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The Rendlesham Forest Incident
28 Plays4 years ago
In preparation for their 250th episode, Josh and M discuss the Rendlesham Forest Incident, AKA the British Roswell Incident.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
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Transcript
Global Tensions and Soleimani Assassination
00:00:00
Speaker
So it's been a while. Well, actually not that long, just that a lot of history has happened in the interim. Time, I think, for a quick update. Indeed. So we may or may not be approaching a war in Iran, which I guess is kind of fun.
00:00:16
Speaker
I mean I know the various arms of the military and the diplomatic corps in the US are having fun with what with the president suggesting war crimes, generals reading out letters about withdrawing troops and then they're missing five minutes later said letter was a draft that should never have been admitted to in the first instant.
00:00:35
Speaker
Admittedly, this isn't so much a conspiracy as it is a set of cockrobes. Although perhaps the motivating event, the assassination of General Soleimani, is, aside from the lack of congressional approval, the claim Soleimani was behind 9-11. Which he wasn't. Or was about to commit some very bad acts.
00:00:51
Speaker
Although no one can specify what those acts are, how eminent they were, or whether killing him actually stopped their preparation in any way, shape, or form. All seems awfully close to the cover story for the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. Ooh, too true. You know, to find those pesky weapons of mass destruction.
00:01:10
Speaker
Which we couldn't, because the intelligence was made up. You know, because of an actual conspiracy.
Australia's Wildfire Conspiracy Theories
00:01:17
Speaker
Meanwhile Australia's on fire. That's true. And the reaction by anthropogenic climate change deniers is very sensible, I think. Did you know the fires are not the result of a natural disaster, but the result of a planned series of arson-based
00:01:33
Speaker
Did you know that the people starting the fires are members of the Green Party? Yes, apparently the environmentalists are so tired of not being able to show that climate of Australia is changing that they are starting fires to prove climate change is real. Or if that doesn't strike you as sensible, you could always blame energy weapons owned by the UN.
00:01:53
Speaker
which apparently is a thing. Or if energy weapons are not your thing, causing fire from space, maybe you'd like to blame light rail. According to you guessed it, Alex Jones, the fires are part of the plan by China to open up parts of Australia to high speed light rail. Dastardly. But here at the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, we know who is really at fault. It's none other than, no.
00:02:22
Speaker
Drum roll please, maestro. Very well.
00:02:29
Speaker
Yes, NH, we've been tracking your part in the conspiracy, and the fires in Australia have given the game away. Now, we're not making light of the bushfires. Rather, we are squarely blaming the entire climate change shebang on NH, whose work in the conspiracy has led to, and Josh is going to quote the official record here, arming squids with lighters in order to melt the polar ice caps from beneath the surface.
00:02:54
Speaker
David Bellamy wrote that so it must be true. Now things get a little hazy connecting this to the bushfires, but we're sure that with the help of our patrons, who are all members of the conspiracy I might add, we will get to the bottom of this. Insert joke about living in Octopus's garden under the sea. Insert laugh here. And with that punchline, let's get on with the show.
Podcast Introduction and Future Plans
00:03:44
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. N. Denton.
00:03:54
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. It's 2020. How much more into the future can we possibly get?
00:04:04
Speaker
Well, according to the prophecies of Nostradamus, no further than this. Oh, it's a shame. Yeah, basically, this is that we are on the bleeding edge of the future. And we don't get any further than this. So basically, it's all over and done with a particular point in time. So give up hope. Give up hope. You heard it here first. Give up hope from the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy.
00:04:28
Speaker
Yes, the podcast is a guide to the conspiracy, of course, being me, Josh Edison, and from the looks of things, Admiral Holdo, aka Laura Dern from The Last Jedi. It's true. I'm about to perform the Holdo maneuver. You heard it here, folks. For our podcast listeners, we're in quite a delightful shade of lavender.
00:04:45
Speaker
In the hair there? I think it's true. And also in the watch. Coordinated. You are nothing if not coordinated. That's right. You can coordinate my watch to certain colours of hair. Now I spoke before we pile straight into the main topic of the episode. We should again say thank you to our Patreon NH.
00:05:03
Speaker
who's upgraded to themselves. They have. They've gone from being someone who wasn't associated with the conspiracy to really out in themselves by paying enough money to be a member of the conspiracy and mentioned in the intro to this podcast. I mean I actually don't know what they get out of that other than we make fun of them for I mean squids with lighters to melt the polar ice caps. You paid for that. You paid for that. But the point is thank you.
00:05:31
Speaker
Yes, yes, I believe thank you for paying for us to make fun of you. Yeah. So it's a new year. We're thinking maybe we might, might shake things up a little bit. How are we shaking things up, Joshua? How are we shaking things up in the UK as well? We haven't really decided yet. We're thinking about a newsletter. We are. We're thinking about setting up a monthly newsletter you can subscribe to, which will not only have information about the podcast, in case you're one of those people who don't have us in their podcast feeds to remind you to listen to the podcast.
00:06:00
Speaker
It will also update you on things like my various trips around the world and papers I'm working on, books I've written and the like.
Conferences, Travel, and Teaching
00:06:10
Speaker
Kind of be a catch-all of information and possibly even academic articles which are free to read on conspiracy theories as they come up. If you subscribe to the newsletter you might find a bit out about those things and be able to read along.
00:06:26
Speaker
And I suppose if you're one of those people who doesn't actually listen to every episode, it might be useful to have little digest summarising what's been on in the last month, so you know which ones you might be interested in catching up on. Yeah, and telling you about what you've missed out on. So anyway, if and when that eventuates, we'll let you know and if you think it's a good idea, please let us know and we'll put our full effort into it, as opposed to half-assing it like I...
00:06:51
Speaker
Which is how you normally do things. If you think it's a terrible idea and you're never ever going to sign up to it I mean you could tell us that but we probably won't listen. If you think that's the kind of thing that will stop you listening to this podcast and I don't understand why it would but if for some reason you think it would please do tell us. Now you mentioned you're traveling planes you're gonna be moving around a little bit this year?
00:07:12
Speaker
So there's a conference in Miami in March being organized by Joe Ucinski, and I'll be attending that. So that's in the middle of March. And there's also a conference on fake news in Hong Kong. I'll be attending in April. So there's some academic stuff going on. I'm hoping I'm going to be able to do some interviews at the conference in Miami.
00:07:38
Speaker
It kind of depends on the timing. Unfortunately, because it's the middle of the teaching semester, not even the middle, the very beginning of the teaching semester at Waikato, where I'll be teaching in semester A of this year, I'm basically leaving after one class and then coming back before another class, which means I don't really have much spare time either side of the conference to do much in the way of, say, socialising, touristing or interviewing.
00:08:05
Speaker
So any interviews I do do for the podcast will be very much in lunch breaks. I will see how that turns out. Are you spending some time in the Tron? I am. I will be going down to Hamilton, the middle of February, because I'll be teaching there three days a week. It makes no sense to be coming to and fro Auckland, paying rent here and paying for transport down there. Makes much more sense to just be down there.
00:08:31
Speaker
Fair enough. So the podcast will also be transitioning back to a Skype-based affair. I think it may be, yes. And we're sorting out logistics of that for the duration. Our older viewers may remember we did a lot of Skyping back when N was in Romania. Strong. And yeah, Skype kind of went downhill quite markedly. Call qualities did drop off. Yes, I mean, the sound's never been terrible, but the video has been...
00:09:00
Speaker
Yes, there's been stuttering and cutting out and so on and so forth. So we'll see what we can do. But anyway, that's in the future. And the future is not now. No. You know what is now? Thursday. Present giving. Because Josh has both had a Christmas and a birthday. I have. I do do that.
00:09:19
Speaker
between the end of the podcast and the resumption of the podcast. Now this for people who are watching the video is Josh's birthday present which I'm not going to give to him now. It'd be more appropriate for next week's episode as you will see next week. So let's just throw this gift away and instead give Josh his Christmas gift belatedly. So
00:09:42
Speaker
Merry Christmas, me old chum. Why thank you. Am I supposed to open it now? I mean you should try and make as much noise as possible for the podcast version. Otherwise this visual thing doesn't work at all. Why it is conspiracy theories philosophers connect the dot edited by Richard Green and Rachel Robison Green. I wonder if I would look at the contents page. There is also a dedication. I did see the dedication. It might actually be salacious.
00:10:12
Speaker
To be honest, I like to keep them between you and I. I see recent releases from this publisher include RuPaul's Drag Race and Philosophy. Interesting. But yes, I do notice the name of a certain MRX dentist in part one of this book. And I look forward to reading that person's contribution. Chapter 3 is written by someone who we know in this podcast universe as well. Good Lord, it's Charles Pigdon as well. It is indeed.
00:10:37
Speaker
So at least two good chapters. Excellent. Who knows, there might be more. There you go. That book, I assume, is available for people to purchase. You haven't broken into your publisher's offices in the dead of night. Or just as a Christmas gift, created a book, Hallcloth. Yep.
00:10:54
Speaker
So I assume people may be interested in purchasing this book. Yeah, actually tell them about who the publisher is. Where is the publisher? I don't know. It's Open Court in Chicago. That's the one. There you go. Open Court in Chicago. They do a whole bunch of philosophy and books and they've done one on conspiracy theories and I've got the first chapter.
00:11:16
Speaker
One of the editors of this book co-edited The Princess Bride in Philosophy, colon, inconceivable. Inconceivable? I don't think I know what that word means. No, I don't think anyone does anymore. Right, well thank you very much, but I think perhaps it is time that we blast forward into the main topic for this episode. Which requires going back to the 80s. Wouldn't we all, if we could, know actually the 80s are a bit shit? They really, really were. Let's go back to the 80s. Yep.
Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident
00:11:48
Speaker
On 26 December 1980, a series of strange lights were reported by a security patrol near the east gate of RAF Woodbridge in the UK, which was at the time being used by the American Air Force. These lights were then seen descending into nearby Rendlesham Forest.
00:12:07
Speaker
At first it was thought that personnel were witnessing the downing of an aircraft, but upon entering the forest they saw, according to some witnesses, and an official report, a glowing metallic object covered with coloured lights.
00:12:22
Speaker
said object then flew away. The police were called to the scene but the only lights they could see came from the Orford Nest Lighthouse some kilometres away. The next morning personnel returned to the site and found three small impressions and a triangular pattern on the ground as well as burn marks and broken branches on nearby trees.
00:12:40
Speaker
A day later, personnel returned to the site once more with radiation detectors, which picked up anomalous readings. This investigation was recorded on microcassette by Deputy Base Commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt. They witnessed a flashing light to the east, as well as lights in the sky which seemed to beam down streams of light from time to time. The Rendlesham incident has never been solved.
00:13:08
Speaker
This is the point in time where it's been much easier to put in the Unsolved Mysteries adaptation of this with Robert Stack. Is he still alive? No, he's quite dead. To the point where they actually had to get, they had to replace him in the final series of Unsolved Mysteries with someone from NYPD Blue, Dennis Farina. They replaced Robert Stack with Dennis Farina. Dennis Farina is no Robert Stack. No. Really no Robert Stack. And with that, the chime.
00:13:43
Speaker
So the Rendlesham incident. The actual Rendlesham incident. Britain's Roswell. Yes, the similarities there are fairly striking. It's perhaps the most, I guess, well known or certainly most talked about
00:13:59
Speaker
UFO sighting in Britain. It happened close to a military base, much like as well. R.A.O.F. Woodbridge, which we mentioned in the intro, and also R.A.F. Bent Waters, which basically is, you've got Rendlesham Forest in the south of England.
00:14:19
Speaker
and you've got a military base to the east of Rendleshire and a military base to the north and the incident kind of occurs almost in between the two. So the incident is as we spoke in the intro, mysterious lights in the sky, objects moving around, marks seen the next day and then
00:14:43
Speaker
The thing, I guess, that makes it the most noteworthy is the micro-cassette recording and the actual documentation of this bi-military personnel. Yes, so it's important to note that the Rendlesham incident of a UFO, and we're using UFO here in its traditional sense of an unidentified flying object, these days we call it a UAP, identified aerial phenomena, was witnessed by both American Air Force personnel
00:15:12
Speaker
and also British Air Force personnel. So RAF Woodbridge and Bentwater were being used at the time by the American military, but they were being governed by the Brits because it was occurring on British soil.
00:15:32
Speaker
So as we say, possibly it's worth pointing out straight away. It was the 26th and 28th in the wee hours of the morning. I think it's about 3 a.m. in the morning. I think of the 26th in a similar time and the 28th is when these things happen. As we will see, there's a bit of confusion around the dates, but that appears to not be in any way sinister, merely an artifact of slightly dodgy memories.
00:15:56
Speaker
But yeah, I mean it's been a big topic the 40 in times I understand likes to talk about here So the 40 in times of those who don't read the 40 in times and why don't you just you read the 40 in times? No, not not regularly. No, I have read the 40 in time. So the 40 in times is a magazine It's the journal of the 40 in society which deals with 40 in phenomena which tends to be phenomena, which is largely unexplained or at least is
00:16:25
Speaker
at the point where there are multiple explanations and fortians are at a at a liberty to choose which explanation they take and the 14 times is being quite focused given it's a british publication on the british roswell incident in part because the person who writes on ufology in the 14 times
00:16:45
Speaker
is Jenny Randles and she's been a major investigator of the Rendlesham incident although she does call it the Rendlesham incident because many ufologists in the UK
00:17:00
Speaker
take a rather negative view of what happened in Rettlesham as we will say. By which you mean they think that the UFO sighting itself is dodgy or are they suggesting some sort of a cover-up? No, they think the actual sighting itself is dodgy. Good, because that's what I have notes on. Good, otherwise this would go in a very different direction. Yes, so I think
00:17:24
Speaker
There's the audio tape, which is what, 18 minutes long? Which is taken on the second night. So we should point out, there are two separate nights and they're separated by a day. They've got the 26th and the 27th. The 26th is the initial report where personnel belonging to the various air forces saw something which happened near Woodbridge.
00:17:50
Speaker
and then the next day there was an investigation looking at the material left behind and then the night afterwards there was a subsequent investigation looking at the sites at which point people saw other things. The recorded document which is a micro cassette recording by Lieutenant Colonel Holt
00:18:15
Speaker
relates to the second night where they saw lights in the sky, it doesn't relate to the first night where people actually witnessed what they claimed was a downed UFO. Yes. Now the recording, I mean, it's a tape recorder out in the middle of the night from the 1980s. The audio quality is not spectacular. We could play you bits of it, but I don't think you'd get much from them.
00:18:38
Speaker
It would sound a little bit like this, where you've got people talking like this the entire time. And actually, whether this actually picks up on my microphone is an entirely different issue. But...
00:18:53
Speaker
Also on the 13th of January, now 1981, so a couple of weeks after the fact, Lieutenant Colonel Holt wrote a memo to which was sent to the British Ministry of Defense summarizing the incident, which I think is small enough that we can probably read the whole thing out in total. Although what I'm going to point out, this memo's never been classified.
00:19:15
Speaker
No. So this is a memo to the Minister of Defence by a senior commander of an RAF base in England about a suspected UFO phenomena.
00:19:31
Speaker
And it's never been classified by the Ministry of Defence? No. It's kind of important as we'll say. So the memo has the subject unexplained lights and it's in three sections. The first section reads, one, early in the morning of 27 December, as we know this is actually 26 December, but a couple of weeks later after the fact he seems to have got his dates muddled,
00:19:53
Speaker
Approximately 0300 hours, two USAF security police patrolmen saw unusual lights outside the back gate at RAF Woodbridge. Thinking an aircraft might have crashed or been forced down, they called for permission to go outside the gate to investigate. The on-duty flight chief responded and allowed three patrolmen to proceed on foot. The individuals reported seeing a strange glowing object in the forest. The object was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, approximately two to three metres across the base and approximately two metres high.
00:20:23
Speaker
It illuminated the entire forest with a white light. The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath. The object was hovering or on legs. As the patrolman approached the object it maneuvered through the trees and disappeared. At this time the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy. The object was briefly sighted approximately an hour later near the back gate.
00:20:44
Speaker
Paragraph two, and they are actually not numbered here. The next day, three depressions, one and a half foot deep and seven foot in diameter. That's inches. That would be a big hole. Imperial measurements, I mean, it's just weird. Sort your stuff out.
00:21:04
Speaker
In diameter, we're found where the object had been sighted on the ground. The following night, the 29th of December, 1980, the area was checked for radiation. Beta gamma readings of 0.1 milliret- I can never get this right.
00:21:23
Speaker
were recorded with peak recordings in the three depressions and near the centre of the triangle formed by the depressions. A nearby tree had moderate 0.05 to 0.07 readings on the side of the tree towards the depressions.
00:21:39
Speaker
And finally, section 3. Later in the night, a red sun-like light was seen through the trees. It moved about and pulsed. At one point it appeared to throw off glowing particles and then broke into five separate white objects and then disappeared. Immediately thereafter, three star-like objects were noticed in the sky, two objects to the north and one to the south, all of which were about 10 degrees off the horizon.
00:22:02
Speaker
The objects moved rapidly in sharp angular movements and displayed red, green and blue lights. The objects to the north appeared to be elliptical through an 8-12 power lens. They then turned to full circles. The objects to the north remained in the sky for an hour or more. The object to the south was visible for two or three hours and beamed down a stream of light from time to time. Numerous individuals, including the undersigned, witnessed the activities in Paragraphs 2 and 3, signed Charles L. Holt, Lieutenant Colonel U.S. Air Force Deputy Base Commander.
00:22:30
Speaker
So, I mean, that's an official report made by... It says, and unclassified. So, I mean, obviously, that raises a lot of eyebrows. You don't get to be a deputy-based commander if you're given to flights of fancy, one would have thought. And yet, as you say, people are not super convinced by this, or anyone who's looked into it, at least, doesn't appear to be super convinced by it.
00:22:56
Speaker
So the first issue is the dates which are wrong. Now that might be because the memo was several weeks after the event in question. So you have a problem here where Holt is simply misremembering the days events actually occurred.
00:23:16
Speaker
And the thing is, we know from other contemporaneous reporting, which includes reports to the police and reports to the media, that something did happen around these dates, just that Holt has got the days out by exactly one.
00:23:32
Speaker
So the anomalies here are Commander Holt not doing due diligence and checking his diary. Although, as we'll see later on in this conversation, this has a flow-on effect which actually leads to doubts about other aspects of the story. It does. Now, I mean, Holt is kind of speaking for everyone involved when he writes this memo, but
00:23:53
Speaker
When you look at the actual accounts from other witnesses, they're not all identical. The nature of the lights, the colours of the lights, exactly what was seen and where and where and so on do differ. Holt himself, as the years have gone by, it seems has become more vocal about this. He believes he saw an extra-terrestrial event and he believes that it has been covered up. Apparently in 2010, he signed a registered or notarized, or whatever it is, affidavit saying as much.
00:24:22
Speaker
And I believe when we get into it, who was the other one? Staff Sergeant Jim Peniston also. Oh yes, we've got a lot to say about him. Has been very vocal about things. The one account that everybody looks at is not universally agreed upon, which I think is the first thing we have to say. No, and actually, importantly,
00:24:41
Speaker
The accounts made by the service personnel in the days after the incident are remarkably different by the reports made to them several years after the incident. So the initial incident is we saw something unusual. Several years later, the stories are a lot more verbose, including the touching of objects that no one reported even seeing in the first instance.
00:25:11
Speaker
Now, I mean, for instance, Dr David Clark, who's in investigative journalism, he's looked into Randall Shimon, didn't seem particularly convinced, in particular after Lieutenant Colonel Holt made his affidavit in 2010, Dr Clark sort of looked around and interviewed
00:25:28
Speaker
Colonel, what's his first name? Tom, I think it was, Tom, Ted, sorry, Colonel Ted Conrad, who was the base commander, who Lieutenant Colonel Holt was deputy to. He said, we saw nothing that resembled Lieutenant Colonel Holt's descriptions either in the sky or on the ground. Now, again, this is 2010. This is 30 years after the fact.
00:25:51
Speaker
There do seem to be some differences about the specifics of what actually happened, but there are some things I think everybody seems to be consistent about. People saw lights in the sky, people saw marks on the ground, people saw marks on the trees. What can we say about that?
00:26:10
Speaker
Well let's talk about what the police thought about it when they investigated it the next day. So the police turned up at the site of the supposed landing and they looked at the marks on the ground which were taken to be in a triangular fashion and indicate kind of either landing feet or landing force and they thought that these were old rabbit diggings that had been covered up with pine needles
00:26:37
Speaker
Yes, some sort of just animal marks seem to be their initial conclusion.
Analyzing Explanations and Theories
00:26:44
Speaker
And these would have been people looking at it in the cold light of day. Indeed. They also thought that the supposed burn marks in the trees were actually just X cuts made by foresters indicating which trees in the clearing needed to be found.
00:26:59
Speaker
Now, when it comes to the lights in the sky, apparently there was a bunch going on in the sky around the 26th of December. There was a meteor shower. There was a Russian rocket whose first stage would have been burning up in the atmosphere around them. So it's possible there were phenomena in the sky that people witnessed.
00:27:20
Speaker
But then that's seeing sort of shooting stars or whatever is different, I suppose, from saying you saw lights moving through the forest and illuminating the whole forest and so on. But then we do get to the matter of Orford Ness Lighthouse.
00:27:36
Speaker
Well yes, so if you draw a direct line between RAF Woodbridge through Rendlesham Forest to I believe the east, then in the distance you have a lighthouse. The thing about lighthouses is that they have revolving lights, which means that at a distance
00:27:55
Speaker
you would see if you were mistaking or for not being a lighthouse a light pulse occurring with some amount of regularity because you'd be looking at a lighthouse where the light is rotating consistently and then pulsing in your direction.
00:28:15
Speaker
Now, we obviously are not only the first people to talk about this, we're far from the first podcast to talk about this. The Skeptoid podcast looked at this in January of 2009, as I discovered doing a bit of research for this, and Brian Dunning, who runs the Skeptoid podcast, has basically done all the research for us, really.
00:28:37
Speaker
Episode 135 is the one where he talks about it. It's actually old enough that their older episodes are now archived and you need to be a sponsor of them to get at them. But the transcript of it is available on his website. And if you're interested in a debunking, I guess, of the Renaissance incident, I definitely recommend going to look at it.
00:28:56
Speaker
But in particular, when it comes to the lighthouse, lighthouses make public the specific interval that they flash on because that allows ships to identify exactly which lighthouse they're looking at. Orford Nest Lighthouse has an interval of five seconds. And in this episode of the Skeptoid podcast, Mr. Dunning actually goes and takes the section of tape recording
00:29:22
Speaker
where these airmen start talking about what's that light over there, and places beeps in it at five-second intervals, and they basically line up perfectly with this guy saying, what was that light? Well, there it is again. There it is again. And with the timing in it, you can see it's exactly every five seconds that they're seeing this mysterious light. So what you're saying, Josh, is that the UFO was able to replicate the phenomena of a lighthouse. That's pretty clever by alien intelligence. It does seem that way.
00:29:52
Speaker
Apparently, for one thing, some of the airmen who were out there that night didn't know there was a lighthouse nearby, so it wouldn't have occurred to a lot of them that maybe that's what it was. Apparently, Lieutenant Colonel Holt did know about the existence of the lighthouse, but thought it was in a different direction, and it seemed slightly confused about exactly which way they were looking. He thought, oh, it can't be the lighthouse, because the lighthouse should be in a different direction, but it was most likely
00:30:17
Speaker
Mistaken, and it does say something about the fact that these are people walking out at night in the middle of a forest, which means if there are lights in the sky or anything, they're going to be disappearing and seemingly moving around as they go behind trees and things which you wouldn't be able to see in the darkness of night either.
00:30:36
Speaker
which I think has been the explanation in some other cases of UFO sightings. There's the famous one, the couple from whom the first recovered memory alien abduction experience... The hills. The hills, yes. I've heard an explanation of their experiences, having seen this light that was supposedly moving all over the sky has been written down to actually know that there is a light over there, it's completely stationary, but as you're winding through roads going up and down hills and around forests,
00:31:02
Speaker
It would look like it was actually moving around and tracking him. It's entirely possible at night, it's entirely possible to sort of lose your bearings and think that this thing which is standing still has actually moved to a different direction. So I suspect there could well be a bit of that going on as well. Now, there's another issue here, which is if there really was an incident occurring there, you would expect the British Secret Services to do something about it. And this actually did lead to a debate in Parliament. So Admiral Lord Hill Northern,
00:31:31
Speaker
who is the former Chief of the UK Defence Staff, argued in Parliament that an incident like Rendlesham at a nuclear weapons base, which Woodbridge was, was necessarily of national security interest. And in reply, Baroness Simmons of Vernon Dean gave the reply that special branch officers may have been aware of the incident,
00:31:55
Speaker
but would not have shown any interest unless there was evidence of a potential threat to national security, no such interest appears to have been shown. So the Baroness is going, if there really was an unexplained incident going on in Rendorsham, we would have investigated it.
00:32:16
Speaker
Yes, they're not likely to sit on their thumbs when wacky things are going along near a military base I mean Admiral Hill Norton sort of commented either large numbers of people were hallucinating and for an American Air Force nuclear base That's extremely dangerous or what they say happened did happen and neither of those Circumstances there can be only one answer and that and that is that it was of extreme defense interest But I don't think that's is the only answer it could be that people did see things But as we're seeing and then upon investigation people were actually
00:32:46
Speaker
you were kind of mistaken about what you saw, so let's not embarrass ourselves by talking about this any further. Now, there was a large MOD file made on the Rendleship incident, of which parts continue to be secret or private.
00:33:04
Speaker
And this has led to people going, oh, well, that is evidence of a cover up of some kind. The government knew exactly what's going on there. The only problem is, given the rendership incident was such major news at the time, there would be a large file because that file will include every single news clipping about the incident.
00:33:24
Speaker
which has to be put into storage so it might be the case the file is large because of the cover-up it's also quite possible the file is large because it was of national interest and thus generated a large amount of information. It's in Project Bluebook as well isn't it the American Air Force record of
00:33:44
Speaker
As was actually, there's apparently earlier back in 1956, there was another UFO sighting by RAF Bentwaters, which is less spectacular, basically. I think it was either visual contact or radar contact or both.
00:34:01
Speaker
of something zipping through the skies, but doesn't have nearly as much attention as the initial incident. No, no. Certainly there's evidence. Speaking of evidence, maybe it is now time to talk about Staff Sergeant Jim Peniston.
00:34:15
Speaker
Indeed, so one of the investigators of Rendlesham, James Easton, actually managed to get the original witness statements that were made by Colonel Holt by the personnel who witnessed the event on the 26th. And the most interesting bit of witness statement here belongs that Staff Sergeant Jim Peniston of the 81st Security Police Squadron
00:34:45
Speaker
Now, his statement is the only one amongst the...
00:34:49
Speaker
One, two, three, four people who made statements that positively identifies a mechanical object as the source of the light. Now he claims that at the time that they entered the clearing where the lights were present, he got within 50 meters of the object and saw it was definitely mechanical in nature.
00:35:16
Speaker
and that he was able to circle, touch and make notes of the object for 45 minutes despite the fact that other witnesses say as soon as they entered the clearing the object flew away and claims that he was able to write down those notes and what he thought about them in a notebook at the time.
00:35:38
Speaker
Yes, now I think it seems even more so than Lieutenant Colonel Holt. Staff Sergeant Peniston's accounts of the event have become more elaborate as the years have gone by. Indeed. In particular this notebook of his observations that he apparently showed in a television interview. He had this notebook full of notes and sketches that he apparently made of the object at the time. At the time. Despite the fact. At the time.
00:36:04
Speaker
despite the fact that the other eyewitnesses have no memory of him spending 45 minutes walking around sketching. Because to them they walked into the clearing and the object flew away almost immediately. Now an interesting thing is that the notebook is headed with the date 27 December, which as we know was not the date when they were out. It was actually the 26th of December, but it is the date that appears at the top of Lieutenant Colonel's memo.
00:36:29
Speaker
which does make one wonder, did Staff Sergeant Peniston get the date from the memo, which was written two weeks after the fact in coming up with this notebook, which would suggest that it was not something written in real time. So all the indications are that the diary, which indicates the notes of the incident, was written well after the fact. Yeah.
00:36:55
Speaker
And I think that's about it. The Skeptoid Podcast, Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid Podcast sums up his episode by basically saying that when you look at the whole thing, you've got a whole lot of dodgy evidence and a whole lot of bad evidence does not add up to a single bit of good evidence, unfortunately.
00:37:17
Speaker
There are lots of things going on, which when you look at them all, do paint quite a vivid picture. And yet, taken individually, each one of them can be explained by fairly mundane things. Unless you're Robert Stack, because Unsolved Mysteries did an episode on Rendlesham, and Robert Stack makes it sound very convincing that something mysterious happened.
00:37:40
Speaker
And I suppose one thing we didn't mention, though, is that in terms of the supposed cover-up, there are some stories, given that these airmen who were debriefed afterwards and so on, were ordered to keep very quiet about it. Even the phrase, bullets are cheap, was supposedly mentioned to them, implying that they could be killed for speaking out about this.
00:38:07
Speaker
the likes of Lieutenant Colonel Holt and Staff Sergeant Peniston have not been shy about talking this over the years. No, Holt's actually been very, very vocal about the entire story. And apparently there was no official debriefing on the subject either. So that does kind of seem to be made up from the whole cloth.
00:38:24
Speaker
I think the only other interesting thing to say perhaps is to come back to Dr David Clark. Indeed. Now in late 2018 there were a bunch of stories in British newspapers about how the Rendlesham incident has been solved.
00:38:40
Speaker
and they claimed referring to something that Dr Clark had written that it had been shown that the whole thing was a hoax. It was in fact a prank perpetrated by the SAS. Interesting. Tell me about the SAS pranking the USAF. According to this story, in August of 1980, the SAS had tried to sneak in to RAF thingy. Woodbridge.
00:39:08
Speaker
to basically test their security to see if they could sneak into these Americans to check whether things were secure enough. They parachuted in thinking that the Americans' radar wouldn't detect their parachutes, not knowing that the Americans had actually recently upgraded their radar facilities, were able to detect them. The Americans captured the SAS agents, tied them up, had a little bit of fun at their expense, referred to them as unidentified aliens, meaning aliens in the more terrestrial sense.
00:39:34
Speaker
And let them go feeling somewhat sorry for themselves and so the idea was that to then get back at them for the way they were treated the SAS rigged up a whole bunch of flashing lights and silver balloons and remote controlled stuff to give those Yankees a bit of a scare. Now unfortunately
00:39:56
Speaker
these newspaper articles who were appealing to Dr Clark's testimony about this appear to have got this story from a blog post that Dr Clark put on his blog, but that blog post was debunking this story, not actually putting it forwards as a hypothesis for what had happened. He basically says, here is the story, it rattles through the whole thing, and then basically says why he doesn't think it's at all convincing, and this just appears to be a funny story someone's come up with.
00:40:24
Speaker
which is a little bit like the so-called headlight story that was put forward at the time that it was a prank made by someone pranking the staff at RAF Woodbridge by driving a jeep through the forest with their headlights on and thus leading to a kind of chase and the person behind that went yeah I mean I did do that but not at those particular dates so you're kind of back porting
00:40:50
Speaker
a prank I perform to explain Rendlesham and that doesn't work. So it's all a little bit deflating in the end, I guess, really. The evidence that it was something, the dramatic, I guess, is the best word, the dramatic scope of it all, the official testimony, the actual tape recording that, you know,
00:41:14
Speaker
While it's rubbish quality, it is, you know, you've got these soldiers creeping around at night saying, what was that thing over there? Did you see that? And so on and so forth. It has a nice ear of drama to it. But unfortunately, it kind of all just comes crashing down to earth to the extent that even the claims about wacky, amusing hoaxes turn out to be themselves not true either. Sort of a shame, really.
00:41:35
Speaker
But we will be returning to Rendlesham next week. We will. We will be returning to Rendlesham next week because there's a rhyme and a reason to this episode. We needed to talk about Rendlesham. This was actually, unbeknownst to all of you, laying the groundwork.
00:41:52
Speaker
For episode 250. Which is what number it will be. Next week. Indeed. But next week is next week's affair. This week is over and done with. And when we say things over and done with, we mean they're over and done with, right? Well, no. They're over and done with for you, our regular listener, who we do like quite a lot.
00:42:16
Speaker
But not as much as the people we're about to talk about. No. Our patrons, of course, get this week's bonus episode where we'll be doing a bit of a run through of what's been going on. It's probably going to be short. I mean, not much has happened in the last year. No, I mean, there's been no issues in the Middle East. There's been no issues with Trump and there's been no QAnon issues. There's been no Epstein updates. There's definitely hasn't been any update about Alex Jones and Sandy Hook or indeed updates about what's going on in Australia.
00:42:46
Speaker
Oh, there's nothing going on in Australia at all. I'm sure we'll make up something. Oh, we will. We will. So that's what our patrons could look forward to. For the rest of you, thanks for listening. We'll see you next week for our 250th episode. But until then, keep watching the skies. Keep watching the skis. Are we allowed to say that? Like, legally, is it copyright or anything?
00:43:13
Speaker
I mean, just pretend that I was really a script and read guys incorrectly. I mean, that's plausible. I misread a lot of things in my time. Haven't we all? Keep watching.
00:43:36
Speaker
You and that bloody Joker serum, you gotta stay off it, it's not good for you. I haven't even watched that film. Mmm. No, no, I haven't watched it, it's rubbish. It's rubbish! Yep.
00:43:53
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:44:55
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there. But not quite where you think you left it. No more hanging around with the Joker for you, I say.