Rendlesham Forest incident

1980NotableContested

U.S. airmen near RAF Woodbridge in England report strange lights in the forest on two nights. It becomes Britain's best-known UFO case.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Babylonian mathematics → Babylonian astronomical diaries → Thales and natural philosophy → Trial and death of Socrates → Plato's Academy → Aristotle's Lyceum → Alexander's conquests → Alexandria founded → Library of Alexandria → House of Wisdom → Al-Khwarizmi and algebra → Fibonacci's Liber Abaci → Bills of exchange → Medici Bank → Double-entry bookkeeping → Muscovy Company → English East India Company → Seven Years' War → American Revolution → Declaration of Independence → French Revolution → Revolutions of 1848 → German unification → World War I → Treaty of Versailles → Great Depression → Nazis take power → World War II → Atomic bomb → Cold War begins → Rendlesham Forest incident

Contested history

Consensus: Over two nights in December 1980 U.S. Air Force personnel near RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk reported unexplained lights in Rendlesham Forest.

Airmen saw real lights they could not identifyEstablished

Deputy base commander Charles Halt's official memo to the Ministry of Defence records the reports.

The lights were the Orford Ness lighthouse, stars and a bright meteorDebated

Skeptics show the lighthouse was in the direction Halt's team described, though witnesses dispute this.

A craft of non-human origin landedUnsupported

Measured radiation was near background and the Ministry of Defence found nothing of defense significance.