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Rendlesham Forest UFO –
Jim Penniston’s notebook
Jim Penniston’s notebook
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Potentially one of the most explosive documents in the Rendlesham Forest case – if not all of UFOlogy – is the notebook allegedly made by Sergeant Jim Penniston during the UFO
encounter outside East Gate of RAF Woodbridge experienced by himself, John
Burroughs and Ed Cabansag in December 1980. The notebook contains descriptions
of a landed craft of unknown origin* Penniston claims to have examined for 45
minutes and even touched, along with sketches of hieroglyphic inscriptions he
says were engraved on its side. None of the other witnesses claims to have seen
any such craft, only lights. Hence this document deserves closer scrutiny than
it has hitherto received.
Penniston first showed this notebook publicly on the Sci Fi channel documentary UFO Invasion at Rendlesham broadcast in 2003 December.
The first page, shown above, is headed with the date “27 Dec 80”. Below is written “12:20. Response notes. A/C [i.e. aircraft] crash”. The rest is hidden behind his hand. Although the time may at first look like
12:50, inspection of the TV footage shows it is 12:20. At the bottom of the
next page is another time; this looks to be either 12.31 or 12.51. These times
should should really be expressed as “0020” etc. The 24-hour clock is standard in military, aviation and emergency services
usage, and at the time of the Rendlesham incident Penniston came under all
three headings, so why he used the civilian 12-hour clock is a puzzle.
Penniston claims to have made these notes and sketches at the time of the
incident. When I asked him in 2010 April, via the Rendlesham Forest Incident
online forum, to explain the inconsistency in date and time with the known date
and time of the incident (i.e. 3 a.m. on December 26), he replied that the
figures in his notebook “are the actual time and date of the event”. Unfortunately, we have independent evidence that they are not. This basic
error in date and time is enough to raise serious doubts about whether the
notes were made during the encounter as Penniston claims. Click
here for a 45-second clip from the Sci Fi channel programme in which Penniston turns
the first few pages of the notebook before stopping, apparently in emotional
turmoil. Is Penniston acting for the camera?
Later on in the same programme, he reads through more of the notes, which end: “Liftoff 2.45. No sound. No exhaust. Takeoff unknown. Speed: impossible.” Some additional pages from the notebook were also shown in the History Channel’s documentary called Britain’s Roswell first broadcast in 2005 December, and a documentary called I Know What I Saw aired in 2009 December (for a 2-minute clip of Penniston’s description of his encounter from the latter programme see here). Unfortunately, none of the programme makers seems to have subjected this
vital document to independent scrutiny.
What other information can we find about the origin of Penniston’s supposed ‘real-time’ notes and sketches made in Rendlesham Forest? The first mention of them that I
can find is in an interview with Penniston by Salley Rayl for Omni magazine; the interview date is not given but the website on which it appears is copyrighted 1996. (Penniston made no mention of any notes or sketches in the
previous extensive interviews he gave for a British TV programme called Strange But True? in 1994.)
In the Omni interview Penniston says that the object was sitting in a clearing when he
approached it. “I had my notebook and camera while I was out there, so I began taking notes.
This is what I wrote:
‘Triangular in shape. The top portion is producing mainly white light, which
encompasses most of the upper section of the craft. A small amount of white
light peers out the bottom. At the left side center is a bluish light, and on
the other side, red. The lights seem to be molded as part of the exterior of
the structure, smooth, slowly fading into the rest of the outside of the
structure, gradually molding into the fabric of the craft’.”
However, now that we have had a chance to see the notebook for ourselves on
three separate TV documentaries there is no sign of this fluently written
passage. Rather, the notes visible on the pages shown to camera are brief and
disjointed. Was Penniston simply idealizing his description for Salley Rayl, or
is there another explanation?
Perhaps the first person to see Penniston’s notebook after the alleged UFO encounter was a security guard at Bentwaters,
Richard Bertolino. Bertolino recalls sitting next to Penniston on the pick-up
bus after they both came off duty that morning, within hours of the event. In
an interview with the Earthfiles podcast broadcast in 2009 September, Bertolino recounted that Penniston “pulls out the notebook and he diagrams what he saw out there. It was kind of
diamond-shaped with tripod legs.” From this, it sounds as though Penniston sketched the object for Bertolino as
they sat together. Bertolino does not mention seeing any existing notes or
sketches of the craft in the notebook. And where is this diagram made for
Bertolino in the notebook that Penniston now displays for the cameras?
There are other troubling inconsistencies. In Penniston’s undated witness statement made shortly after the event he drew the craft as boxy in shape and apparently on legs. An inset detail of the craft is
accompanied by a question mark, presumably indicating some uncertainty. One is
left to wonder why he would query the drawing if he had examined the craft in
close-up for 45 minutes. In another, more detailed sketch, made at some unknown time and dated “27 December”, Penniston depicts the craft as triangular, like the landing marks, and shows
it from three directions: front, side and top. The impresssion is sometimes
given that this sketch of a triangular craft was part of Penniston’s original witness statement, but it was not. Neither does it come from his
notebook, because the paper is different. This sketch seems to have surfaced
around 1997 at the same time as an interview he gave with Salley Rayl, and was
published on the Microsoft Network's UFO forum
Given the doubts and questions surrounding these notes and sketches, it would be
unwise to rely on them as evidence for a landed craft in Rendlesham Forest.
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* Penniston usually refers to what he allegedly encountered as “a craft of unknown origin”, but he has also gone on record as saying that it was a craft from tens of
thousands of years in the Earth’s future: “They are us.”
Content last modified 2010 August
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