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ON OTHER PAGES
Rendlesham Forest UFO –
the witness statements (page 1)
On the next page are the original statements provided by five of the main participants on the
first night of the Rendlesham Forest UFO sighting (1980 December 26). Paragraph
1 of Col. Halt’s subsequent memo to the Ministry of Defence was based on these statements and his own interviews
with the witnesses. The statements were later presented by Halt to Citizens
Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) and were unearthed in 1997 by Scottish researcher
James Easton, to whom I am grateful for providing these scans. Their
authenticity has been confirmed by Col. Halt and the witnesses themselves.
One of the statements is by the officer in charge at Central Security Control
(CSC) on the night in question, Lt Fred ‘Skip’ Buran, who helped gather the statements from the others. It is sometimes said
that the statements were deliberately toned down or sanitized, but Buran told
me by email on 2007 December 30: “I did not ask anyone to edit their statements in any way. Had anything occurred
other than what appeared in the statements, those facts should have been
included.”
These statements should be read in conjunction with the report of the local Suffolk police who were called to the scene of the incident on the first night and again the
following morning.
A number of points are worth making:
1. The statements give the correct date for the sighting (December 26). This makes
it even more surprising that Col Halt got the date wrong in his memo. Penniston’s statement is the exception, as it is undated (but see Point 4 below).
2. The only witness to claim he saw a mechanical object was Penniston. The others
have only ever described seeing lights. During the incident, Penniston
estimated that he got no closer than about 50 metres to the object and that
every time he tried to approach it, it moved ahead of him. This was relayed at
the time by radio to his supervisor, Master Sergeant Chandler, who confirms it
in his own statement. There was no mention at the time of the much closer and
extended encounter that Penniston has since claimed (see Point 4).
3. Burroughs and Cabansag confirm that they chased the lighthouse for about two
miles before realizing what it was. Evidently they were not as familiar with
the lighthouse as proponents of this case like to claim – see also Point 8 below. In an interview on The Paracast in 2009 Burroughs stated he had never been out in the woods before that night.
Penniston and Cabansag were newly arrived on base and were no more familiar
with the woods than he was (scroll to 08:40, 25:35 and 33:15 in the Paracast
interview).
4. In more recent television interviews Penniston has exhibited a notebook in
which he claims he made real-time notes and sketches of a landed craft for
about 45 minutes (see picture below). However, there are serious problems with this claim. For one thing, the date
in the notebook is December 27 and the starting time is noted as 12:20 (meaning
00:20). This, as we know, does not accord with the established date and time.
Burroughs, who was within a few yards of him throughout the incident and saw no
craft, told me in an email on 2006 March 22: “Penniston was not keeping a notebook as it went down”. In a further email dated 2008 January 17 Burroughs emphasized: “Penniston did not have time to make any sketches in a note book while this was
going on and did not walk around it for 45 min.” So what are we to make of Penniston’s claims?
Airman Jim Penniston showed this notebook on the Sci Fi channel documentary UFO Invasion at Rendlesham first broadcast in 2003.
The first page, shown here, 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.
Penniston claims to have made these notes at the time of the incident. For a
fuller discussion of this notebook, see here.
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5. Penniston’s statement and accompanying sketch map (reproduced on the next page) clearly refer to the “traditional” landing site on the eastern side of the forest, where the supposed landing marks and tree damage were found and which the local police were called to see the following morning. However, on the Sci Fi channel programme mentioned above Penniston claimed there was a second landing site on the near side of the forest, only a few hundred yards from East Gate, where he approached and examined the craft. This site is not attested to by other witnesses and is not referred to in his original statement or sketch map. Again, what are we to make of this more recent claim by Penniston?
6. In TV interviews, Burroughs and Penniston have said that the supposed object
took off over the trees, but there is no hint of that in these statements,
which simply refer to the light(s) moving through the trees and disappearing without explanation. Master Sergeant Chandler, who
was at the edge of the forest monitoring events and would have been well placed
to see anything taking off, says in his statement that he saw nothing at any
time. In the more recent Paracast interview referred to above, Burroughs said it went up and back towards the coast (scroll
to 21:35 into the interview).
7. According to Burroughs, the initial sighting of the object apparently coming
down in the forest was made by Bud Steffens, with whom he was riding on patrol.
Steffens did not go out into the forest and was not asked for a statement.
Steffens has never spoken publicly about the event.
8. In addition to those who provided written witness statements, there was another
significant participant in the events of Night One: Chris Armold, the USAF law
enforcement officer who placed the call to the British police and later went
out to see for himself what was happening. James Easton tracked him down in
1997. This is part of what Armold had to tell him:
“My flight chief [at Bentwaters] asked me if I wanted to head out to Woodbridge
to meet up with Burroughs and see what was up. I grabbed the back gate keys and
took the back way to RAF W/B [Woodbridge]. I met Burroughs at the East Gate of
WB. We left our guns with the guy riding with Burroughs and drove to the end of
the long access road. We left our vehicle and walked out there.
“There was absolutely nothing in the woods. We could see lights in the distance
and it appeared unusual as it was a sweeping light, (we did not know about the
lighthouse on the coast at the time). We also saw some strange colored lights
in the distance but were unable to determine what they were.
“Contrary to what some people assert, at the time almost none of us knew there
was a lighthouse at Orford Ness. Remember, the vast majority of folks involved
were young people, 19, 20, 25 years old. Consequently it wasn't something most
of the troops were cognizant of. That's one reason the lights appeared
interesting or out of the ordinary to some people.”
Easton published the interview in full on his website (note: the original site has long disappeared; this link is to an archive server
which is very slow in responding.) The first part of the linked page details
the background and reaction to the initial release of the witness statements.
Scroll down about two-thirds of the way to reach the section on Armold.
9. In 1998, Easton heard from Bernard Donahue, who at the time of the incident was
Area Defense Counsel at Bentwaters with the rank of Captain, the lawyer charged
with defending personnel charged with offences. He said: “Most of us on base were embarrassed by this ‘incident’. We didn’t believe the UFO hype for one minute. The next day, I personally read the
Security Police Blotter [the Bentwaters police log] describing the incident in
detail. It seemed to document hysteria rather than hard facts.”
Content last modified 2010 May
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