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Hundreds of unidentified...

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Every year, hundreds of unidentified flying objects, UFOs, are reported over the British Isles.

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Most of them can be explained, but about one in ten defy the investigators.

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Witnesses make astonishing claims of their close encounters, of bizarre lights darting around the sky,

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communication with other forms of intelligence, even of being abducted by aliens.

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But none is more remarkable than the story we're going to tell tonight.

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It resulted in inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic and questions in Parliament.

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It involved senior American Air Force personnel and a former chief of staff at the Ministry of Defense.

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The witnesses and the evidence they gathered are impossible to ignore.

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This is the first time all those directly involved have told their story, and we reconstructed what they describe.

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American airmen stationed in Britain tell of events that would change their lives.

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I came to Britain from a tour in the Pentagon, having previously served in the Far East and, of course, in Vietnam like many other people.

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And I kind of expected it to be a somewhat of a quiet tour.

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I was at the height of the Cold War, but we weren't directly involved like the bases in Europe.

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It was very late back, not much happened, and you never expected much to happen, especially at Christmas time.

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Bent waters and Woodbridge twin military air bases in East Anglia.

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The three miles that divide them are filled by Rendlesham Forest.

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Until last year, the bases were occupied by the 81st Tactical Fighter Wing of the United States Air Force.

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Although a normally uneventful assignment, they formed a strategic part of Western Europe's defenses.

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And such they had top security status. Nothing could get in or out without being detected.

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An RAF radar station nearby. During the monitoring of a night flying exercise, a strange object was picked up.

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We didn't have the faintest idea what it was. We checked through the air traffic agencies.

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There should have been nothing in that area at the time.

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Colin, have a look at this. It's just completely static. It's just hovering there.

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The only thing we could do was send the jet aircraft in to find out what it was.

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Bravo 6-0, Bravo 6-0. We have unidentified traffic in your area.

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Your new target is 2-7-0 degrees, range 10 miles, indicating 5,000 feet over.

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No, sir.

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They got to within about a quarter of a mile and the pilots suddenly started reporting that they could see a very bright light in the sky in front of them.

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And extremely bright lights. It's moving away, target accelerating away.

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Look at that thing go. Bravo 6-0, target is still in front of you. It's going straight up. Target going straight up, over.

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It was stationary on the screen and then in seconds it moved off at a fantastic rate of speed within a space of 5 minutes.

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It was reaching 90,000 feet and higher and we lost it off the top end of the radar scope.

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Target is accelerating too fast. We can't keep up with it. We're disengaging.

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The radar operators were mystified.

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There's nothing we have in this day that can perform those kind of maneuvers. The pilots wouldn't be able to take it. You tell me what it was.

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The first day of flight, Airman John Burroughs was on security patrol with a colleague.

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Stop the car. Look at that. Do you see that in the woods?

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There were strange lights out in the forest. To me it almost looked like Christmas lights at first, a Christmas display.

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I'll open the gate.

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At that point we looked at each other and we decided that we better go out and take a closer look because we weren't sure what we were dealing with.

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What we were looking at wasn't real.

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Those are no Christmas lights. Come on, let's get out of here.

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Airman Burroughs and his colleague raced back to the gate house where he contacted the security controller.

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Hi, this is Burroughs here. I'm not at the East Gate. We've got a problem here.

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He had a lot of trouble believing what I was telling him because it was Christmas and I played a lot of jokes on him before.

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I'm serious. This is not a joke. There's something out there.

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Eventually persuaded by the Airman's tone, the controller contacted Sergeant Jim Peniston.

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Roger control. We're on our way over.

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We received a call from the control center to go on down to the East Gate and contact John Burroughs.

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And I asked him what was the nature of the problem down there.

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And they said that they'd rather not tell me. They'd rather have me go down there and talk to the patrolman on scene.

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What is that?

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I don't know. And I don't want to know.

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Did you hear an explosion, John?

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It didn't crash. It landed.

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The first thing that came to mind was an aircraft crash. I've had at least 30 or 40 crashes that I have been to at that point in time.

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And that's definitely what I thought it was.

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I'm going to contact control.

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Sergeant Peniston at the East Gate. I've got a possible aircraft down just beyond the perimeter.

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They notified me that they were tracking an undefined bogey about 15 minutes ago.

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And they confirmed it with contact with Eastern radar and Heathrow in London.

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And at the approximate location, about five miles off base when they lost contact with it.

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They registered it. They don't know what it is.

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So a plane or what?

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It was Christmas time and there was no scheduled flying for that night.

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I'd heard rumors that it possibly could have been a British exercise with ships and planes out at sea.

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Whatever it was, Sergeant Peniston knew they had to go and find out.

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I got permission to proceed off base to investigate.

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Following military rules, the Americans had to leave their weapons behind.

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One part of me wanted to go ahead and go out there and figure out what we were dealing with.

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And the other part of me was saying, nah, you don't need to go out there.

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Just go ahead and stay back at the gate where it's safe and you don't have to worry about what's going on.

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The men went through the forest towards the lights.

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This is as far as we go.

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Stand on foot now.

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I started to see a defined shape.

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And at that point, when I realized it wasn't an aircraft crash, a fire or anything of that sort.

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The air was filled with electricity that could feel it on your skin as we approached the object.

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It felt like you were moving in slow motion.

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Your hair on the back of your head was standing up.

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And you felt like you had very little control over your body.

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Then they saw it.

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I wish I had my weapon because I felt totally defenseless.

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It was about the size of a tank.

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It was triangular in shape.

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Underneath the craft was a high intensity white light emulating out of it.

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And it was bordered by red and blue light and automated.

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When nothing happened, the men deciding the object wasn't hostile got up to take a closer look.

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On the upper left side of the craft was an inscription that measured six inches high of symbols.

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They looked familiar, but I couldn't ascertain why.

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The Americans watched for about 20 minutes.

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And slowly started moving back, weaving in around the trees.

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Got about 40 feet away, then it raised up into the air and it shot off as fast as you could blink.

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Enter!

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Come on in.

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On their return to the airbase, the men were called in by the officer in charge.

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Well, what happened out there last night?

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We know radar saw something.

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Now I want you to tell me in your words exactly what you saw.

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Well, sir, Burroughs was the first to say.

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As we were standing there reporting in, then I hit me and I realized what in the world am I doing here?

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Standing in front of my lieutenant, getting ready to explain this situation that I had just observed.

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I thought, there goes the career, Jim.

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Had markings on it.

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This is what I want you to do.

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Gentlemen, he says, I need to go over to the woods, he says, and take a look at the area in daylight to see if you can find any more physical evidence.

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Anything.

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Dismissed.

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The Tigers did.

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Branches on the ground. We found indentations in the ground.

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The local Suffolk police went out too.

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An officer found the indentations, but reported they'd been caused by animals burrowing.

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I asked him why, and he says because he's not going to put anything other than that in his report.

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We found that just totally absurd.

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The ground was frozen and it was just impossible for that to happen.

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Then the airmen remembered that the object they'd seen was triangular.

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They measured the distance between the indentations and discovered that they formed a perfect triangle.

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The activities soon came to the attention of the deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt.

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Well, it's the aliens I feel sorry for.

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I wouldn't want a close encounter of any kind with burrows.

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Who's been having close encounters?

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Sir, well, I guess you could say we were having a few Christmas festivities.

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Oh, yeah?

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Well, Burrows and Peniston said they were out chasing a UFO in the forest.

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Are you serious?

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Well, that's what they said.

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Has anybody confirmed it wasn't an aircraft?

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Nothing I know of.

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Whatever they saw, I want it moved on.

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Okay.

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I personally knew the individuals that had reported it and I knew there were very credible people.

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I was sure something had happened. It was obviously something.

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I certainly wasn't convinced it was a UFO, but I didn't know what it was.

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There was only one way to find out.

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Huge portable floodlights known as lightalls were rigged in the forest ready for anything which might appear the next night.

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But as darkness fell, the lightalls began to malfunction.

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Lieutenant Colonel Holt was interrupted at a Christmas dinner.

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The duty flight attendant came in and he was quite shaken and insisted upon speaking myself and the base commander about a matter of utmost urgency.

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He said, it's back.

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And I said, what's back?

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And he said the UFO is back.

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What's back?

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We assembled a small team of experts and we set off in the forest really to debunk it.

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About 30 men followed the lights into the forest armed with special equipment including a night vision scope, geiger counter and a tape recorder.

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Right, this way.

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I'm certainly glad we made the tape because if we hadn't made the tape even I would have trouble believing what happened that night.

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But would anyone else believe it?

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Right, this way.

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It appears that he may be moving a little bit this way.

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It's brighter than it has been.

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It's coming this way.

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It is definitely coming this way.

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I knew there was something there, there had to be something there.

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But I also was firmly convinced there was a logical explanation for what was going on.

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Portable floodlights known as lightalls positioned in the forest mysteriously refused to work.

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It's very unusual to have a problem with the lightall.

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That night the lightalls wouldn't work even when they swapped out and got other ones from the base.

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In addition we had problems with our radios.

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All three frequencies we were using were intermittent and did not work properly that night.

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But other equipment was working.

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A night vision scope, a geiger counter and a tape recorder.

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The sound in this reconstruction is taken from the actual tape they claim to have recorded that night.

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There was no doubt about it. There was some type of strange flash in the red light ahead.

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I saw a yellow tint in it too.

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Weird.

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It appears that you may be moving a little bit this way.

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It's brighter than it has been.

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It's coming this way. It is definitely coming this way.

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It pulsated as though it were an eye winking at you.

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And around the edges it appeared to have molten metal dripping off it.

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Just like falling to the ground.

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But I didn't see any evidence of anything on the ground.

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I just couldn't believe what I was saying.

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None of us could.

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Here I am a senior official that routinely denies this sort of thing

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and diligently works to debunk them.

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And I'm involved in the middle of something that I can't explain.

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The geiger counter was measuring levels 25 times normal background radiation.

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It jumped up to 7 tenths.

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7 tenths right there in the center.

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We're getting very positive readings.

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We're getting readings on the tree you're taking samples from.

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We're clicks, max.

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That's the strongest point on the tree?

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Yes, sir.

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The night vision scope showed strange readings too.

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We're picking up heat reflection off the trees.

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Working directly overhead, one can see an opening in the trees

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plus some freshly broken pine branches underground underneath.

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Looks like some of them came off about 15 to 20 feet up.

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The men stayed in pursuit through the woods for six hours.

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The object suddenly exploded.

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A silent explosion and broken into three to five white objects

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and rapidly disappeared.

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A mile away, Airman John Burroughs was with the broken down light holds.

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All of a sudden out of the distance, a blue light streak passed us.

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Passing the light off, they came on.

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They passed through the open window on the truck,

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going off into the distance and the light holds went out.

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As we moved out of the forest, we noticed three objects in the sky.

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The objects in the sky were moving about.

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Sharp angular movements, very high speed.

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This is it. It's looking for something.

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I kept getting on the radio and calling the command post.

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Thunder, this is Stopper.

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Call Radar and ask them what they've got.

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30 degrees above the horizon and 10 miles out.

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I wanted to know if they were finding anything on the radar scope.

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One of the objects in the sky was sending down beams.

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Beams of light, beams of energy. I'm not sure what they were.

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But at the same time I could hear on the radio voices talking about the beams coming down on the base.

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That's all. It's all the further down now.

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Then a beam shone straight at them.

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At this stage, my skepticism had definitely disappeared.

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I was really in awe.

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Almost as rapidly as it appeared, it went.

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An extraordinary story.

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But what could be behind it?

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Some of what the airman saw can be explained, astronomers say,

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by a rare coincidence of events in the sky that night.

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One of these was the re-entry of a Russian rocket.

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This came in and burnt up in the Earth's atmosphere.

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It was seen by thousands of eyewitnesses all over South-Eastern England.

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And the second was a brilliant natural fireball,

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a piece of interplanetary rock burning up in the atmosphere.

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Another astronomer thinks further confusion was caused by a third factor,

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a lighthouse on the nearby coast.

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Although it's six miles away, it only looks as though it's a few hundred yards away in between the trees.

230
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And as the airman moved around, the lighthouse beam, too, would have appeared to moved in between the trees

231
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and retreated in front of them as they moved forward, which is exactly the way they described it.

232
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That theory was backed up when the tape was played against the flashing of the lighthouse.

233
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Right at misposition here, straight ahead in between the trees. There it is again.

234
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Watch. Straight ahead off my flashlight there. So there it is. I see it, too.

235
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The two matched, but the Americans were well aware of the lighthouse and say that wasn't what they saw.

236
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A lighthouse doesn't move through the forest.

237
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A lighthouse doesn't go up and down, doesn't explode, doesn't change shape, size, doesn't send down beams of light from the sky.

238
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The Rendlesham Forest encounters became the talk of the airbase.

239
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Lieutenant Colonel Holt knew he had to act.

240
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I really didn't know quite how to handle it. I reported it to my superior,

241
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and I was quite concerned, to be honest with you, what his reaction would be.

242
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But he was very supportive.

243
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He was told to write a memo to the British Ministry of Defense.

244
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Including the undersigned?

245
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I sent the memo, but I never heard. I kept checking and asking, but I never got a response.

246
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Please.

247
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But other airmen say secret investigations were taking place.

248
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Two, three.

249
00:17:14,000 --> 00:17:20,000
After the incident happened, there seemed to be some strange activity going on in the base.

250
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I'm really not sure what it was, but it wasn't normal activity.

251
00:17:24,000 --> 00:17:28,000
At that time, we noticed that there was many unscheduled flights coming in.

252
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They told me that I was supposed to keep it quiet and not to take the issue any farther.

253
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According to a former US military intelligence officer, the flights were ordered by his colleagues.

254
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There was a total blackout of any information leaving the base.

255
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Even the senior officials on the base were not told about these flights coming in and leaving.

256
00:17:50,000 --> 00:17:54,000
These flights contained teams of specialists.

257
00:17:54,000 --> 00:17:59,000
They were together specific data in their fields of expertise.

258
00:17:59,000 --> 00:18:02,000
All of that information then was to be sent to Washington, D.C.

259
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where it would be assessed and accumulated in a finalized, highly classified report.

260
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Whatever conclusions may have been reached, Lieutenant Colonel Halt wasn't told.

261
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He's mystified as to why, as a senior officer, his report never even received a reply.

262
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To this day, I'm very puzzled why nobody ever came back and asked for additional information, asked questions, or even interviewed me.

263
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It doesn't really add up.

264
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But news of the sightings began to leak out.

265
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Local investigators began to take matters into their own hands.

266
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We asked the local people if they'd heard anything and seen anything.

267
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And most of the local people said that they'd seen the lights over the forest.

268
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A few days later, though, they seemed less forthcoming.

269
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They'd all been told to keep quiet.

270
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And two of the local people who lived near the air base told us originally what they'd seen from their bedroom window.

271
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And then when we went back, they'd got M.O.D., property, private, keep out, and they'd got barriers around the house.

272
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The thing that worries all parents...

273
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...gators managed to get a copy from the U.S. government of the deputy commander's memo.

274
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In Britain, it prompted a question in Parliament.

275
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I have seen the memorandum to which my honorable friend refers.

276
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I'm ready to give information about any such reported sightings that are found to be a matter of concern from a defense standpoint.

277
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But there have been none to date.

278
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The case intrigued Lord Hill Norton, a former chief of staff at the Ministry of Defense.

279
00:19:38,000 --> 00:19:41,000
One can't help feeling that something is being concealed.

280
00:19:41,000 --> 00:19:47,000
Either the Americans and indeed the deputy-based commander were hallucinating,

281
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or they believed that something had landed there and they had taken photographs and records of it.

282
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And in either event, it must be of interest to the defense of the United Kingdom.

283
00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:02,000
Sergeant Jim Peniston is not only convinced by what he saw then.

284
00:20:02,000 --> 00:20:06,000
A cover-up could explain what he says happened after he left the U.S. Air Force.

285
00:20:07,000 --> 00:20:14,000
As time went by, a year or two, I had noticed that my mail was being tampered with, opened and resealed.

286
00:20:15,000 --> 00:20:20,000
And we also got to the one point where we found a listening device within my home.

287
00:20:21,000 --> 00:20:28,000
Soon after the story surrounding the Suffolk Air Base surfaced, a large swathe of Rendlesham Forest was cut down.

288
00:20:28,000 --> 00:20:31,000
Locals believed because of the radiation left behind.

289
00:20:33,000 --> 00:20:40,000
When we asked why the trees were cleared so quickly, we were told because of the traces that were left on them.

290
00:20:41,000 --> 00:20:45,000
And we tried to find out who had taken the trees away.

291
00:20:45,000 --> 00:20:48,000
We were told that they were just taken.

292
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The air bases have gone too. With the end of the Cold War, the Americans left.

293
00:20:56,000 --> 00:20:58,000
But the mystery won't go away.

294
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The ministry had doggedly denied that anything untoward occurred there and I simply don't believe it.

295
00:21:06,000 --> 00:21:11,000
Therefore, somebody, I don't know who it is, is sitting on information which by now should be public.

296
00:21:12,000 --> 00:21:15,000
If a secret report is in Washington, what could it contain?

297
00:21:15,000 --> 00:21:18,000
The former intelligence officer claims he knows.

298
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That finalized report concluded that real objects were seen.

299
00:21:25,000 --> 00:21:30,000
That these objects were a result of a highly evolved advanced technology.

300
00:21:31,000 --> 00:21:35,000
The technology was so advanced that we cannot to this day replicate it.

301
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That there was an intelligence involved and that that intelligence did not originate on Earth.

302
00:21:43,000 --> 00:21:51,000
And according to the radar operator who first saw an object, it's far from being the only UFO incident.

303
00:21:52,000 --> 00:21:58,000
These things are being picked up by radar operators throughout the whole world, not just in Britain.

304
00:21:59,000 --> 00:22:04,000
And we're not told what they are and we're not expected to ask questions about what they are.

305
00:22:04,000 --> 00:22:09,000
The Ministry of Defense admits they have more than 8,000 cases of UFOs on file.

306
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As for Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt, although he never heard any more about his UFO report, it didn't as he feared damage his career.

307
00:22:18,000 --> 00:22:22,000
Soon afterwards he was promoted from deputy commander to commander of the air base.

308
00:22:23,000 --> 00:22:27,000
Rather strange you might think if he'd been suspected of not telling the truth.

309
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We're going under cover now but see you again soon.

310
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Good night.