This is Unreal

Two nights after the first encounter, strange lights are once again seen above RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge. The US Air Force dispatches a group into Rendlesham Forest to investigate. The leader of the group makes an audio recording of the hours-long incident that follows, involving multiple unidentified lights that seem to invade the airspace above facilities where nuclear weapons are stored.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D
audio for full exposure. Listen with headphones. No experience, no job.
I could do that job, but it would give me
the chance. Maybe we don't ask spart e sperience. We

(00:22):
give it. You won't read it in AFO, you man,
it's sick service. Pick your challenge sends us up a
part maybe, but place, it's a big place. I'm Toby

(00:43):
Ball and this is Strange Arrivals Episode two. This is unreal.

(01:06):
Picture yourself as a young airmen on R. A F. Bentwaters,
one of the twin air bases bordered by Rendell shamp Forrest.
It's late December. You and more than ten thousand other
Americans are divided between these two bases on the North
Sea coast, seventy miles northeast of London, de east. About

(01:29):
a hundred and fifty miles across the water are the
Hague and Amsterdam. Jimmy Carter is in his last days
as president. The struggle for human rights overa it's all
differences of color or nation or language. Leonard Bresnev is
still in the Kremlin, shoeless in terms of world events.

(01:57):
In late of course, The big thing hanging released the
United States would have been they around hostage crisis that
that's still going on and nobody knows how it's going
to end. I'm Kirk Droisley. I'm a chair of the
history department the University of New Hampshire, and I specialize
in US foreign policy and US environmental history. Reagan had
just been elected, and so he had run this campaign

(02:21):
on the United States being far weaker than the Soviet Union,
being vulnerable to Soviet expansion. It can happen at any point,
and therefore we are the only ones that can preserve
the peace, and to do that we must have strength.
It was not clear when or how the Cold War

(02:42):
would end. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan the previous year
in late December, in their greatest show of four since
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They are lifted thousands of
soldiers into the Kabul area and moved tens of thousands
more overland across the border into northern Afghanistan. It seemed

(03:06):
as though they had gained an upper hand on the
world stage. What would happen if they made an aggressive
move in Europe? How would the US respond? If you
were at Bentwaters or Woodbridge. This was not an idle question.
You were on the front lines, because it is is our
legacy at failure in the nineteen seventies into and of

(03:27):
course Britain also was now under Margaret Thatcher's control as
Prime Minister, and she had very similar rhetoric about ramping
up the Cold War in good versus evil. It is
fashionable for some commentators to speak of the two superpowers,
the United States and the Soviet Union, as though there
were somehow of equal worth and equal significance. Mr Speaker,

(03:50):
that is a travesty of the truth. The Soviet Union
has never concealed its real name. In the words of
Mr Bresner, the total triumph of all socialists all over
the world is inevitable. For this triumph, we shall struggle
with no lack of effort. Indeed, there has been no

(04:15):
lack of effort. So I think that on that base
in December they would have been hearing a lot of
rhetoric about this new, more intense Cold War, that the
Soviets might come across Europe. It was the height of
the Cold War, so tensions were high. This is Jim
Peniston again, in he was a sergeant in the U.

(04:38):
S Air Force and was one of the witnesses to
the first night of the reynoldshom Forest Encounter. Looming over
any conflict during the Cold War was the knowledge that
the US and the Soviet Union had nuclear arsenals adequate
to annihilate each other. This led to a US doctrine
of mutually assured destruction, that knowing the devastation that would

(05:02):
result in retaliation, would prevent each side from launching a
nuclear strike. The acronym, of course, is M A D.
We had nuclear weapons that were stored at Dent Waters.
I can say this today. We also had five squadrons
of a ten tank killer aircraft and their mission was

(05:24):
to go ahead and deploy during the first few days
of imaginary war and go to forward operating locations in
Germany el Horn, Light Pine Home a few others. We
had a different type of terrorists threat at the time.
We had groups like the r A Black, September, Bottom

(05:45):
Line Hoff Group, Red Brigade, those type groups, and our
perimeter was always either being observed or tested while we
were there. Mainly it's because that we were about three
miles from Felix So and Loosoft. There were two ports
right on the North Sea where we frequently had Russian

(06:08):
trawlers and stuff like that go there. So the situation
was tense. And things that we look back on through
the comfortable lens of history, the release of the hostages
in the US embassy in Tehran, the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the disintegration of left wing terrorists groups in Europe,

(06:29):
all were uncertain and at this base would have held
potential for real trouble. It's in this atmosphere that Airmen
first class John Burrows, another witness to the encounter on
the first night, went back to base. It was the
morning of December twenty four hours after that initial encounter,

(06:53):
got up on the desk before the night shift was relieved.
When I went in there, the death sargeants at ours
was the guy that was chasing UFOs in the woods
the night before. The desk sergeant was talking about Burrows
and Peniston, of course, but then he added something, you're
not gonna believe this. We had an incident last night.

(07:14):
What he told me was the shift commander I had
an interaction with some kind of a blue light. They
went through her vehicle shut it down. And ended up
getting really the duty because it shook her up so much.
So that was night too. The incident that Burrows refers
to here involves Lieutenant Bonnie Tamplin. There doesn't seem to

(07:36):
be any documentation, and her account mostly comes to us
second or third hand. But briefly, the story is that
there was a report of lights that Tamplin and probably
another person went to investigate. During the investigation, as Burrows said,
a blue light of some sort entered their vehicle and

(07:57):
shut off the engine and radio. What happened to money
Gamp and the lieutenant was on the second night she
disappeared from the base and immediately this is Chuck Halt,
who at the time was a lieutenant colonel and the
deputy base commander. He's not implying by the way that
she was abducted by aliens or anything like that, she

(08:19):
was transferred. I'm tried to track her down and I
was told Fining she was in Italy. I have found her,
but she will not respond. I know where she lives,
I know her address, but she does not want any involvement.
They scared to you know what I don't. And this
is the extent of what happened on the second night.
For us, it mostly serves as a bridge between the

(08:40):
events of the first night and the events of the
third night, to which Chuck Halt would be an important witness.
On the third night, there was a social function at
the base and awards ceremony. My name's Nick Pope, and
I worked for the British gown him and for twenty

(09:01):
one years at the Ministry of Defense for much of
the early nineties. Pope's duties included researching and investigating the
UFO phenomenon and determining if it posed a threat the
United Kingdom or if it was of any defense or
scientific interest. He was in the desert when I spoke

(09:21):
with him, and so coverage was not great, so I
apologized for the quality of the audio. Anyway, Chuck Halt
was at the ceremony and his night was interrupted by
a report. The Stingy based commanders were there and burst open.
A junior officer went up saluted it and said, sir,

(09:42):
it's back, and and one of the officers, deputy base commander,
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt, said what are you talking about?
What's by? And the young officers said the uf post
it's it's come back. The third consecutive night with the
UFOs sighting well, Holt and one of the other senior

(10:03):
commanders conferred and decided someone had better go and deal
with this and see what was going on. So Colonel
Holt drew the short straw, really threw together a team
of about half a dozen people and went out into
the forest, in his own words, to debunk this UFO nonsense.
The small group Halt assembled included an on duty airmen

(10:26):
named Morgan Nevill's. But I knew he had a camera
and he had done some work for Photo Lapp and
he was pretty good photographer. I said, have him made
me a disas preparedness office in about thirty minutes and
we'll go out and take see what this is all about.
So I went home and change master. Starting ball came
by in the cheap several people in it, driven by

(10:47):
an Lieutenant uh England, on duty cop. We went found
disaster for parents. We had to wait for nimals because
his wife was at the Catholic Women's program with the
chapel and he was mayby city. He finally showed up
and I said, don't want you to bring your camera
at the gagger Conner. The only reason I saiders two things,
because I wanted the document was not being air while

(11:10):
this was going on. John Burrows, one of the witnesses
to the encounter, on the first night, was on base
talking with friends. I went over to the dorman, talked
to some of the guys I worked with that we
decided to go out there. Me and a couple other
guys went out into the forest and end up with
me meeting up with Colonel Hall on night three. So

(11:32):
two groups entered the forest, one determined to find nothing
and the other hoping for a repeat of the sighting
forty eight hours before. One of these groups was not
ready for what was about to happen. Strange arrivals will
return in a moment. On the night of December, two

(12:08):
separate groups headed into Rydalshow Forest. The first, more or
less official group was led by Deputy base Commander Chuck Halt,
who made it clear that the base didn't at the
time take the sighting very seriously. The second group was
John Burrows and his two friends, hoping to catch a
glimpse of what Burrows had seen on the first night.

(12:31):
Chuck Halt, sorry went on into the forest, and I
was shown the site. We were something that supposedly landed
the first night. There were three indentations eight or ten
feet apart, and we definitely got radiation readings, and they're
both on the ground higher in the center of the
triangular formed by the three objects and the three sides

(12:53):
towards the landing site and higher readings all more the
background and not enough to be dangerous. Halt made an
audio recording to document anything that happened to them that night.
It is the one real time document of the events
over these three nights. To preserve battery power, he turned

(13:15):
the recorder on when there was something that needed to
be documented and off when there wasn't. This is from
the cassette tape made that night. The first voice you
hear is Colonel Halts, the second is Lieutenant England, and
the third is Morgan Nevill's Yeah, I see it too.

(13:35):
What is it? We don't know? Strange small red light.
Let's see on maybe a quarter and half before they're
at and I think it's gone now it was approximate
add twenty degrees through. Is it back again or splash? Light? Said,

(13:57):
so I can get a better look at it and
see if you get the Spanish coop on it. All
the animals have gotten quiet. Now we haven't got to
undertain on the twenty degrees inside through to the plarry.
Now still getting reading on the meter, got two clicks.
So Halt and his companion saw a light in the
distance that disappeared and then reappeared. They turned off their

(14:19):
flashlights and found a better vantage point at the edge
of a clearing. They looked through a star scope night
vision goggles to try to get a better view. At
this point, Burrows's group joined up with Halts. We met
up with them. Halt kind of told me what was
going on. Showed me some blue lights in the sky

(14:41):
that were flying around, and then all of a sudden
in the distance, an orangeish hue type of flight or
whatever started coming towards us. He asked me, if that's
what I dealt with the first night? And did it
looked like but it was farther away. While where were there?
Kind of I want to do? I saw a small,

(15:02):
I say basketball size maybe the larger beach ball size,
going orange object directly from out of the forest toward
the farmer's fears, a farmer's field to the east of
us in a farmhouse. The objeck was out in the field.
It was glowing and the equivalent of dripping metal or
sparks for coming off it. We watched it for several minutes,

(15:25):
just so let's get close to it. As we started
to the object move into the forest in front of us,
between us and the farmer's size. It moved horizon lea
bombing up and down through the trees. Again from Halt's tape,
its coming this way. It is definitely coming this way. Shoot,

(15:46):
leather is no down of bias. This is weird. The
last different two nights, one light to the lift, take
splash lights off. There's something very very strange. I can okay,
this is from my interview with Chuck Halt. The particulars

(16:08):
obviously under intelligent control and some kind of sensors to
avoid things if they got close. It moved back out
into the field between us and the farmer's house. At
that time I can see the windows in the farmer's
house glowing bright reflection. Oh my, look like the house
was on fire. I was kind of concerned about, you know,
an issue for the people in the house. On Halt's tape,

(16:32):
you can hear as they walk to the edge of
the woods, flashlights off to get closer to the object.
Halt thinks it looks like a winking eye, and when
he looks at it through the star scope, it seems
to have a hollow center and when the lightest flashing
right at them, it almost burns his eyes. Okay again,

(16:54):
but it just moved to the right hand, got the
right strange. Oh that's how much to answer the woods
up there? You want to do a lot lights and
still carefully come on. Okay, looking at the thing. We're
probably about two or three hundred guys away. It looks
like an eye winking at you, still moving from side
to side, and we put the star scoop on it.

(17:16):
It starts star dark sars and I looking at it
and the flashes so bright to the star scope that
was burned dry. Burrows asked Halt for permission to move
closer to the object. I wanted to see what it was. Anyway.
We were trying to figure out what was going on,

(17:38):
just like everybody else, because it just didn't make sense.
Halt okay, Burrows and another Air Force cop to proceed.
We started running towards it. As we got closer and
he went to the ground. I kept going. I remember
getting close to it, and then the next thing I know,
I was gone. But he said that I went into
it and I disappeared for a while, then he saw

(18:00):
me come back. In the course of interviewing Rendelsom witnesses
and researchers, I was not able to find the person
accompanying Burrows during this event. No one else mentioned anything
about Burrows being taken up to the craft. Throughout the
Rendelsom case, there are a number of situations like this
where one witness's account is not corroborated by the others. Again,

(18:24):
Deputy Based Commander Chuck Halt, the objects suddenly exclently exploded
like fireworks into five white going objects and they disappeared.
So we went either to the field looking for traces
of from whatever was coming off the object, and the
only thing we find evidence of was that cos there accalpies.

(18:46):
So while we're going around looking, we noticed pre objects
in the north and the sky, multi killer objects moving
together in synchronizations and they're doing a great search or
some type of performation flying away a bizarre three or five.
We see strange stroke like flashes to the fish sporadic

(19:08):
that there's definitely something that some kind of phenomenal three
or five about ten degrees horizon directly north. We've got
two strange objects, half moon shaped, dancing about with color
lights on them, but guests to be about five to
ten a lot maybe less the half those and turned

(19:29):
in the full circles because all of those elimp eclipse
or something there for a mere two. So here they
are seeing colored lights that are some distance away from them,
starting off shaped as half moons and then appearing to
become circular. They're very fifteen. Now we've got an object
about ten degrees directly and once an aay're moving once

(19:54):
moving away from us. The lights are moving away from
them now north here he comes from the song. He's
coming toward us. Now appear to be a beam of
coming down to the ground. Here, Halt says that he

(20:17):
sees a light beam coming down from the craft to
the ground. This will be important later side of farmers
the second farmers field, and they deciding again about degrees
after the coast. It's right on the horizon, loos about

(20:39):
a bit and flashes from time to time still study
new color. Halt uses radio to call the command post
to see if they had anything on radar. They reported
back to him that they did not. This report would
be disputed later, but at the time the response he

(20:59):
received Eaved was that there was nothing unusual on radar.
We decided to go go further out to get a
better view. Can we see objects of the found going
white options one of the objects because overhead is very
high speed probably dry, high abound and being elevations above us,

(21:20):
that sens a laser light. Being that our fate attending
me away, the veins about and dang pain diameter of
sirs andand and are rather wondering what is that a
weapon to communication some kind of worry and this is
suddenly some being appeared disappeared. The group kept moving. Halt

(21:46):
had his radio on. He says he could hear people
at the weapons storage area who are looking at the
objects through binoculars, and that they were reporting that the
objects were triangular and that there was a larger object
that had sparks coming off of it. But despite all
of this that Halt described, there still seems to be
little interests from the base and they can hear the

(22:08):
people and weapons starge carry or seeing the objects. We
saw in the sky were actually triangular, and they can
see an equivalent of what we would call a mother
ship with small objects coming off, with sparks or whatever
emanating from them. Again, you get the sense that no
one at the base was taking this very seriously. We

(22:29):
were out there for several hours watching this. Nobody seemed
to get excited at the command post, did seem to
secure too much. So finally we were wet and tired
and cold temperature of summer air free scene, and we
must blowing off the coast. So we packed it in
and went home. I didn't know what else to do.
I've expected somebody to come out and respond with me.

(22:52):
Burrows leaves the story here. Over the next few days,
he would return to base and write the document we
heard from earlier describing his experiences. On the first night,
Halts Night, however, was not over. So I showered and
cleaned up because it was I was went dirty, good sleep.

(23:13):
So I went into the office and my boss, Colonel Williams,
met me on the steps. They said, ever, some night
you had, because he had monitored by radio conversations and
I see I made a type of quarter open. Colonel
Williams asked for the tape and Halt reluctantly handed it over.
This was Sunday. There was a meeting of top staff

(23:35):
on the coming Wednesday and the Colonel said that he
would play the tape at that meeting. Halt was horrified
by so oh my god, there's the end of my career.
I waited all week and of course when he came
back Wench and the after lunch, I was waiting at
the door. First thing I said to him, a boss,
still I have a job? Am I still gonna be here?

(23:57):
And he asked throw me the tape. I said, what
do we He said, well, I played the tape for
the General of Staff and the general said, well, anybody
staff have comments? Nobody said anything is infinite wisdom. He said,
well we have them off the base. It's a British
affair case closed. So I said, I mean the end

(24:17):
of it and he said no, you get with Squadrone
or Morland who was to the A zone from the
RF of the base, and see what he wants to do.
So I had to wait about tender Halt base because
Don Morton was in Wales at his family home to
the hall Christmas holidays. So when he came back. I
briefed him and played the tape, but he didn't want
to do either. So about two weeks past between halts

(24:42):
uf O encounter and his meeting with the squad leader
Don Morland, a Royal Air Force representative at the bases.
In this meeting, Halt was to tell the British authorities
about the three nights of the encounters. David Clark has
interviewed any of the people involved in the Ryndalship encounters,

(25:03):
including Don Morland. I'm David Clark. I'm associate professor at
Sheffield Hallam University in the UK and my specialist subjectives footlow.
This is how Donald put it to me when I
interviewed in Chuckhole. Invisted him into my offit and said, oh,
by the way, while you've been on holiday, Don, the
the aliens landed. But I thought I'd wait until you

(25:25):
came back off holiday to tell you about it. And
he thought he's pulling my leg. This is a joke,
and then he came out with all this fantastic story
about wizards and bangs and lights flying around in the forest.
As you would imagine, Don Morland was unsure what to
do about this. He told Halt that if they gave

(25:46):
an official account of these sightings, it would lead to
a big inquiry. So Moreland suggested that Halt write it
down in a memo, and he actually did that, almost
as like an ex roment, because he didn't think the
whole would actually commit this to writing. He said, put
it down any much and I'll send it to the
Ministry Defense. And he didn't think you would take the

(26:07):
bait and the behold. He did. He produced that one
page and that's gone down in history. He made a
lot of phone calls and I don't know what all else,
as give me a memo to talk from. So I
wrote the infamous memo who was never supposed to go anywhere.
It was supposed to be a document for him to
read it and talk from. You can easily find the

(26:29):
Halt memo on the internet. It's just one page with
three numbered paragraphs and is signed at the bottom. The
first paragraph is a brief account of Penistin Burrows and
Coban SAG's encounter on the first night. It puts the
time at three am, so it was consistent with burrows timing,

(26:50):
not Penistan's. It also describes a craft quote the object
was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape,
approximately two to three meters across the base and approximately
two ms high. This is based on Peniston's account, which
we will look at in a later episode. The second

(27:13):
paragraph relates the field investigation undertaken the next day and
reports that depressions were seen in the ground the following night.
As we heard earlier, moderate radiation readings were recorded. The
third paragraph summarizes halt encounter later that night, but the
memo gets the dates wrong. The first night is identified

(27:37):
is December and the last as December. As we will
see in the next episode, this mistake complicated efforts to
verify information. There's also no mention of Lieutenant Bonnie Tamplin's
encounter of the second night. Morelands sent the memo up
the chain of command to the Ministry of Defense, and

(28:00):
we waited and waited and waited, and nothing had happened.
I was relieved to be very honest radio, and that
was I thought the end of it. I told two
or three years later, whenever the momo got released, and
then I hit the fans next time on Strange Arrivals.

(28:28):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
grimin Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and
hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and
Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, at Frederick and
Aaron Mankey. Special thanks to our voice actors Joe McCormick

(28:49):
and Jeff Williams. Learn more about the show over at
Grim and Mild dot com. For more podcasts from my
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.