanations for

what happened are put forward. So the reason it's living on and it's mutating is because you've got this constant sort of clash going on between the believers and the skeptics, and even in the believer camp, you've got all these different sort of groups of believers are all trying to assert their version of it, and that's why it's so latent.

He's one of the most successful UFO legends. In fact, I think he's almost going to supersede Roswell because the difference with Randelshim is that all the key participants are still alive. You can actually talk to them, whereas no one from Roswell. I mean, I know there are sons and daughters of people who were there, but really, what more can you say about ROSWELLT that hasn't been said. There's an awful lot you can say about Rendel Ship

that hasn't been said Holt, Peniston and Burrows. I'll have more to say things that cast a new strange light on those three nights in Rundel Shom Forest next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heeart, three D Audio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey.

This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Mankey, with voice acting by Jeff Williams and special thanks to Wendy Connors, creator of the Faded Discs archive of UFO related audio on

archive dot org. Learn more about Strange Rivals over at Grimm and Miles dot com, and find more podcasts from my heart Radio by visiting the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.