My Weekly Book

You Can’t Tell The People: the definitive account of the Rendlesham Forest UFO mystery – Georgina Bruni.

The point of this book is very simple. In 1980, over three days around Christmas, an unidentified flying object appeared to land in a forest next to two US military installations in Suffolk. According to evidence compiled by the author, it showed up as an anomaly on the radar at West Drayton as well as for the local RAF bases. It was witnessed by a large number of American servicemen, photographed and even possibly touched. Memoranda about it were written by high-level American and British personnel. A tape recording was made at the scene. After it had left three triangular depressions were found on the ground along with burn-marks on nearby trees and unusually high levels of radiation were recorded. These are all facts and all in the public domain – although sceptics may propose various solutions that would explain them away, with varying degrees of effectiveness.

So, why have you possibly never even heard of it before?

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Let me point out before we go any further that acceptance of something unidentified having landed in the forest is not the same as acceptance of it being little green aliens, people from the future, top-secret military technology or anything else so definite – for all of these explanations have been offered about the Rendlesham Forest Incident. It is a perfectly logical position to believe that something inexplicable happened without feeling the need to explain it down to ten decimal points (for a longer dissertation on this subject, read the following book). I myself am quite sceptical about the idea of UFOs being ‘visitors from another planet’ simply because the distances merely to the edge of our own solar system are so vast and take so long to cover. We are a very scientifically advanced society and we don’t have the technology to cover vast interstellar distances – in fact, we have only the vaguest ideas about how it might be achieved. This, to me, weighs against ‘visitors from another planet’ but I know that’s just one view. (Unlike so many people in the world, and its subset called the blogosphere, I don’t actually feel the need to make you believe the same things I do.)

And so, having explained my position (which I hope is ‘open-minded’ rather than ‘sceptic’ or ‘believer’), onto the book. It’s a very interesting read indeed but quite heavy going – with highly-detailed accounts of all the different witness testimonies and discussion of how they all fit together. A lot of effort goes into trying to forensically recreate what happened and compare the accounts of all the different people involved as well as trying to separate what was recorded at the time and what added through later embellishments. Personally I found it fascinating but also that it required a lot of work to read and your interest in the subject would have to be there from the start to make that work worthwhile. Which possibly means that you will inevitably bring your own baggage along.

I have read criticisms of the book from several sources but it seems to me in every case the person making the criticisms had an agenda of their own to prosecute – be it as one of the involved parties trying to establish the predominance of their own views, as a UFO researcher who had invested time and personal resources into the case or as a professional sceptic. I have taken a look at the sceptics’ arguments and I find them largely unconvincing. While each alone may be enough to give pause for thought I find the idea of them all strung together to make the case for the incident being down to the Orford Ness lighthouse, or rabbit diggings, or a hoax by a guy who later turned round and said he did nothing of the sort, harder to accept and a more insubstantial argument than the idea of a simple unexplained incident.

My personal preferred explanation is that the servicemen witnessed some kind of experimental military aircraft – these things so often seem to happen near military bases. The book makes a convincing case for a substantial cover-up by the American authorities including the intimidation of personnel and the confiscation of photographs which would fit very well with this. It helps that Suffolk has long been the site of a number of research facilities stretching back to before the war. On the other hand, perhaps I am just choosing to take notice of the bits of evidence that fit in with my world-view, in exactly the same way as the believers and sceptics. Perhaps this is all you can do with a case as complicated as this one.

And finally, to answer the question that I posed at the top. If there is such solid evidence of a UFO sighting, why is it not a far more prominent part of the public discourse? I think it is because, apart from the interested minority, most people genuinely don’t want to know. The issues that UFO sightings raise are too big, assessing the evidence too demanding, coming up with a conclusion that fits into your worldview too disturbing. And there is too much risk of being labelled a nutter or a conspiracy theorist. This means that the implications of the Rendlesham Forest incident, whether it was caused by aliens, time-travellers, military experimentation or just a set of extremely unusual but entirely explicable circumstances, are just not ones that most people want to consider. Far easier, after all, to dismiss or forget.

Some links:

• The Rendlesham Forest Incident
• This man wrote the book’s introduction

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 4th, 2006 at 3:09 pm and is filed under 2006 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.