The Rendlesham Forest UFO Sighting, Part 2, The Aliens Return

Suffolk, England

Sources:

www.unknowncountry.com, 12-5-2014, Whitley Strieber’s interview with Linda Moulton Howe on Dreamland.

Larry Warren and Peter Robbins, Left at East Gate: A First-Hand Account of the Bentwaters-Woodbridge UFO Incident, its Cover-Up, and Investigation, New York, Marlowe and Co., 1996.

www.youtube.com:  interviews, TV shows, 2010 Disclosure Conference in Washington DC.

SciFi Channel, “Declassified Special, UFO Incident at Rendlesham,” 2003, with Bryant Gumbel, Part 1 and 2, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzuBkzLoPtQ.

The second night

For Part 1 of this series, I trolled the Internet to find videos of the main players of the first sighting. We met Jim Penniston, John Burroughs, and Ed Cabansag. We learned that Bentwaters AF Base is only 3 miles from Woodbridge AFB in Suffolk County, on the east coast of England. At least 3 airmen from Bentwaters AFB were sent to the East Gate of Woodbridge AFB to access Rendlesham Forest, just outside the base, where a light was seen landing in the woods. The men encountered an actual landed craft. Tech Sgt. Jim Penniston touched and examined it, then all three watched in awe and terror as it flew away. That was December 26, 3 a.m. to 5 a.m., 1980.

My impression is that there was also activity on the second night, the early hours of December 27, but I found no information about it. The “night of legend” was December 27 to 28. Larry Warren describes his personal experience in this book, Left at East Gate. In this post, I will combine his story with what I also found on the internet.

During the dark morning hours of Dec. 28th, Greg Battrum and 3 others, all stationed at Bentwaters, were on a routine perimeter patrol inside the fence at Woodbridge. They saw lights in the sky and a glow in a clearing in the woods that they thought might be a fire. CSC cleared them to go investigate. Battrum had been at Bentwaters for about two months, yet, in spite of Col. Halt’s insistence that new arrivals at the base were never allowed weapons without training, Battram claims they were armed. They left the base through the back gate and parked the jeep on the side of the road. They felt electricity in the air as they approached a glowing, shapeless fog. They saw strobing colored lights and heard a thrumming noise. The radios wouldn’t work. It was so unnerving that they left without verifying what it was. On the way out, they saw the light-alls and twenty or thirty people coming into the forest. At that point, no solid craft could be seen, but the fog was strobing yellow, blue, white, and orange lights.

On the 27th, UFOs were seen over London (as reported by the London Times). That evening, the base officers and their families were enjoying themselves at a party. A soldier came running up to Deputy Base Commander Charles Halt and said, “It’s back!” He was out of breath and white as a sheet. “What’s back?” “The UFO!” Halt’s response was immediate. He left the gathering, grabbed a tape recorder, a Geiger counter, and a night scope, and headed for Rendlesham Forest. According to East Gate, so did Base Commander Gordon Williams, although Halt denied that later. Williams has also denied being there, but Larry Warren swears he was, and if an unidentified threat was hovering over a major nuclear arsenal, why would the Base Commander just send his deputy to investigate the intrusion? Halt’s group also included Monroe Nevel, who worked the Geiger counter, Master Sgt Ray Gulyas, who took pictures, and a few others. Nevel, Halt, and Gulyas would all share their version of events on the SciFi special decades later.

Larry Warren was assigned to night duty at Bentwaters Perimeter Post 18 the night of 27th to the 28th. He was there by 11:30 p.m. He had an M16 rifle and a Motorola radio at his side. He was far from other posts, at the end of the runway. He was unnerved by strange conversations between the Bentwaters 80-foot high observation tower and the Woodbridge flight tower. There were reports of lights bobbing in the woods. Suddenly he heard the pounding of hooves. Five panicked deer ran out of the woods, three of them racing across the runway.

A security police truck pulled up with Sgt Adrian Bustinza at the wheel and Second Lieutenant Englund in the passenger side. Lt. Englund got Warren relieved of duty so he could join two other SPs in the back. Their task was to pick up some light-alls, bright spotlights powered by gas-driven generators on trailers. Two trucks, each with one light-all and generator in tow, headed for Rendlesham Forest. The men had all been issued M-16s with real bullets. At the Bentwaters main gate, they all had to remove their ammunition clips. There were several other cars there outside the gate. The convoy headed down the road to Woodbridge.

After turning left at East Gate, They joined other cars and trucks parked in a clearing. By then it was the 28th. Deer and rabbits were running out of the forest, helicopters were flying overhead, weapons were confiscated. He was still mystified as to what was going on. Radios wouldn’t work, and the light-alls malfunctioned. There was an argument as to whether the generators had been properly gassed. Warren saw about 15 men heading off into the woods with flashlights. As his group headed out, they saw taped off “hot spots” that had to be avoided. At the farmer’s field, they met up with around 30 or 40 soldiers, including Bustinza, Burroughs, Halt, and Base Commander Gordon Williams. A farm house stood in the distance, and beyond that, low on the trees, the strobing beacon of a light house. In Larry Fawcett’s interview with Bustinza, several names were confirmed as to who was present: Medina, Verrano, Ball, Thompson, Combs, Palmer, Warren, Zickler. Notice that Penniston was not mentioned (p. 141).

Halt’s group found a landing site, but it must have been from an earlier hour. His tape recorder registered their voices as they checked broken branches and pod marks in a perfect triangle. Nevel was getting clicks on the Geiger counter on the crash side of several damaged trees and no clicks on the far side of the tree. They made plaster casts of the pod marks. Then one of them spotted a red light moving through the forest. It had a dark center, looking like and eye. They took off after it, and followed it to the farmer’s field.

Former Deputy Base Commander Charles Halt

Warren and Bustinza described seeing a fog with a light within it. Someone on the radio exclaimed, “Here it comes!” A red basketball-sized orb came from over the North Sea, hovered close to the fog, then exploded in multi-colored lights. What looked like molten metal dripped to the ground. Warren and Bustinza felt a burning sensation in their eyes. Suddenly in place of fog, there was now a craft. It had strobing orange, blue, and white lights around its perimeter. Bustinza whispered to Warren, “Oh, no, not again.” He had had a similar experience in [Mather AFB, Davis, California.]

This time, aliens and probable abductions

While they all watched in amazement three entities floated out of the side of the craft. They had a bluish light around them. They wore silver suits. Warren, who described being an abductee as a child, immediately thought, “What are the kids doing here?” He was referring to the small gray entities that used to play with him when he was a child. They told him then to keep their presence secret because if people found out, they would have to be sent away down a drain hole in the front yard. At that point, Warren blacked out. The rest of his testimony about the events in the field were gained from hypnotic regression years later. It’s not clear whether Halt or Williams approached the entities.

Although Gordon Williams denies being there, and although Halt supports that story, Larry Warren asserts (under hypnosis) that the officer closest to the entities was Williams. And what kind of coward would Williams be if he were present and didn’t step up as senior officer in such an event? Bustinza, however, was quite adamant that it was Halt who communicated something to the aliens. The odd thing is that Bustinza claimed [p. 146] that he could not see the entities. He heard Halt say something about “We’ll get you the parts from our electronic division.” Warren saw the entities but heard no words. Many years later Bustinza would tell Linda Moulton Howe that as he and Burroughs ran up to the field, he felt pushed to the ground by some force, but he turned his head to see John Burroughs be engulfed in a blue light, then disappear.

Adrian Bustinza 

And where was Penniston in all of this? To everyone’s surprise, during the filming of the SciFi special in 2003, Halt and Penniston pointed to different sites for the landing. Penniston’s site had no possibility of seeing the light house. The key to that may lie on pg. 55 of East Gate, in which Warren is told that day by Steve Longario (sp?) that Penniston and others are out “creating a false landing site.” The base gossip may have misunderstood what was happening. Perhaps Penniston and the others did actually see a second UFO, and they were out examining the trace evidence. The SciFi special seemed to be the first indication for Penniston that he didn’t actually make it to the historic site where the aliens appeared.

There was also gossip about Burroughs jumping onto a UFO. He couldn’t recall any such thing, but in one video Warren states that a smallish orb was seen whizzing down the footpath toward a parked truck in which someone was sitting. It went through the windows of the truck and came around the other side. By that time, Burroughs, who is a tall, burly man, was in the parking lot. The orb approached him and morphed into a small version of a craft. Burroughs put his arms around it and was dragged several feet across the parking area.

Pictures of the landing site that night and the next day by Master Sgt. Ray Gulyas (flight commander), Jim Penniston, and others all came out fogged. Penniston’s landing pod casts matched those made by Halt. It was claimed that no pictures of the landing site or event survived, but in the ‘90’s, an airman who wanted to remain anonymous gave a strip of film to Gulyas showing pictures of Halt’s investigation of the landing site. Halt surmises that films were switched, but one person who did his own developing also came out with whited photos.

When Gordon Williams was confronted with the tape made by Halt, he said that it was an “abomination,” and he couldn’t make out what it meant. He said he played it for his bosses, including Charles Gabriel, Commander-in-Chief of all US AF bases in Europe. They decided that it indicated no threat, so they let it kind of fade away. Halt was then told to turn over a copy of the tape to the MOD. He wrote his famous sanitized memo for them and got no response, which surprised him. According to several witnesses, Gabriel made an unscheduled visit to Bentwaters-Woodbridge to collect evidence. The plane came from Wiesbaden, which at the time was the HQ of the US AF in Europe. Photographs, documents, logs were all seized. According to Linda Moulton Howe, this secrecy would enrage Col. Halt and annoy the MOD.

If the UFO returned after the night of the 28th, the vocal witnesses in our books and videos had no part in it. Nevertheless, their ordeal wasn’t over. There would be ongoing health issues, PTSD, continued haunting by aliens in their bedrooms, and persecution by the military and the government. That will be the topic of Part 3. The implications of the UFO being seen by so many US soldiers are astonishing enough, but that pales in comparison to Larry Warren’s description of the underground base. That base and the ongoing cover-up will be the topic of Part 3.