Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident

[Scaramanga]

The hypothesis that they mistook the lighthouse light shining through foliage for an object flying around and periodically emitting light is consistent with Halt's memo.

The lighthouse is not 3 meters wide and 2 meters tall, does not have blue and red lights, and from 6 miles away did not 'illuminate the entire forest'. It's one thing being 'parsimonious' with a story....its quite another matter just totally ignoring it.

And yes, its contradicted by Burroughs ( who does still mention seeing an 'object' ) and by Cabansag ( who mentions no object at all ). How can three people all relatively close, and who spoke to each other on the way back, give such widely different statements ? Rather than trying to explain these wide differences....why not wonder if any of it actually happened ?

 

[Mendel]

...and that if you really examine all the evidence it points that way

except you've not cited any of the evidence in the thousands of words you've written here, you're simply dismissing it sight unseen

 

[Mendel]

Seriously ?? I Mean just how much evasive nonsense one has to invent to get the lighthouse to even remotely match Penniston's report is more a matter of blind allegiance to the lighthouse theory than it is to the sort of critical thinking we're supposed to be doing here.

http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/lighthouse_visibility.html

1: Lighthouse from the forest edge

Above is a super-telephoto view of the top of the Orfordness lighthouse peeking through a notch between trees on the skyline, as seen from the eastern edge of Rendlesham Forest where the flashing UFO was sighted.

think about what they'd have seen of this in the dark, with the light flashing, in the distance through the trees

it explains Penniston's impression

The lighthouse is not 3 meters wide and 2 meters tall, does not have blue and red lights, and from 6 miles away did not 'illuminate the entire forest'.

the size is explained because Penniston misjudged the distance (insert Father Ted clip about cows)
the impression of the "entire forest" illuminated is explained because P. would have judged that from reflections on the trees, caused by the lighthouse beam strafing the forest


and you have to explain why the UFO believers at the site reported on every little light they saw, but did NOT mention the light house, which we know was visible

 

[Mendel]

I suppose the argument could be made that a lot of flood lights* were used at the FAKE site to give credence to the FAKE site

no, it can't, because the flood lights were never turned on

Looking through the transcripts of Halt's recording, I'm not convinced there were "massive floodlights".

you missed the bit right at the start

Having a little difficulty; can't get the Light-all to work. Seems to be some kind of mechanical problem. Gonna send back and get another Light-all.

http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/halttape.html

that never arrived

 

[Mendel]

And that's all a lighthouse 6 miles away ?? That is taking 'parsimonious' to absurd levels.

you seem to be surprised that lighthouses can be seen from 6 miles away?
when that is their primary function

that is taking argument by incredulity to new levels
"I can't believe lighthouses can be seen at a distance at night"

 

[Mendel]

We have, for example, Penniston and Burroughs claiming to see a landed object that Cabansag never mentions even though he was with them.

because they never reached that "landed object", and Cabansag understood they had chased a beacon

You still have no EVIDENCE to support your theory, and you have to cherry-pick and discard lots of the evidence we do have to make it work at all

you've been on Metabunk for so long, you should recognize how conspiracy theories work, by now

 

[Scaramanga]

and you have to cherry-pick and discard lots of the evidence

I'm sorry, but that is just absolutely hilarious as its exactly what many of you have been doing.

Penniston 'misjudges' the size of a lighthouse 6 miles away ? Lets do some simple maths. We know the entire structure is 98 feet tall. The section with the lens is 1/6 of that, thus about 16 feet wide. Six miles is 31,680 feet, so the entire circumference of a circle at that distance is 199,051 feet. That means 16 feet is 0.028 of a degree. That's less than 1/20 of the diameter of the Moon. Tiny.

Yet this tiny object is somehow seen as 9 feet wide and 6 feet tall ( says the Halt memo ) and seen as having red and blue lights ? You know, the red and blue light that Penniston mentions in his statement as coming from the object. The 'blue glow' that Penniston says was under an object not described as a tiny point of light but ' definitely mechanical in nature'. The blue light that the lighthouse does not have. Why are you ignoring that bit ? Now that's what I call 'cherry picking'.

As for people saying that Penniston's statement never says anything landed.....why the hell would Captain Mike Veranno be calling the police just 6 hours later to say he'd found the landing site, if Penniston had never claimed there was a landing site ?

If anyone's incredulous at the sheer extent to which stuff is just being cherry picked or ignored it is me.

 

[Scaramanga]

and you have to explain why the UFO believers at the site reported on every little light they saw, but did NOT mention the light house, which we know was visible

They do mention the lighthouse. Cabansag's statement mentions the red and blue lights ( the very same ones Penniston reports on ) and the yellow 'beacon light off in the distance'. And it clearly differentiates between them.

The idea that none of them were even aware of the lighthouse until Ian Ridpath discovered it is just nonsense. The lighthouse is right there in Cabansag's statement.

 

[Eburacum]

Seriously ?? Penniston claims a 9 foot wide metallic craft on the forest floor that he walks around ( how does one do that with a lighthouse ) and touches and feels it is warm, and notes strange markings on it.

Penniston's statement says he was 50 metres away from the object, and Halt's memo does not contradict this. How could Penniston touch an object that was 50 metres away? He must have very long arms!

Penniston may have misidentified some unfamiliar British vehicle, such as an agricultural vehicle, with warning lights of an unfamiliar kind. Why were the lights on in the middle of the night? Unknown. But ~50 metres away, through a dense forestry plantation, he couldn't identify it. Or it may have been a police vehicle, responding to the alarum.

 

[Eburacum]

Here's Penniston's drawing from his original statement. It seems obvious he never got near the thing.

Looks like a badly drawn tractor to me.

 

[Scaramanga]

Penniston may have misidentified some unfamiliar British vehicle, such as an agricultural vehicle, with warning lights of an unfamiliar kind.

Sitting abandoned in the middle of a forest with its light on at 3am on a Boxing Day morning ?

 

[FatPhil]

Seriously ?? Penniston claims a 9 foot wide metallic craft on the forest floor that he walks around ( how does one do that with a lighthouse ) and touches and feels it is warm, and notes strange markings on it.

Where's that? It certainly isn't in the document you linked to. Please follow the posting guidelines.

 

[Eburacum]

Sitting abandoned in the middle of a forest with its light on at 3am on a Boxing Day morning ?

He didn't get close enough to see if it was abandoned.
I call this tentative hypothesis the 'Tractor Beam' hypothesis; James Easton saw something similar in this period. From his 'Voyager newsletter No9'

Around a month ago, I witnessed something which was strikingly similar. It was at night and I noticed a number of lights which seemed to be moving through a small wood about half a mile distant. Intermittently, the trees were lit by a beam of white light.
Although I presumed this must be a vehicle, it was difficult to understand why there were so many lights, some appearing to be higher than others.
As I knew the landscape well, I had also deduced these lights must be from a farmer's field, used for cattle, behind the trees. If I hadn't known this, it would have been much more puzzling, as I recognised would surely be the case for anyone unaccustomed to the area.
In time, it became clear this was indeed a vehicle moving through the field, however, it was still unusual and looked to be surprisingly large as there were five lights on the front alone.
That was also an illusion.
It turned out to be nothing more than a tractor with a JCB 'digger' type of front scoop, being used to carry bails of hay for the cattle. The tractor had two lower front lights, two at the height of the cabin and also a rotating 'warning light' on top. There were also two lights on the back, all of which in the darkness could only be perceived as a collection of moving lights, with occasionally a white beam 'lighting up' some of the surrounding area. I didn't detect any noise until the vehicle was quite close.

Livestock still need to be fed on Boxing Day.

 

[Scaramanga]

Where's that? It certainly isn't in the document you linked to. Please follow the posting guidelines.

Burroughs got close enough to do this quite detailed drawing.....but they can't have got any closer ?

http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/Burroughs3.PNG

It's tiresome when people argue that stuff was not in the original statements, as if that is justification for ignoring. Of course stuff can be made up later. But then stuff can also be made up at the time......after all, the statements themselves are 'later' in that respect. It's quite understandable servicemen might not want to go into every detail of what happened but give a minimal report for such bizarre events.

 

[Scaramanga]

Livestock still need to be fed on Boxing Day.

1) Penniston's drawing clearly depicts the object in the forest...not in the field. This was Forestry Commission forest, not farmland.

2) The object is alleged to have had red lights on top and blue light(s) underneath....both Penniston and Burroughs state this. I live right next to a farm. The harvesting and crop sewing equipment is very noisy and has one of those rotating yellow lights on top. No blue or red lights. The crop spraying equipment does have blue lights underneath...a common practice now. BUT, before anyone gets excited, this practice of blue lights on crop sprayers did not start until the 1990s. At least that's what Google AI says. But if earlier examples could be found...that would be interesting...

 

[FatPhil]

[SNIP - not an answer to the question asked, and thus irrelevant]

Either support or retract, don't deflect.

 

[Eburacum]

Penniston's drawing clearly depicts the object in the forest...not in the field.

Indeed. It may be the case that this vehicle (whatever it was) was way beyond the trees, and further away than Burroughs or Penniston thought.

James Easton (who has been studying this case for about as long as Mr Ridpath) is relatively sympathetic to the idea of a misidentified ground vehicle. But it is not conclusive proof.

 

[NorCal Dave]

I've seen previews and there are allegedly 22 new witnesses.

The idea that in the previous 45 years, 22 witnesses managed to evade detection and are just now coming forward sounds sketchy at best. This is the exact formula used in The Roswell Indecent. Take some of the original source material and then use the 30 year old memories of "new witnesses" found 30 years later to concoct a new story, including alien bodies (bold by me):

The first Roswell conspiracy book, released in October 1980, was The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and Bill Moore.[89]​[90]​ Anthropologist Charles Ziegler described the 1980 book as "version 1" of the Roswell myth.[91]​ Berlitz and Moore's narrative was the dominant version of the Roswell conspiracy during the 1980s.[92]​

The Roswell Incident introduced alien bodies – via the second​-hand legends of deceased civil engineer Grady "Barney" Barnett – purportedly found by archaeologists on the Plains of San Agustin.[98]​[99]​​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident

I imagine we'll see very little actual evidence and lots of "new witnesses" telling tales from 45 years ago.

According to the records, the police were called a mere 17 minutes after some captain 'terminated' the Penniston/Burroughs exploration of the forest. Very oddly, the police report makes no mention of who at Bentwaters made the call, and makes no mention of the police ever meeting or speaking to any of the witnesses...which you'd think would be a fundamental thing for establishing where to look !

The records do indeed mention who at Bentwaters made the call, USAF Law-enforcement Airman Chris Arnold:

So, the 'landing site' is actually not even determined by anyone who was actually there at the time. Its as if someone was determined to draw attention to a specific location, even to the extent of calling the police twice.

Which is fine IF it's a fake landing site being used as a diversion. But again, and to repeat your own assertions from post #255 (bold by me):

It's odd how the infamous 'landing site' just happens to align within a few degrees of the runway. Just the right location for something to fall off a plane coming in to land from the east, in fact. Well....a piece of ordnance landing in a forest outside the base would not go down too well. They'd have to remove it....hence all the massive floodlights. And why else would Halt have his Geiger counter with him ?? Why take a Geiger counter to debunk a UFO ? In fact, why even be out there at all at 3am, on a cold winter night, with Geiger counter, floodlights, a team of at least 5 people, and relaying everything back to base, just to dismiss some 'lights in the woods' ?

Your main pieces of evidence for a Broken Arrow event included the location of the site, the floodlights and Halt's use of a gieger counter. You argued for pages that the Rendlesham UFO incident was a cover-up for a lost nuke.

Then you suggest the landing site, and with it the floodlights used in the recovery, as well as Halt's recording and use of a gieger counter are all fake and part of a diversion:

True, but the claim is not that Halt is removing the bomb or even checking THE dropped bomb site. He's creating a diversion afterwards.

1) Halt needs a reason for checking a diversionary site. Hence the 'landing site' is invented via the Penniston/ Burroughs 'encounter'.

2) Halt is not checking 'the' site. He's setting up a diversion site. The true site may be way over on the other side of the base for all we know.

You're dismissing your own evidence as part of a diversion. Maybe because you realized that as evidence of a Broken Arrow, it was extremely weak, so that which we've discussed for several pages (which was fun I might add) was then hand waved away as just a possibility:

I'm not insisting on a dropped bomb. That is merely one explanation.

I guess we'll see what the 22 "new witnesses" say next month.

 

[JMartJr]

At the end of the day (or decade, or century, or however long these tales last!) we're always going to come back to the issues that are an unavoidable part of cases based on what witnesses say... there is no way to tell what parts, if any, of what is reported are true and accurate, what part is wrong, and what part might be just made up intentionally. As time passes, and reports change and grow and are embellished, it is impossible to tell how much of that is just the way memories change over time, and how much is being made up to make the story more interesting. (I guess we can detect that claims of ASCII code messages being added way after the fact may not be reality-based! ^_^)

The best we can do is discuss whether there are any plausible "mundane" explanations (there are) and then argue, without hope of resolution, as to which might have been the real one(s) behind what was experienced and reported.

Disagreements about that can be intense, and the discussion can bring out useful new ideas -- but let's be careful not to let it obscure the fact that this is just another case based on "witnesses claim..." without evidence that can be analyzed, and that there are a number of possible ways this story could have come about that do not involve the presence of an alien spaceship or anything else that is previously unknown!

 

[Ann K]

Penniston 'misjudges' the size of a lighthouse 6 miles away ? Let's do some simple maths. We know the entire structure is 98 feet tall. The section with the lens is 1/6 of that, thus about 16 feet wide. Six miles is 31,680 feet, so the entire circumference of a circle at that distance is 199,051 feet. That means 16 feet is 0.028 of a degree. That's less than 1/20 of the diameter of the Moon. Tiny.

A brilliant light can easily obscure the actual size and shape of the object that's emitting that light. And lighthouses are very brilliant indeed. Nobody looks at the sun and says "That's only a tiny angle it subtends!"

Coastal lighthouses they are located on land and serve as a reference for navigators along the coast. Their range can reach 25 to 30 nautical miles.

https://www.boatnews.com/story/4855...t-sea-understanding-and-calculating-distances

As for the comment you made about a zillion posts ago about the lighthouse not shining down onto the forest (sorry if I paraphrased that incorrectly but I can't find the original), lighthouses are designed to shine a beam toward ships that are at sea level.

 

[Scaramanga]

The idea that in the previous 45 years, 22 witnesses managed to evade detection and are just now coming forward sounds sketchy at best. This is the exact formula used in The Roswell Indecent. Take some of the original source material and then use the 30 year old memories of "new witnesses" found 30 years later to concoct a new story, including alien bodies (bold by me):

There are numerous perfectly valid stories, not just within UFOlogy, where witnesses have come forth years or decades later. Epstein, the Jimmy Savile saga, Catholic schools in Ireland, the list is endless. Witnesses may have perfectly good reasons for not coming forth at the time. Seeing a 'UFO' in the woods is not exactly career enhancing. One has to use one's own discretion in each individual case to decide whether witnesses are jumping on the bandwagon or not....one cannot just throw a blanket suspicion over all.

 

[Scaramanga]

A brilliant light can easily obscure the actual size and shape of the object that's emitting that light. And lighthouses are very brilliant indeed. Nobody looks at the sun and says "That's only a tiny angle it subtends!"

But the sun is not a tiny angle. It ( along with the Moon ) is half a degree or so.

A little maths, and an object 9 feet across would have to be 1031 feet away in order to subtend an angle of half a degree. We know that the top part of lighthouse subtends an angle of just 0.028 degrees.....1/20 of that.

We know Penniston claims to be at least ( leaving out all the 'touching' stuff ) 50 meters, or 164 feet, from the object that he claims is 9 feet wide. An object 9 feet across at 164 feet subtends an angle of 3.14 degrees. That is more than 6 times the apparent diameter of the Moon and 62 times the subtended angle of the top of the lighthouse !

I am a keen amateur astronomer. I have never confused even a bright object like Venus for something 6 times wider than the Moon !

 

[Scaramanga]

You're dismissing your own evidence as part of a diversion. Maybe because you realized that as evidence of a Broken Arrow, it was extremely weak, so that which we've discussed for several pages (which was fun I might add) was then hand waved away as just a possibility:

Possibilities are all we have, in this case. My position is more that there is no one 'explanation' that really explains everything. Every explanation leaves unanswered questions. I've simply been asking those questions....more devil's advocate than firm believer....as I don't like the way everyone has just settled for the lighthouse and stars explanation as the default and thus nobody asks questions any more.

I remain totally unconvinced by the lighthouse and stars explanation. Even if that theory explains some of what happened, it does not by a long way explain all of it.

Interestingly, here's an article from The International Centre For UFO Studies in 1985....which questions precisely my point about the Halt tape. The weird ending of the tape does not seem to go with the earlier part of it...

https://cufos.org/PDFs/cases/1980_12_27-28_UK_SUFF_Rendlesham-Forest_IUR_ArticlesR.pdf

 

[JMartJr]

But the sun is not a tiny angle. It ( along with the Moon ) is half a degree or so.

But, because of the brightness of the Sun, it appears to be much larger. Convincing people that the Sun is not larger in the sky than is the moon is a chore, thankfully the case of solar eclipses provided a good proof.

 

[John J.]

How about you first provide evidence that ANY of 'the story' actually happened. Other than a police report we can probably rely on....NONE of what is alleged to have happened has any evidence whatever.

I'm not the one making claims of a conspiracy...

I am insisting that stories are cover stories

...the onus is on you to provide evidence that a conspiracy took place.
Just as the burden is on UFO enthusiasts to explain why alien / time-traveller visitation is more likely than misidentification, an element of wishful (or fearful) thinking on the part of two or three, but not all, witnesses, whose recall has changed over time.

There is evidence that there were claims of unidentified lights being seen by USAF Security Police (and later, Halt and co.) including:

The witness statements of Burroughs, Cabansag, Penniston, Buran and Chandler, the Halt tape, Halt's memo, Col. Conrad's remarks on the event, and there were two Suffolk Constabulary records (one of the initial sightings, one for the scrapes on the ground).
We also know that Suffolk police contacted air traffic control at West Drayton (London), whose response was recorded as "NO KNOWLEDGE OF AIRCRAFT, REPORTS RECEIVED OF AERIAL PHENOMENA OVER SOUTHERN ENGLAND DURING THE NIGHT. Unless Suffolk police made that up, of course.

Some witnesses (Penniston, probably Halt, possibly Burroughs later- his witness statement did not reflect this) interpreted the lights as being of unusual origin, others did not. It is the claims of the "some" which have entered into UFO lore.
The different interpretations mitigate against this being a cover story involving UFOs: If an officially-sanctioned cover story were sanctioned, we would expect all the (false) witnesses under Halt's chain of command to provide statements that supported the cover story. Or Halt (if he is the orchestrator, which I don't believe for one minute) could have chosen men who would willingly, and reliably, stick to a cover story:
I'd guess most servicemen are not required to lie as part of their service, but many might understand the need to do so "for the greater good", "national security" etc. in some circumstances.

Incidentally, Halt's superior, base commander Colonel Conrad, has never been supportive of the UFO narrative.
So we have a plot to make up a cover story to hide the secret recovery of a dropped nuclear weapon (or something) (which no-one else was aware of, and for which no evidence exists to this day) involving Halt but not the base commander, who might reasonably be expected to know about major incidents under his command.
Did the conspirators find a place to hide the recovered nuke? Did they just check it back into the armoury?
"Hey, Fred, bet you weren't expecting to see this baby again so soon. Don't tell the CO, you know what he's like about these things. ...Hey you, yes, you with the telehandler, turn it around so those dents face the wall..."

We have no evidence of anything else unusual happening at RAF Bentwaters/ RAF Woodbridge or the surrounding area in the week following December 25th 1980.
Unless someone can provide evidence otherwise, which nobody has.

I Mean just how much evasive nonsense one has to invent to get the lighthouse to even remotely match Penniston's report...

No-one is claiming Penniston's description or sketch resembles a lighthouse.
But Burroughs, Cabansag and Penniston report following lights- and ending up first at a farmhouse, and finally looking at Orford Ness Lighthouse. This is in Burroughs' and Cabansag's statements. Penniston was with them: He didn't mention the lighthouse in his statement, but we know, from Chandler's statement (Chandler was in radio contact with Penniston) that Penniston also ended up seeing the lighthouse.

As well as Penniston not mentioning the lighthouse, he was the only witness who omitted times and date from his statement.
Only Penniston claims to have seen a (non-farmhouse, non-lighthouse) artefact with lights.
Penniston has subsequently made much more elaborate and frankly hard-to-believe claims (exactly what you wouldn't want with a cover story).

We have, for example, Penniston and Burroughs claiming to see a landed object that Cabansag never mentions

Where does Burroughs claim to see a landed object? His statement is posted in post #44.
I couldn't make out all of his handwriting, but I think you might be wrong .

...Ed Cabansag, said in his statement: "We figured the lights were coming from past the forest since nothing was visible when we passed through the woody forest. We would see a glowing near the beacon light, but as we got closer we found it to be a lit-up farmhouse. We got to a vantage point where we could determine that what we were chasing was only a beacon light off in the distance." Another participant, John Burroughs, also stated: "We could see a beacon going around so we went towards it. We followed it for about two miles [3 km] before we could [see] it was coming from a lighthouse."

Wikipedia, Rendlesham Forest Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident

We have Halt, and even people inside the base, claiming beams of light in the weapons storage unit....

It's not in Halt's memo. And

Ridpath notes that Tim Egercic, a security policeman on duty at the Weapons Storage Area at the time, said "I was on duty at the alarm monitor's building, which was located between the double fence that surrounded the WSA. I never saw or heard about a UFO at the WSA, or beams of light, or anything like that."

Enigma website, Rendlesham Forest Incident

Not only is there zero evidence that the Penniston/Burroughs incident ever happened....but the statements on it totally contradict each other. I don't just mean minor contradictions...I mean mutually exclusive versions.

There are quite literally three completely different versions of what happened that night.

Perhaps you could back this up by quoting the appropriate passages from the original witness statements?
We know Penniston's account differs, principally in his claim to have seen a "mechanical" light source and his omission of ending up looking at a lighthouse, but I don't think any of the Penniston/ Burroughs/ Cabansag/ Buran/ Chandler witness statements "totally contradict each other".
They have inconsistencies that we know occur when witnesses give their individual accounts of the same event.

 

[Scaramanga]

I'm not the one making claims of a conspiracy...

Well, actually, some would equally argue that the 'lighthouse and stars' theory is itself a conspiracy.

I have an inherent objection and dislike towards minimalist 'explanations' of things. By which I mean so-called explanations that appear to explain ONLY because they simply ignore any and all details that don't fit the narrative....or they stretch details to ludicrous variants to do so.

A good example was the Phoenix lights. ONE alleged witness ( Mitch Stanley ) claimed to see the event via a telescope. We then end up with all other evidence....the testimony of two or three hundred other people....being essentially ignored if it didn't fit in with Stanley. Never mind whether Stanley really did see things as he described, or even at all, he becomes the unquestionable gold standard.

And it is the same with Rendlesham. Everything is forced to fit in with Ridpath's lighthouse and stars....even if it doesn't actually fit. One is not supposed to question why Halt confused Sirius for a UFO yet didn't confuse the 1.5 times brighter Jupiter and Saturn conjunction ( at the same elevation ) for a UFO. Lets just ignore that Jupiter and Saturn were ever there, and Arcturus too ! Strange how Halt only 'confused' a subset of the things in the sky...and not even the brightest...and the infamous drawer effect is applied whereby the other objects never get mentioned !

Likewise the way the beam from the lighthouse...which is a horizontal beam...is forced to be Halt's beam 'coming down to the ground', which you can find any number of Halt lectures, videos, statements, etc insisting the beam came from a craft overhead. Halt's memo even says 'beamed down'...the meaning of which is quite clear. Yet this gets shoe-horned into being the lighthouse too.

Halt also described in his memo a red object throwing off particles, which split into five separate objects. The lighthouse beam is not red and does not split into five objects. But heck....lets force it to be the lighthouse.

Penniston and Burroughs saw an object with red and blue lighting. The lighthouse does not have red and blue lighting. Incidentally, some have claimed the red and blue was police car flashing lights. The problem being than in the 1980s UK police cars ONLY had flashing blue lights.

And so on. There are too many things that the 'conventional' explanation for the incidents simply doesn't explain. To my mind the dogged insistence on this theory has itself reached conspiracy levels.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Halt_Memorandum.jpg

http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/rendlesham2c.html

 

[Scaramanga]

But, because of the brightness of the Sun, it appears to be much larger. Convincing people that the Sun is not larger in the sky than is the moon is a chore, thankfully the case of solar eclipses provided a good proof.

I've no idea what point you are making in response to mine. I pointed out that the lighthouse lens housing structure is 16 feet across and at 6 miles is only 0.028 degrees in width. That is tiny.

For Penniston to deem that an object 164 feet ( 50 meters ) away was 9 feet across means it was 62 times larger, or 3.2 degrees or so. That is over 6 times the diameter of the Moon. A size at which any object has a quite distinct size beyond being a point light source. Indeed, I am looking right now at a car at about that distance, and it is very recognisable as a car.

 

[Scaramanga]

The hypothesis that they mistook the lighthouse light shining through foliage for an object flying around and periodically emitting light is consistent with Halt's memo.

No, it isn't even remotely so. Why are people so addicted to the lighthouse that they'll force a square peg into a round hole ?

The lighthouse had a yellowish-white beam. NOT red and blue as Penniston/Burroughs describe, or red as Halt describes. The lighthouse lens structure ( 6 miles away....and 0.028 degrees in apparent width ) does not occupy 3.2 degrees of visible arc ( 6 times the diameter of the Moon ) that would be required for Penniston to deem the object 9 feet across at 50 meters ( 164 feet ).

 

[Mendel]

Did the conspirators find a place to hide the recovered nuke? Did they just check it back into the armoury?
"Hey, Fred, bet you weren't expecting to see this baby again so soon. Don't tell the CO, you know what he's like about these things. ...Hey you, yes, you with the telehandler, turn it around so those dents face the wall..."

Unexploded ordnance is a big deal. You don't handle it at all, you cordon off an appropriately big perimeter and call in the bomb removal squad to defuse it. For a tactical nuke, that'd be very noticable.

You don't invite the local constabulary to come and try to find it.

 

[Mendel]

Penniston and Burroughs saw an object with red and blue lighting.

How is this evidence for your "Broken Arrow" scenario?

 

[Scaramanga]

How is this evidence for your "Broken Arrow" scenario?

How is your response not evading the actual point I made ? Classic red herring....especially given that the specific lengthy post you are responding too never once mentions broken arrows.

 

[Mendel]

How is your response not evading the actual point I made ?

your point was "you guys are dismissing the blue and red light sighting".

my point was, "you are dismissing it, too".

You have NO EVIDENCE in support of your theory.

Spoiler: first mention of Broken Arrow on this thread

So, 45 years later we have the 'Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident'...rather than 'Yet another embarrassing incident where nuclear ordnance fell off a plane' ( actually known as 'Broken Arrow' incidents ).

 

[JJB]

your point was "you guys are dismissing the blue and red light sighting".

I was always under the impression that the lights reported during the early part of the Rendlesham Forest incident could've been a prank - and it turns out that might not be far from the truth.


Kevin Conde, a former USAF cop stationed at Bentwaters, later admitted:

"Leaving my headlights off I turned on the overheads lights, which on American cop cars are red and blue. We then proceeded to drive the car in slow circles while making weird noises over the PA system. Remember, there was a light fog, which was the key to the joke's success, as each light appeared in the fog as a moving beam of light.

The kid on the gate freaked. The response to his call for help was quite gratifying."

http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/statement.html


Also worth noting:

"Base operations told us that there were no aircraft on final, and no aircraft on radar."

That one quote alone casts serious doubt on the more dramatic interpretations of the event. If it all started with a prank - and the radar was clear - the "UFO" angle starts looking pretty flimsy.

 

[Scaramanga]

your point was "you guys are dismissing the blue and red light sighting".

my point was, "you are dismissing it, too".

You have NO EVIDENCE in support of your theory.

My point was that the post you responded to made NO mention of broken arrows. You completely evaded what was actually said...which I'm increasingly finding typical.

 

[JMartJr]

I've no idea what point you are making in response to mine.

I was making the point that bright lights can appear bigger to a viewer than the actual arc subtended by the object emitting light.

I pointed out that the lighthouse lens housing structure is 16 feet across and at 6 miles is only 0.028 degrees in width. That is tiny.

Yet it will likely appear larger due to brightness.

For Penniston to deem that an object 164 feet ( 50 meters ) away was 9 feet across means it was 62 times larger, or 3.2 degrees or so. That is over 6 times the diameter of the Moon. A size at which any object has a quite distinct size beyond being a point light source.

Or he made the sort of perceptual error that densely populates UFO lore. Or he stinls at estimating angular sizes of unknown objects at night. Or the story got better in his head. Or it is possible he improved the story intentionally -- we don't and can't know.

Indeed, I am looking right now at a car at about that distance, and it is very recognisable as a car.

Sure, and you won't report it as a UFO, or a bigfoot, or any such thing. The stuff that people recognize is excluded from the reports of paranormal goings-on.

The lighthouse lens structure ( 6 miles away....and 0.028 degrees in apparent width ) does not occupy 3.2 degrees of visible arc ( 6 times the diameter of the Moon ) that would be required for Penniston to deem the object 9 feet across at 50 meters ( 164 feet ).

It would not be required if he was grossly in error. People make gross perceptual errors with some frequency.

I have an inherent objection and dislike towards minimalist 'explanations' of things. By which I mean so-called explanations that appear to explain ONLY because they simply ignore any and all details that don't fit the narrative....or they stretch details to ludicrous variants to do so.
...
And it is the same with Rendlesham. Everything is forced to fit in with Ridpath's lighthouse and stars....even if it doesn't actually fit.

Would it be less objectionable to think of it in terms of "once people get excited by an event, such as misperceiving a distant lighthouse for a UFO, their further observations and memories might diverge even more from reality?"

If you require a theory to cover every facet of a UFO tale, inculding the ones that bear no relation at all to reality, you are requiring a theory to account for and include bad data. Or so it seems to me -- I really, really, really hate UFO cases based on nothing but "witness(es) say that..." ^_^

 

[Scaramanga]

Kevin Conde, a former USAF cop stationed at Bentwaters, later admitted:

So we're not allowed to bring in Penniston's statements made 15-20 years later....but we can bring in this guy's statements made 21 years later and which provide no date for the alleged incident.

 

[Scaramanga]

I was making the point that bright lights can appear bigger to a viewer than the actual arc subtended by the object emitting light.

I completely reject that in this context. A light that is 1/20 of the diameter of the Moon...appearing 6 times larger than the Moon ? How does that work ?

Also, people make statements about how dazzlingly bright the lighthouse was. OK...lets be the first to work out how bright it actually is ! Some maths at last. I don't think anyone has previously done this...and it is really very useful regardless of one's take on things.

5 million candelas. Now using the following calculator I get 0.0536252977 Lux at 6 miles..

https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/light/candela-to-lux-calculator.html

And using this calculator....( I had to do the calc in reverse )

https://www.vcalc.com/equation/?uuid=5ae8c1a2-ea1b-11e3-b7aa-bc764e2038f2

I get roughly a visual magnitude of -11. Feel free to check that.

A full Moon is magnitude -12.5 ...which is around 4 times brighter. SO....the lighthouse actual brightness was about 1/4 that of a full Moon. Bright, but not dazzlingly so. Also, that brightness would be considerably further reduced by the atmosphere, especially for an object on the horizon.

 

[Mendel]

My point was that the post you responded to made NO mention of broken arrows. You completely evaded what was actually said...which I'm increasingly finding typical.

If you've abandoned your Broken Arrow theory, you should've told us.

 

[Eburacum]

This is such a complex series of events, which took place over several days (assuming that it took place at all, which is a fairly good bet). So we should not try to explain everything with a single phenomenon (for instance the lighthouse) when it looks very likely that there are many, in fact possibly numerous different stimuli that were reported at different phases of the event.
1/ Possibly a bright meteor or satellite re-entry, which started the chain of events on Boxing Day night.
2/ A yellow beacon( presumably the lighthouse) which Burroughs and Cabansag seem to have eventually identified as mundane. Penniston doesn't even mention it.
3/ Blue and red lights in the forest, perhaps a police car, some other emergency or military vehicle, or a tractor. Despite later elaborations and confabulations, no-one got near enough to this location to confirm its identity.
4/ Two nights later (assuming the stories are correct) Halt and others saw some lights in the sky, including something that flashed with the same rhythm as the lighthouse. They also observed lights in the sky, which seemed to move about and send beams down (these beams and movement could have been caused by mishandling the Starscope image intensifier).

The fact that these lights hovered around for hours and moved slowly towards the west indicates that at least some of them were misidentified celestial objects; how something could hang around for hours in one spot, while at the same time moving rapidly back and forth, is another mystery, but it is a common aspect shared with many misidentifications of stars and planets.

So if anyone misidentified the lighthouse, it was on the third night, when Halt was making his recording. Debunking the lighthouse theory has little relevance to the rest of the sighting.

 

[Eburacum]

Kevin Conde, a former USAF cop stationed at Bentwaters, later admitted:

"Leaving my headlights off I turned on the overheads lights, which on American cop cars are red and blue. We then proceeded to drive the car in slow circles while making weird noises over the PA system. Remember, there was a light fog, which was the key to the joke's success, as each light appeared in the fog as a moving beam of light.
The kid on the gate freaked. The response to his call for help was quite gratifying."

http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/statement.html

However Mr Ridpath is doubtful;

...it is unlikely that Kevin Conde's hoax was directly responsible for the Rendlesham Forest UFO, it remains possible that someone else repeated the stunt, this time outside the base, which could account for some of the unusual coloured lights seen in the forest by the guards at East Gate on the first night. But unless the real (presumed) culprit comes forward, this must remain speculation.

http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/rendlesham7.html