Original subtitles

Tonight, a surreal event outside a U .S. Air Force base near the Rendlesham

Forest in England becomes an international legend.

Lieutenant Colonel Halt's team goes out in the forest at night, and they are

investigating these lights, recording what they're saying in real time.

We're talking about a watershed moment in UFO history.

These were highly trained military men shaken to their core.

For more than 40 years, the question has endured, what was really out there in

the Rendlesham Forest?

Maybe it was an experimental aircraft, or maybe the ones being experimented on

were the men themselves.

Was it all a test to see how far minds could be manipulated?

Now, we'll explore the top theories surrounding one of history's strangest

encounters.

This was an experiment straight out of science fiction.

It would have been the perfect way to gauge their readiness without anyone

getting hurt.

What were the Rendlesham Lights?

Christmas night, 1980.

All is calm in Rendlesham Forest.

Six square miles of woods, stretching between the Bentwaters and Woodbridge

military air bases.

Bentwaters and Woodbridge, known as the twin bases, are in England,

in the county of Suffolk.

The U .S. Air Force leased these bases.

And they're very important in the NATO military alliance.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Bentwaters Woodbridge become a

aerodrome complex because they're quite close to one another. And by 1980, there

are 12 ,000 U .S. Air Force personnel stationed at Bentwaters Woodbridge, and

it's one of the largest air bases available to NATO.

With the Cold War raging, no one here takes security lightly.

Even though Rendlesham is public land, the base is very well protected.

It's surrounded by razor wire. There are motion sensors. There's an electric

fence. There's 24 -7 security.

The officers and personnel making these rounds and security checks are very

highly trained.

So anything out of the ordinary, the security on these bases would be able to

catch it.

Among the guards responsible for protecting Woodbridge is 20 -year -old

Airman First Class John Burroughs.

Burroughs and his Staff Sergeant Bud Steffens are making their rounds around

perimeter of Woodbridge Air Base when they see lights in the sky that are

very unfamiliar.

They're red and blue and then yellow and orange. They're moving in a strange

way. And then...

All of them suddenly descend into Rendlesham Forest outside the base.

Their minds immediately go to, these are aircraft.

And since they descend downward, maybe the aircraft crashed. Maybe there is an

emergency that they need to alert somebody to. The thing about it that was

to them is the fact that there was no sound.

Burroughs and Steffens alert the base's central security controls of the

situation. And Sergeant Jim Penniston, the base's senior security officer, is

assigned to investigate.

It turns out there are no missing planes. Every aircraft is accounted for

military in this area. But there is an anomalous radar signal that people saw,

but then the signal disappeared. And that's not a normal thing that occurs.

That's weird.

When John Burroughs and Steffens are waiting at the east gate, Sergeant

Penniston and his driver show up, and they have to leave their weapons with

Steffens as they start to investigate off the base.

With a glow still visible in the distance, the men drive about 100 yards

an old logging road where, due to the rough terrain, they're forced to carry

by foot.

It's 3 a .m.

It's dark.

They're in this old growth forest, and the radios start.

to malfunction.

There's this static. It's almost as if there's some sort of disruption with

their signaling.

As they approach, their hair on the back of their neck was standing up.

And as they reach the clearing where these lights are coming from, there's

instantly this large burst of light.

Penniston describes this eerie silence and sees this car.

Triangular shape.

Nine feet high, nine feet across.

About the size of a tank.

Burroughs, who's about 20 yards behind Penniston, he has a different account of

what he sees.

He does not see this triangular craft.

But what he does see is even more perplexing. He claims he sees a red orb

suddenly rise from the clearing and then shoot toward the coast faster than any

craft he's ever seen before.

Penniston and Burroughs are still in a state of shock.

To them, they've only been gone for a few minutes.

But by the time they get back to the East Gate, Steffens informs them that

they've been gone for almost an hour.

And so Penniston and Burroughs decide that they need to go and investigate the

clearing in the light of day.

The men return to that clearing in the woods.

And when they reach it, they find there are three indentations that are seven

inches in diameter and circular, one and a half inches deep.

And these indentations in the ground seem to corroborate Penniston's story of

something sitting on a tripod of legs.

U .S. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt is deputy base commander at Bentwaters.

When he hears about the incident, he assumes it's some sort of Christmas

that's gotten out of hand.

On December 27th, Colonel Halt is enjoying the annual awards Christmas

when one of the airmen bursts into the room, very much wide -eyed, pale -faced,

and goes right over to Colonel Halt and says, whispering, it's back.

Halt decides that the way to silence these rumors is to do a thorough

investigation. So he assembles a team, and he brings along a night scope. He

brings along a Geiger counter, which measures radiation.

And he brings along a tape recorder so that he can record all of the

conversations as they are finding things.

At 1 .25 a .m., Halt turns on the Geiger counter as well as his cassette

recorder while he and his lieutenant search the forest.

The Geiger counter seems to get higher readings on the sides of the tree facing

the clearing Specifically where they absolutely peak is in those three

indentations

It's like an abrasion point into the center. It is.

It's not an immediate panic.

It's a sort of, that's interesting moment.

At 1 .48 a .m., Halt's attention is drawn from the landing site to the sky

overhead.

You just saw a light there.

Where?

Right on this position here, straight ahead, in between.

There it is again.

As they get closer to the location of these lights, they realize that we're

actually chasing the light.

The light is coming towards us.

It's coming this way.

It's definitely coming this way.

After around five hours in the woods, Halt and his men are no closer to

out what these lights could be, and they return to the base with more questions

than answers.

Halt is ultimately told that since this event unfolded off base, on UK soil,

that it is technically within the purview of the Ministry of Defence to

with it, not the US Air Force.

Holt gets told, go write up a memo and send it to the Ministry of Defence.

We'll let them deal with it as the host nation.

But because of the key Brit officer being away on Christmas leave, Holt's

wasn't sent until January 13th.

This interim of two weeks.

provides the basis by which the Ministry of Defense declines to do anything.

And they declined to do anything on the basis that this was serious. You would

have informed us sooner.

And if we're brought into it two weeks later, why should we even waste a minute

looking into this matter?

So while the Brits are downplaying the incident, it's not the same case on the

base. Rumors are already starting to swirl.

And over time, Halt, Penniston, and Burroughs all become convinced.

that whatever occurred in Rendlesham Forest was not of this earth.

After the incident, Penniston and Burroughs begin to experience unusual

of anxiety, nightmares.

Burroughs develops white gums, and he's diagnosed with a heart murmur that he

didn't have before.

And in fact, his physician asks him whether he's been exposed to radiation.

But both Penniston and Burroughs fear sharing some of the details. They know

that there's a stigma to reporting things like UFOs or paranormal

So they don't feel very comfortable giving outright everything that took

Some 14 years after his first report of the incident, Penniston adds a crucial

bit of new information.

Finally, in 1994, Penniston reports that not only did he see this strange

black triangular object in the woods, but that he actually touched it.

And that the surface of it was smooth in some places, but in other places felt

like sandpaper. It was as if the surface was covered with hieroglyphics.

This was a trained airman, and this was like nothing he had ever seen before.

Although his claim sparked some scepticism, critics acknowledged that

many UFO sightings, his claim is well documented.

The accounts from those directly involved are also corroborated by others

off the base.

Although most of the Rendlesham Forest witnesses are military, turns out at

least eight witnesses in the local community reported a triangular -shaped

object zipping around very rapidly.

Speed it up, and it came towards the lodge.

And the closer it got, the more I realized it was not an aircraft.

Many of the details around this case make people believe that this was some

of an extraterrestrial craft.

We have missing time. We have physical effects taking place.

And multiple witnesses from trained people seeing something anomalous in the

sky. Not everybody believes that it was aliens or extraterrestrials in Suffolk,

England that night. But it's very possible that this is some type of a

phenomenon that...

We don't understand.

For nearly three years, the unexplained lights in Rendlesham Forest were largely

an Air Force secret.

Then, in October of 1983, a popular British tabloid called News of the World

publishes the first public account of the Rendlesham incident.

From the beginning of the case, Air Force personnel had been known to be

parts of the information to the local population.

As the interest started to rise in this case, some of these ufologists filed a

Freedom of Information Act request with the U .S. government and actually

retrieved the memo that Colonel Holt filed to the Ministry of Defense of the

incident that took place that night.

So now the cat's out of the bag.

When this account is finally made public, many people believe that this is

first official account of military personnel interacting with some type of

extraterrestrial spacecraft.

We're talking about a watershed moment in UFO history.

For UFO enthusiasts, this is irrefutable proof that UFOs are real. They're

actually documented. They think this proves it once and for all, to the point

that CNN even made a documentary about this.

CNN has found others who were there in the forest separating the Bentwater's

Woodbridge Air Force bases who have given strikingly similar accounts of the

UFOs. We saw flying objects containing maybe other people or another life form.

But not everyone believes that the lights were otherworldly.

Like a lot of UFO sightings, there's not necessarily a single neat explanation.

But what if a number of things?

All of them decidedly terrestrial and normal. What if they all came together

create a sort of perfect storm of confusion?

Ian Ridpath, a UK astronomer and known UFO debunker, starts to investigate the

Bentwaters case himself.

Digging through police reports and witness statements, Ridpath soon

that in the memo Charles Halt sent to the MOD, he got the dates of both

encounters wrong.

The lieutenant colonel reported that the first sighting happened early in the

morning on the 27th when it really happened early in the morning on the

And he reported that his own encounter happened early in the morning on the

and it was actually the 28th.

When you're out in the woods at 3 o 'clock in the morning, do you really

about it in terms of the night before or the next morning? And that causes some

of the confusion and the chaos.

When Ridpat realizes that according to Suffolk police, Halt's dates are wrong.

he makes a startling discovery.

And what was assumed to be extraterrestrial might have been a more

phenomenon.

On the very night when Penniston and Burroughs see these strange lights

in the trees, it just so happens that astronomers all around the UK reported

some very bright fireball meteors.

Meteors are essentially pieces of base rock.

And when they enter Earth's atmosphere, they catch on fire and usually break up

into multiple pieces and fall harmlessly to Earth or into the ocean.

The meteors that were supposed to be visible on that night had actually hit

.20 p .m., 7 .20 p .m., and 2 .50 a .m.

And that corresponds to the time that Burroughs and the other men were in the

forest seeing those weird lights behave strangely.

Witnesses in Suffolk, England, noticed that just before 3 a .m., this meteor

streaking across the sky and causing this unbelievable light show of sparks

things coming off of it.

An astronomer at the time described it as being almost as bright as the full

moon.

Meteors. are also known as shooting stars.

And most of them are little bits of rock that enter our upper atmosphere and due

to friction and compression of the atmosphere, they generate light. And

them, they can explode and they can burst into flames, making these big

fireballs.

So these fireballs, we give them different names based on how they

If it explodes and you get this really bright light, we call those fireballs.

but also bull eyes.

Back at the twin bases, another guard claims to have witnessed a similar light

show in the sky that Christmas night. And he described it as a very bright

of fire in the sky with a sparkle tail.

He reports that he and his fellow guards had the feeling that this meteor was

close and that, in fact, it had fallen right between the two bases.

These objects can play optical illusions with you. They can look like they're at

a much lower altitude than they really are.

Sometimes they look like they're right above you, but actually they're miles in

the sky because there's no contrast.

There's just a blackness of space behind you. Especially for an object that's

big and bright, it can appear to be a lot closer than it is.

The guard was listening to the radio that night, and he heard someone

into the radio saying, it's a UFO, it's a UFO.

Humans are very susceptible to this thing called confirmation bias. So if

told, it's a UFO, it's a UFO, don't be surprised when suddenly people are

manufacturing UFO explanations.

All they got was a light show, and then they struggled to explain.

Three years after the Rendlesham Forest incident, The public remains intrigued

about those strange lights in the woods.

Some say it's an alien encounter.

Some raise the possibility that it's a meteor shower. But is there actually a

more earthly reason for what eyewitnesses saw?

Investigators tried to gather information about what happened that

meeting with locals, by going into the forest, gathering data, gathering

evidence, putting together information, trying to get the facts.

As they start to piece together the information, they hear about something

nearby that could have accounted for this mystery.

The 100 -foot -tall Orford Ness Lighthouse is located just about six

Rendlesham Forest on the coast of the North Sea.

In this particular area is the Orford Ness Lighthouse, and it's actually the

second most... powerful lighthouse in the United Kingdom.

It's got a beam that you can see for 30 miles out to sea, and what it does is it

tracks around.

So you get a beam that sweeps across the whole surrounding area.

The lighthouse has been there since the 18th century.

And the beam from the lighthouse is shielded towards the town so that it

bother citizens in the town. But the part of the lighthouse that faces the

forest, that's not shielded because there's nobody living there to bother.

Depending on atmospheric conditions, the lighthouse can either glow a yellowish

or an orangish color and is rotating in five -second intervals.

It's highly likely that the military personnel in the base were not even

of this lighthouse.

Just because the terrain of the forest isn't something that you can directly

through and make out a lighthouse.

But a few hundred yards into the forest, that would have been a different story.

From these guards' perspective, the light would appear to enter just above

forest, and you have the effect of the light bouncing off of low clouds.

So it really could appear to be something hovering just above the forest

actually it's a beam of light that originates from the coast six miles

Because this is considered really a British problem, since it's not

a U .S. Air Force base, local constables are alerted and asked to investigate

the matter.

Not surprisingly, as locals, they're well aware of the existence of the

lighthouse. There have been other reports of mysterious lights being

it. So when a report came from the base that there was something weird going on

in the woods and they were investigating, the local police decided

were going to take a look that first night. And they arrived out there an

later at around 4 a .m. And what did they report?

All we see are the lights from the lighthouse.

According to the proponents of the lighthouse theory, halts on tape prove

case.

As he's narrating this into his tape recorder, he is saying, the lights, here

they come again.

And then five seconds later, the lights are back again.

Small red light, maybe a quarter to half mile, maybe further out.

Based on Holt's recording, after trudging through the forest a little bit

further in, the bright beam becomes visible once again.

This looks like it's clear off to the coast. It's right on the horizon.

Right on the horizon where the lighthouse Fortfordness is located.

According to some, the frequent intervals of light suggest a secondary

for the Rendlesham's mysterious light show, a vessel with a warning beam known

as a light ship.

It's a vessel that's effectively like a mobile lighthouse. It's put over a

particularly dangerous area of coastline that the coastline shifts as a result

of a large storm or tidal levels.

a light ship might account for the reports of five other lights that are

presented by some of the witnesses.

As the lighthouse theory goes public, the three main witnesses stand by their

accounts. Lieutenant Colonel Halt, he's a base commander. He has a sterling

reputation. Burroughs is young, but he's well -trained.

Penniston is also a professional. He's a top security person there.

When they hear this lighthouse theory, they don't take kindly to it.

Halt says, yeah, you think it's a lighthouse?

Well, guess what? Lighthouses don't fly.

When this empirical argument is presented to both Halt and Penniston

Penniston backs him up.

Penniston further states that, yeah, lighthouses do what they do, but that

doesn't explain this black craft that was spotted in the middle of the woods

that emitted this powerful light that he walked up to and laid a hand on

physically.

All the while, another theory starts to bubble up, which explains perhaps why

the Ministry of Defense denied looking into the case.

In December 1980, Cold War tensions are rising between the world's two

superpowers, the U .S. and the USSR.

Is it possible that new technologies forged in that supercharged moment might

hold clues to what people saw in Rendlesham Park?

Ronald Reagan is elected president in the 1980 presidential election.

One of his major campaign promises is to expand the size and funding of the

United States military.

The U .S. government sought to return the perception of great American

to the Cold War balance of power.

It would do this by increasing the amount of money that would flow into the

American military, particularly into agencies like the Defense Advanced

Projects Agency, DARPA.

So what takes place is a heightened sense of military action on both sides,

increasing their arms regiment, including new weapons for spying and for

destruction.

So perhaps there is more to the Rendlesham case than meets the eye.

Maybe this was an orchestrated diversion from what was really going on in the

skies over Rendlesham.

At almost any time in the history of aviation, there have been things that

public won't be told about for some years.

And you can look back to the 50s and the 60s at programs like the U -2, the SR

-71 Blackbird.

None of these things appeared magically overnight.

If you are a government and you are developing secret craft and someone

and they say it's something that it's not, you like that.

You want people thinking it's a UFO. You don't want them to know about what

you're doing.

because it is secret.

Not only did the government like it, sometimes they actively promoted that

narrative. It's a smoke screen.

It's a distraction.

At the time, they were much happier with people thinking it's a UFO than the

Soviets getting a glimpse or any type of knowledge about some of these game

-changing technologies that were being developed.

At the time of the Rendlesham incident, there's a truly groundbreaking

technology in the pipeline.

Stealth aircraft.

The stealth program is one of those quintessential examples of something

took more than a decade to actually put into operation and was a very tightly

held secret.

In 1977, the first test flights of a U .S. Air Force development project was

done between DARPA and the Lockheed Skunk Works called Have Blue. The

anatomy of the aircraft was developed to disperse radar reflectivity so that the

aircraft will show up at a greatly reduced radar profile.

Have Blue eventually is adopted in the form of the F -117A Nighthawk stealth

fighter.

While the stealth fighter wasn't operational until the fall of 1983, it

striking resemblance to the craft Penniston claimed to have seen in the

Rendlesham Park.

The stealth bomber was black. It was triangular.

It had a very smooth surface. It had many of the characteristics of that

that Penniston reported seeing.

So that object might have been some kind of prototype for the stealth bomber.

We can also consider that there are other types of aircraft that were in

development at the time. For example, combat drones and surveillance drones.

So by around 1980, they probably would have been prototyping.

If the U .S. was working on such classified technology, a test flight in

Rendlesham Forest on Christmas night could have been an ideal time and place

do it.

One of the reasons that the Ministry of Defense didn't actively investigate it

might have been that they were very well aware that the Americans were testing

new prototypes of technology at the time. And they're not going to

something that their allies are developing to defend them against Soviet

missiles.

This all presumes that the craft we see in Rendlesham is some type of American

test flight. But what if it was something that the USSR was actually

It's rumored, not completely known, that Bentwaters and Woodbridge had more

nuclear weapons than any other military base that the US operated in Europe. So

if it was from an adversarial nation like the Soviet Union, they definitely

would want to see what's going on there.

In theory...

If there was some kind of an incursion of Soviet personnel or Soviet equipment

into an American air base that may or may not have been equipped with nuclear

weapons, this could create an escalating incident.

Maybe this story was buried because we don't want to let people know that there

is this Soviet cutting -edge drone that's looking at our military bases.

Even 40 years later, we still have very little idea about the technology that

the Soviets were developing at the time in the 1980s. If it was Soviet

technology, then it's possible that the hieroglyphics that Penniston reported

seeing and feeling on the surface of the object might have in fact been

Cyrillic.

Perhaps what Penniston was feeling on the craft was a type of Cyrillic

actually from the Russian alphabet.

Given the tensions at the time, the idea that a Soviet military surveillance

drone was hovering over a U .S. nuclear base, oh, that could have been bad all

the way around. And some people think it could have gone as far as triggering

World War III.

Over two decades later, the public still wants answers about the Rendlesham

incident. In her 2001 book titled...

You can't tell the people. The late Georgina Bruni, a British UFO

claims to have turned up some new evidence.

She says that she has evidence from four scientists who visited the twin

air bases in December of 1980, right around the time of the incident.

Allegedly, they put on some type of contamination suit with air compressors

began going through the Rendlesham Forest area.

Now, after a few hours of doing these investigations in the woods, they

no explanation for what they were doing. They changed their uniforms back into

normal clothes and then left the scene.

Bruni and her associates theorized that these scientists could have been from

the Porton Down Research Center, one of the UK's most secretive and sensitive

sites.

Located about 200 miles southwest of the Twin Bases, Porton Down is the oldest

chemical and biological warfare research installation in the world.

One of the more unsavory aspects of Porton Down is that during World War II,

they actually weaponized anthrax spores.

In order to test their new weaponized anthrax, Porton Down apparently duped

their own soldiers.

into being test subjects, guinea pigs for anthrax, which is deadly.

Or maybe what happened in the Rendlesham Forest was also part of some secret

government test.

Six months before the Rendlesham Forest incident, the U .S. Department of

Defense prepared a secret report titled The Role of Behavioral Science in

Physical Security.

And in that report, they recommended a method for evaluating their ability to

withstand being probed by the enemy.

Maybe Porton Down was helping them carry out that trial run.

In 1964, at Porton Down, they conducted Operation Moneybags.

This was the first test conducted on human subjects.

to determine if LSD could be used to incapacitate an individual.

At 11 .40, the first effects of the drug make their appearance.

Two Marines are reported to the troop commander for insubordination.

Drug is also beginning to affect the other men. They no longer take cover.

relax and begin to giggle.

Most of the soldiers just got silly and sleepy and kind of goofy.

But they found also that among some people that it triggered strong

hallucinogenic reactions.

The troop commander, although feeling more capable of thinking and acting

normally, is, in fact, still experiencing one of the characteristic

the drug.

Everything he looks at appears to be patterned.

While looking at the white ceiling, he describes geometrical patterns which are

coloured and three -dimensional.

They appear to move in and out of each other.

Anonymous sources say that in 1980 on Christmas night, Porton Down researchers

had another batch of hallucinogens, but these doses would be delivered

throughout the woods using some type of an aerosol delivery system.

Mind -altering drugs were just one part of the assessment. The rest of the

readiness test involved light holographic imagery.

A 1997 article discusses the possibility of the use of hallucinogens combined

with holographic imagery.

of troops and tanks so that enemy soldiers would be under the

impression that they were being overwhelmed by huge numbers of soldiers

other side.

It would have been the perfect way to gauge their readiness without anyone

getting hurt.

Were Halt and his men also part of an experiment as they chased lights in and

out of the forest?

You want to do a lot of lights? Still carefully, come on.

Okay, we're looking at the thing. We're probably about 200 to 300 yards away.

It looks like an eye winking at you. It's still moving from side to side.

It sort of has a hollow center, a dark center.

Like a pupil of an eye looking at you, winking.

And the flash is so bright to the star scope that it almost burns your eye. We

see strange, strobe -like flashes, rather sporadic, but there's definitely

kind of phenomenon.

This hallucinogen theory can actually close a couple of loopholes in what

occurred that night. For example, why did Penniston and Burroughs report

different experiences to the same event?

Just don't make sense. Why do they both report losing time?

Well, hallucinogens could create those sort of effects using so -called active

procedures.

What happened in Rendlesham was possibly...

An incredible series of experiments to see just how far the human mind could be

manipulated.

More than four decades after the Rendlesham incident, a new theory is

One that the U .S. Air Force may have wanted to keep hidden.

Some propose that what was experienced that night was actually a military

experiment involving nothing more than lasers, radar, and air.

On December 29, 1980, an astronomer talks to people who claim that they've

this triangular thing zipping about, and he comes up with his own theory, that

what people are seeing is consistent with the idea of being a plasma globe.

Plasma is often called the fourth state of matter.

If you make a gas really hot, it begins to dissociate into its elementary

particles, and you end up with a state called a plasma.

And although they're rare here on Earth, relatively speaking, 99 % of the volume

of all that we call normal matter is in the plasma state.

It isn't solid. It isn't liquid.

It's not a gas. And you can find it in lightning. You can find it inside the

tubes of fluorescent lights or neon lights. You can find it in stars. It is

type of matter.

There is a plasma glow phenomenon that people witness, and it's called ball

lightning.

Ball lightning involves the ionization of a small area that results in

essentially a plasma ball spontaneously erupting. It almost looks like lightning

kind of hovering above the ground for a short period of time.

Plasma balls can be any color, but red...

Orange, yellow are quite common, and sometimes they move very slowly, but

times they can be really erratic and can sometimes even go through glass.

It could be turned into a very powerful weapon, which would essentially be like

making a giant lightning bolt to strike your enemy.

The idea of trying to weaponize plasma has been around for decades.

Most people would argue it's not a very practical approach to weapons. That

doesn't mean that there weren't at least attempts to create a plasma weapon.

As far back as the 1950s, scientists have been exploring ways to harness the

devastating power of plasma.

And perhaps they even succeeded.

In 1965, two American scientists come up with the idea of focusing lasers as a

means of manipulating plasma or ball lightning.

They even give it the German nickname Kugelblitz, the German word for ball

lightning. Although there's no evidence that a test of this nature was ever

conducted by the U .S. government, there's evidence that tests with plasma

been conducted historically.

And who knows, maybe a test such as that was being conducted that night in

Rendlesham Forest.

Some theorists think that perhaps the U .K. did in fact develop a plasma weapon.

And if they did... What better time and place to test it than in the middle of

the forest at night between two military bases during Christmas?

The men on the base had no idea that they were walking into a hot zone.

John Burrow claims to see a red orb that lifts up and there's some type of

plasma or electricity like dripping off of it.

The presence of plasma might explain the other odd occurrences that night.

including an atmospheric mixture of electric and magnetic forces that

electromagnetic field, or EMF.

An electromagnetic field from plasma can be one of the things that can cause

interference with radio communications.

Penniston and Burroughs, they've talked about it as if they were wading through

water, the hairs on the back of their neck standing up.

There's a static electricity field.

All sorts of things can emit an EMF. You can get them from plasmas. You

can get them from certain propulsion systems.

Exposure to high levels of plasma can also cause confusion.

It can cause optical illusion.

It can cause any number of...

mental and psychological effect so why no one from the ministry of defense in

the uk will comment on the event in the rendersham forest that night there was

an official study of ufo phenomena in the uk and in that report it does state

that the uk government was aware of this idea of weaponizing plasma

Henniston to this day maintains his belief that he saw something

extraterrestrial in Rendlesham Forest.

Burroughs, on the other hand, has become convinced that he and his fellow

members of the patrol were actually just caught up in some form of secret

demonstration or test.

Part of the reason that so much attention is attracted to this incident

because of the incredible importance of these twin bases.

Bentwaters and Woodbridge both are known to have nuclear weapons on them. And we

were developing even newer and even more impressive technologies.

And then the whole thing was shushed up in the aftermath so that word of this

technology would not get out, potentially reaching our Soviet

In the decades since the Rendlesham incident, the U .S. Air Force has left

Suffolk. The 100 -foot lighthouse has been torn down, and the twin bases of

Bentwaters and Woodbridge are now occupied by the Ministry of Defense.

But between them lies the same dark woods whose secret remains hidden to

day. I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest

Mysteries.