Rendlesham Forest UFO case
The Russian rocket re-entry
ON OTHER PAGES
Summary
At 21.07 on the evening of 1980 December 25 (i.e. a mere six hours before the
supposed UFO landing in Rendlesham Forest) the Russian Cosmos 749 rocket
re-entered over north-west Europe and was widely reported as a UFO. News
reports of these sightings on national radio that night could have put the idea
of UFO activity into the minds of the airmen at RAF Woodbridge, but there is no
evidence that this re-entry had any direct connection with the later events in
Rendlesham Forest.
The re-entry
A report on the re-entry the Cosmos 749 rocket can be found in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association (1981, vol. 91, page 561). It broke up during re-entry, and the last fragment is
thought to have burnt out somewhere east of Clacton. Any surviving fragments
would have fallen into the North Sea, and hence have been unrecoverable. As far
as I am aware, no fragments from this re-entry were ever detected on radar, but
it is possible that the radar tapes were examined to see if anything did get
through and this may explain some of the stories about radar checks that were
later attributed to the Rendlesham Forest UFO.
In her 1998 book UFO Crash Landing?, Jenny Randles suggests that the NSA on Orford Ness had fired an energy beam
into space to “jam the electronics on the Soviet military satellite and deflect its orbital
path causing it to burn up in a controlled fashion”. She names the source of this energy beam as a secret radar project called
Cobra Mist. And in a subsequent book, The UFOs That Never Were, she goes on to claim that the flightpath of the incoming debris altered “as if something caused the trajectory to be deflected”. Exciting stuff, if true.
Rocket, not satellite
To assess the credibility of that idea requires some background information.
Firstly, the object that re-entered was not what most people would think of as
a ‘real’ satellite. It was in fact the upper stage of the carrier rocket that launched
Cosmos 749 over five years earlier, in July 1975. (It is usual for the top
stage of a launch rocket to go into orbit with the satellite, and is a major
contributor to the amount of ‘junk’ in orbit). As such it was a dead, inert cylinder of metal, and there would have
been no way to command it down even if anyone had wanted to do so. What’s more, the re-entry started 1,500 miles away over North Africa.
The real Cosmos 749 satellite had in fact re-entered three months earlier, in
September 1980. It was an electronic eavesdropping satellite but it was not the
type of satellite designed to be brought back to Earth, nor was it
nuclear-powered. And the British Astronomical Association research paper
referenced in paragraph one makes it clear that Jenny’s claim that the incoming object somehow changed course is simply wrong.
Cobra Mist
Now for some information about Cobra Mist. It was an over-the-horizon radar and
as such was designed to detect missiles coming from Russia and the eastern bloc
over azimuths from 19.5° to 110.5° clockwise from true north, whereas Cosmos 749 came in from the southwest. What
would have been needed here was not an over-the-horizon but an
over-the-shoulder radar. According to FOIA documents made available on
the radar never worked successfully. It was closed at the end of June 1973, over
seven years before the Rendlesham Forest UFO sighting, and the hardware
dismantled. The closure was publicly announced by the MoD that same month (not
1983, as Jenny has it on page 189 of UFO Crash Landing). See also this Wikipedia entry and this link.
Although the Cosmos 749 re-entry sparked a rash of UFO sightings that were
reported on national radio news that night and might well have put the airmen
at RAF Woodbridge on “UFO alert”, there is no evidence to suggest that it had any other connection with the
later events in Rendlesham Forest.
Content last updated: 2012 May.
© Ian Ridpath. All rights reserved
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