Within a few seconds, Torres had been able to get in behind the UFO. He armed his weapons and was about to fire when the object suddenly accelerated to tremendous speed. In an instant, it was off the Sabre’s radar screen completely.
Torres later estimated the UFO must have attained at least Mach 10—as in 6,500 miles per hour — in order to make such a quick exit. However fast it went, though, it left the pair of Sabres flying through an empty sky.
(Oddly, a similar incident had happened just a year before, again over East Anglia; this one involved another huge UFO and as many as four jet fighters in pursuit ready to fire. Like the one Torres was chasing, that UFO also accelerated to an astonishing velocity just before its pursuers could unleash their weapons.)
Torres and his wingman landed back at Manston soon after their encounter, only to find that Torres was about to have a Man in Black episode of his own. A man Torres described as looking like a “well-dressed salesman” came to RAF Manston to interrogate him.
This man asked many questions about Torres’s just completed mission. Once he’d got all the facts, the man informed Torres that the whole affair was now considered highly classified and that Torres should not talk about it with anybody, including his superior officers.
The mystery man also made it clear that if Torres said a word to anyone, his air force career would be terminated.
Flash forward another twenty-three years, to 1980—and again, strange doings in East Anglia.
This time it was in a place called Rendlesham Forest, a vast six-square-mile woodland near the city of Ipswich. The forest shared some interesting real estate. Located close to the coast, a nearby island housed some buildings purportedly occupied by the National Security Agency, America’s most secretive intelligence agency. Also close by was a pair of large NATO air bases, RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters.
These bases were highly classified installations in 1980. RAF Bentwaters was one of NATO’s largest nuclear weapon storage facilities at the time, and RAF Woodbridge was where the USAF 67th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron called home. This highly specialized unit was under the direct command of the Department of Defense and flew radically adapted HC-130 aircraft used for satellite recovery.
On the night of December 26, 1980, a blip appeared on radar screens at RAF Watton in nearby Norfolk. This blip fell off the radar right in the area of Rendlesham Forest. The same unidentified object was also spotted by radar at RAF Bentwaters — and its track also ended over Rendlesham. Two U.S. Air Force policemen, John Burroughs and Budd Parker, were manning the east gate at RAF Woodbridge at the time. Around 2 A.M., they saw an object fall into the forest nearby. They thought it was one of the base’s planes crashing, despite the fact that it was the Christmas holiday and no planes were supposed to be flying that night.
Then they saw lights coming from the dense forest. Not flames — instead they described them as looking like bulbs on a Christmas tree: A large yellow light was glowing above the trees, a red blinking light was in the center, and near it, a steady blue light. The lights were about a mile and a half east of the east gate.
What the policemen were looking at didn’t make sense. First, they’d thought something had crashed in the woods — but now it was as if something had landed there. But how could something land safely in a thick forest?
The policemen called the base headquarters, and their sergeant was quickly on the scene. His name was Jim Penniston.
Penniston saw the lights in the forest as well and listened when his men insisted this was not a crashed plane. Whatever it was, Penniston knew it had to be investigated.
So, while Parker stayed at the gate, Sergeant Penniston, Burroughs and Penniston’s driver set out for the woods.
But almost immediately the small search team’s radios went on the blink. Something in the woods seemed to be interfering with them. Penniston ordered his driver to stay behind near the road, so he could shout messages to him if need be. Then Penniston and Burroughs went into the woods alone.
They noticed right away that strange things were happening. The forest animals were running around wildly, and the air seemed filled with electricity. They could feel the static on their skin. They heard strange noises, too. Burroughs reported hearing something like a woman screaming. Some farm animals nearby were making a lot of noise as well.
The two men started walking toward the lights, knowing if it was a downed aircraft, it would have lit the forest on fire by now or at the least filled the woods with the stink of spilled aviation fuel. Yet they could neither see nor smell anything along those lines. So Penniston and Burroughs stayed focused on the multiple colored lights, which were getting brighter as they approached.
They eventually reached a clearing, where they found the source of the strange illumination. It was a shiny object, shaped like a cone about five to six feet high. It was floating a couple of feet off the ground with a strange mist around it. It was so brightly colored that it was hard for the two men to make out any distinct features beyond that. But one thing was for certain: They were sure this was not something of this world.
Penniston eventually walked right up to the object. There appeared to be some strange writing etched on the side of it, but when he ran his hand over these impressions, the light on the top of the object suddenly grew brighter. Both men hit the dirt, and the object started moving away from them.
They watched as it made its way through the dense forest, finally reaching a spot a short distance away. At this point, the object ascended to about 200 feet above the ground, paused a moment, then took off at such high speed, both men said it was gone literally in the blink of an eye.
Thus began the haunting of Rendlesham Forest — and a real rarity: an almost indisputable UFO case.
And it was not over.
Penniston and Burroughs returned to the woods the next morning to find the local police on hand. The nearby constabulary had also received reports about the strange lights the night before, and they were investigating. At some point, the two airmen discovered indentations in the clearing where they believed the object had set down. Penniston and Burroughs measured the distance between these ground markings and found that they formed a perfect triangle, made, they were sure, by the undercarriage of the strange object. But the police did not agree with their conclusion. They insisted on describing these holes as animal diggings simply because they didn’t want to put anything too crazy into their report.
But other signs of the UFO’s presence were found as well. Many trees in the area had their tops broken off, and weird serrations were found on some tree trunks, too. Plus, a U.S. Air Force aircraft had flown over the area at sunrise and reported that infrared radiation was “pouring” out of the forest.
The base’s top brass was made aware of all this, but typically, the U.S. Air Force refused to address the events. Their stance was that whatever happened had taken place outside the gates of the Woodbridge base. Therefore, it was not their place to comment.
The following night there was an officers’ dinner party at RAF Bentwaters.
No sooner had dinner begun, though, than a junior officer appeared and reported to the base commander that the UFO had returned to nearby Rendlesham Forest. Because the base commander was scheduled to make an after-dinner speech, he asked his deputy commander to handle it. This man was Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt.
Halt gathered up some airmen and headed for the east gate. On arrival, Halt learned that an hour earlier a security patrol had spotted more strange lights floating above Rendlesham Forest. But the lights had quickly disappeared.