What Witnesses Actually Reported at Rendlesham (Part 1)

I can see a strange glowing yellowy green fog on the ground and you see it's about 50 feet in diameter and it's hugging the ground in a set shape. Sounds bizarre. What's even weird is that there's US Air Force Security Police in a cordon around it like the guard in it. Some say it's coming. He's thinking what's coming and then the next thing that he sees is a small red light that's like the size of a basketball and it arcs towards over the trees and then over the field and it stops and then there's an explosion of light and then when his eyes focus where the mist had been there is a translucent shimmering wedge-shaped crackler. Hi everyone and welcome back to that UFO podcast and joining me today is a first-time guest, very honoured to have him on. He is a former British police detective, founder and editor of UFO Truth magazine and author of Non-Human, the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incidents, 42 Years of Denial. Welcome to the podcast Gary Heseltine. Welcome. Thanks Andy, always a pleasure. Good to have you on. Really good first time almost six years doing the podcast and finally get you on to have a conversation and Rendlesham is going to form a big part of that. It's something you've worked on for many years now and done a lot of really interesting work Gary. Rendlesham is a topic and an event that is so well known but still seems to be bringing up new information, new witnesses, new evidence and new narratives which I'm really looking forward to getting into. But since it's the first time you've been on the podcast, for anyone who's watching or listening unfamiliar with you and your work, do you want to give us a little bit of your background? Yeah, no problem. I served in the Royal Air Force Police between 1983 and 1989. I was a corporal and then in 1989 I joined the British Transport Police and went on to have an almost 24-year career, the last 19 years of which was as a detective constable. Not a high rank, I didn't want to go high because I liked interviewing and my specialism, for want of a better word, was I became an advanced interviewer of suspects and witnesses and I liked the one-to-one and I wanted to be at the sharp end. And if you speak to any police officer in terms of serious investigations, the main people that do the arresting and the interviews are detective constables. And so that's what I like to do, so I wanted to stay at the sharp end. My interest began in UFOs from nowhere, when as a 16-year-old in 1976 I had a sighting with my then-girlfriend in Ashby, a suburb of Scunthorpe, in Lincolnshire, where I was born. We can maybe talk about that coming back to it, but that created an interest. That kind of led me to, on a strange kind of route, we'll talk about maybe synchronicities and coincidences, but eventually in 2002, when I was almost 42 years of age, I then became a public researcher when I created an unofficial national police database for recording and collating British police officers sightings. So that's how I became, first became known within the UFO community. And over time, that has expanded into becoming one of the leading Rendlesham Forest researchers. And I've done lots of other things. And, you know, like in your introduction, I was fortunate enough to be one of the witnesses at the citizens' hearings in 2013, a mock congressional hearing in Washington, DC, at the National Press Club, which is two blocks from the White House. And then I was fortunate enough in, I think, 2022 to speak to the Brazilian Parliament, the Senate, rather, Brazilian Senate, along with eight other UFO researchers. Robert Salas and I were the only non-Brazilian speakers. So that was a real honour. And I continue to do lots of work behind the scenes. And as again, you said in your introduction, I'm the vice president of what is a non-profit, non-government organisation, NGO, the International Coalition of Extraterrestrial Researchers, which comprises of scientists, academics and leading UFO researchers from around the world. And we've got members and representatives in over 25 countries. So that keeps me busy. It does. It's quite the CV to go through. And I think a good place to start then is back as a 16-year-old, you mentioned you and your girlfriend. I imagine, is that girlfriend at the time, did she go on to become a wife? No, no, no, no, no. I went out with her for just about a year. And her name was Dawn. I won't reveal her maiden name. I don't know what her later, if she got married or whatever. I'm not in contact with her now. But we were walking along a long, narrow footpath. And I've told this story many, many times. It was a long, narrow footpath that was not lit by any streetlights or anything. And it dissected my comprehensive school on my left, as we were walking back to her home from my home, which was about three quarters of a mile to a mile away from one to the other. And my comprehensive school was on the left, Frederick Goff Comprehensive School. And then on the right side was a large, a very large allotment where people grew their own vegetables, etc. Now, it was a, it was an August, a balmy August night, one of those rare nights where you can go out in a t-shirt and it's not cold at eight, nine o'clock at night, which for the UK is pretty rare. And there was not a cloud in the sky. All the stars were out. And just as we were walking, essentially past the start of the school fields and the allotment on the other side, there were no streetlights. So it's at its darkest point. Now, this footpath, I would say we were halfway along it, maybe towards two thirds, but there maybe was only under 150 metres or 200 metres left to go before we then entered a housing estate. And you could see all the housing estate right in front of us. So that was the scenario. So a long footpath. And then to our right, maybe a 60 degree angle, we both see, I'm not sure who noticed it first, but we both see a bright white light, indistinct shape, but much bigger than the background stars, moving really slowly and appeared to be silent. You know, it might have had noise, but we didn't hear anything. And it was moving very, very slowly, right to left. And essentially, what really, I guess, piqued our curiosity is, if you're there, and the object is there, as soon as it went past us, and therefore we were behind its flight path, all the housing behind the flight path of the object was plunged into a power cut. So it was really weird. And if you've ever seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is after my encounter, there's a scene where Rich Dreyfus is looking down on the city, and like there were grid failures going off in sections. So that happened, the first power cut was there, behind it, and like, whoa, what is that? Now, I had no interest in the subject prior to this, and she certainly didn't, but she was a little bit alarmed, a bit anxious, shall we say. We watched it, and it went further and further away to our left, and then there was a second grid failure, behind its flight path. And it's at that point, then, that I'm really thinking, that's going in the general direction of where I lived, which was, like I say, maybe three quarters of a mile to a mile away. Now, at the time, I had my bicycle pushing it beside her. So, me, the bicycle, Dawn, walking forward. And then, at that point, it said, get on the crossbar, I'm going to see if I can catch this thing up. So, two on the bike, a Lincolnshire expression, Kroggering, for those out there in Lincolnshire, two on a bike, on the bike. So, I raced to the end of the alleyway, and her house was basically a 90 degree right turn at the end of that footpath, along a little street, maybe three, four hundred meters long, onto a main road, and hers was opposite that junction. So, literally, raced like mad, got to her house, literally just threw her off the bike, not really throwing her off the bike, but literally just dropped her off. I could see her parents rooting around, trying to get candles. The whole area is total darkness, pitch black. I then literally said bye, and then, boom, back on my bike, pedalling like mad, back down the same street, back down onto the same alleyway, which is like four hundred meters long, raced like mad, get to the end, and it turns out onto a main road called Grange Lane South, which took you towards my home, turned right, raced like mad, up and down a bit of a hill. And the interesting thing was, the whole area is in darkness, it is absolutely pitch black, and it's not very often you have end up in a pitch black situation, because there's always electricity around, but it was very, very dark. But I remember, close to my home, there is a left-hand bend, still part of Grange Lane South, and it's a left-hand bend, gentle kind of like curve to the left, but I noticed that on the bend, all the electricity was on beyond the bend. So I instinctively thought, wow, I might be able to get ahead of this light, so raced like mad, and literally at the point I go, just before the bend, that's going to the left, I look over my right shoulder, I have this big memory of looking over my right shoulder, and I've managed to get ahead of the light that's moving very, very slowly in the direction of where I lived. The general area, not my particular house, but the general area. And so I go from total darkness into the light, I go around the corner, maybe go 50 to 75 meters, then take a right on what's called Westerdale Road, then maybe do another 75 meters, take a right onto what was my street, Baysdale Road, I lived at number three, so it's at the top of the road. I literally throw my bike to the ground, rush inside, I guess it's about half past eight, nine o'clock, because my mum and dad were in the habit of having supper, as Brits do, a cup of tea and a sandwich at sort of half eight, nine o'clock, so they were doing that. I literally rushed inside and said, come outside, I think there's going to be a power cut caused by this strange light. And they just sat there bemused, they didn't get up, they just like looked to be gone out. So I literally just left them, ran through the hall, into the kitchen, out the back door, down to the bottom of my 25 meter semi-detached garden, turned around to look back at the house, just in time to see the objects literally coming over my rooftop at a higher elevation now, because I'm now directly underneath it. And I'm at the bottom of the garden, and to this day, I don't know why I do it, but I put my hand up like I'm answering a question in class at, I guess, to make the 90 degrees. And as soon as the object went past my fingertips, the whole area is plunged into a power cup, a third power cup. Now, at that time, I realized that whatever that light was, it must have interacted with a power grid because I'd moved from a second geographical, this was a second geographical position from where I'd originally seen it. And that light must have had an interaction because it's crazy for me to predict power cuts. So that's where what happened to me, I'm not saying it was a spaceship, I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was some strange anomaly that seemed to interact in some way with the power grid. And that's what created my fascination initially. I appreciate you sharing that. And you've told it incredibly well, because in my head the whole time, I've got all these pictures on the streets. And being from the UK, I can see that in my head as well. You say you don't think, or you don't know if it was non-human or whatever it may be. Did you get any feelings at the time that were strange or what it was? Or at any point, could you discern a shape from the light? No, if you if you look back in the history of the subject, which obviously I did after that, and, you know, 40 years later, it's a long time. You realize that many, many sightings are just indistinct bright white lights. I guess the best way for me to describe it is if you look at the old kind of biblical movies, and you see the star of Davy, you know, moving to Bethlehem kind of thing. It's like that much brighter, indistinct shape, but kind of like, I guess, star-like, I guess, bright white light. You couldn't really tell a shape. But in terms of did they have any feelings of interaction or whatever? No, not that I'm aware of to this day. People have said, well, you know, did you have any nightmares or anything? No, nothing that I can discern. But I mean, the first thing I did was rush inside to my house. My mum's trying to get candles, say, see, I told you. And she says, oh, don't be stupid. Totally dismissed it. Now, in 1976, you know, we were, I weren't even on the phone. My parents weren't even on the phone. So the nearest shop that had a phone was about a five-minute walk away. And who am I going to ring? And I often say this, go supposed to do a deer ring when you've had something like that. So I didn't do anything like that. It was just totally dismissed out of hand. But, you know, I only ever did get one kind of possible correlation to my story or corroboration of sorts. And that happened many, many years later. Do you want me to tell that story, Bree? Yeah, please do. Yeah. I announced myself, well, just before I created the database, I met with Graham Birdsell. It's a long, circuitous route. But suffice to say, he was a former editor, founder and editor of UFO Printed magazine, which is a brilliant publication. Sadly, he passed away in 2003. But in the last couple of years of his life, so about 2001, I met him and told him that I was interested. I wanted to be an active researcher. And I had an idea for the police database, which he supported. But what he'd done in that interim period of meeting him was he'd said, I do a three-day international conference every year in September in Leeds. Now, I worked in Leeds. What a coincidence. It could have been anywhere, right? It's like you were meant to do things. Like I say, there's lots of synchronicities in my story. But suffice to say, he invited me to go to that conference. And he said, I want to have you as an armchair guest to introduce you because nobody had ever seen me and I'd never spoken publicly at that point. And so on a Friday night, I was an armchair guest. And he used to do like from six o'clock till 10 o'clock on a Friday. And the main conference would be Saturday, Sunday. It was often initially at the Leeds University. So we do that. And there's maybe five or 600 people in the audience. It's huge on the Friday night. And it was like a 30 minute fireside chair, armchair to armchair kind of thing, like a Parkinson interview. And he just gently got me to basically do what we're just doing now. And at the end of it, a number of people queued up to speak to me and tell me about their thoughts or whatever I'd done or whatever they wanted to ask me. Well, in that series of maybe 10 or 15 people, eventually, this guy comes along who I initially didn't recognize. I didn't recognize him because he was completely bald. And he had glasses on. And it turns out it's somebody I knew from school. And he lived in the Ashby area. And he said, I saw that too. And I said, well, the airs on back of my neck went up. And he said, I think I saw what you saw. I said, well, tell me what you saw. He says, well, we were playing football in the street. And he mentioned the street. I can't remember what it was now. But it was, I knew the area then very well. And it was within a quarter of a mile of where I was. And he said, we were playing football in the street. And then suddenly we see this bright white light. And then suddenly there's a power cut. And everything plunged into darkness. And he said, it was Gunthorpe summer of 1976. And I went, wow, that's the closest kind of corroboration to my event that I've ever had. Now, does it mean that it is? And the answer is no, because we can't prove the dates. But it's anecdotal. And it could be because he said, it's the summer of 76. And how often would it be power cuts in the same locale, very close to where I was. So there's maybe a strong chance that it was, but you can't say definitively that it is linked. But that's the only kind of corroboration I add to the incident. I can appreciate that not being able to discern a shape from the object, because my own sighting I've talked about many times on here was like yourself, a very busy area, Knightswood in Glasgow in the mid 90s. And quite often, I still to this day, people send me videos or pictures of objects and say, is this like what you've seen in your sighting? And they're always quite disc shaped. And I'm like, I only say mine was disc shaped because it looked like lots of lights spinning like a carnival ferris wheel. But I couldn't see a shape. So all I'm saying is it probably must have been something like a disc shape. It could also have been lots of lights just going round because it was that, you know. So people send me stuff and I'm always like, nah, you know, I see why you've sent me it. But it was just lights going round. I couldn't make out a shape. Again, like yourself, really busy built up area in Glasgow. And there's no point in saying, yeah, oh yeah, it was disc. If you don't think it was a disc. In the end, all it is, is your perception. And your perception is that there's something that appears to be revolving many lights, but you don't want to say it's a disc. So no, you do right. Absolutely. And that's just testimony from myself, yourself. There are so many people who have stories like that, where they've had a sighting, a light in the sky. It's been far away, up close, all different things. But let's get on to Rendlesham because this is a case that has so much information, so many witnesses, so much discussion has happened over the decades about this incident. What I want to do first off, Gary, before we get to what's happening now and over the years, the work you've done, let's recap the Rendlesham story as people tend to know it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I liken the Rendlesham forest to being the most complicated UFO story in history. And I, I say that, I think with good reason, because it's so multi-layered, uh, so many emerging different narratives that have been over the years. Uh, so it's not easy to do what you just asked me to do, but I will attempt to do what you've done quickly. Um, for many, many years, uh, the only things that you would see in a TV documentary about Rendlesham were two events. Uh, the first event would be involving, uh, Sergeant Jim Pennison and Airman John Burroughs. And allegedly they see some lights, uh, in the forest. Uh, they get permission to go off base with one other person. Uh, they go in the other person, uh, Edgar Banzak is left as a radio relay according to Jim Penniston because the radios are breaking up in the forest and the two Pennison and Burroughs go forward. And then it gets a little bit different because Penniston will say that he comes across in a small clearing in the forest, a three meter by three meter by two meter height, uh, triangular object at or near the ground in this small clearing. It's black. It's like glass. It's got raised etchings. There are some markings on it and it, from within its, um, seamless body, there's no rivets, there's no kind of engine, no signs of, uh, openings or anything. Uh, he says that there were internal lights that seemed to drift around within, move freely within. So it was casting some different colored lights, yellow, white, et cetera, from within. Um, he said he walked around it for 45 minutes. Uh, he took photographs because he originally thought it was going to be a, uh, uh, a downed aircraft. So he'd take a camera just in case he'd take photographs of the scene. Uh, he said that he took the photographs later to the base photo lab at Bentwaters and they said, oh, they came out fogged. True or not? We don't know. But that's what he was told. Uh, he said he wrote it down in his pocket book, drew pictures of it. And he says it's a, it's a, it's a, a, a structured craft, uh, of unknown origin basically. And, uh, of those dimensions that I gave you. And that's what he saw. Something you could physically touch, tap on, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. It's physical. Now, John Burroughs was a bit further back and his description is not that. So you get a kind of a different perception, which is again, from a former police detective point of view is perfectly normal. He may be 20, 30 meters back. He sees what, uh, and described as a bank of lights, different colored, multicolored lights. He said that suggested a structure behind it. Well, in the same way that we've seen in our past bright, brilliant white lights, uh, of unknown description, that was our perspective. His perspective is a bank of lights that suggest structure, but he couldn't say for definite what shape it was or whether it was a structure it's suggested. Okay. So that's essentially the first thing that people always associate with Rendlesham Forest and has been recounted in over 50 documentaries in English since 1983, when really the case hit the international news media, the case happened in late December, 1980, but essentially it was kept under wraps and known to all, but a few people until there was a huge, uh, double page spread in, uh, tabloid newspaper, the news of the world. And the headline was this incredible headline. Uh, it's official, uh, uh, it's a UFO landed. It's official. And in the Senate, it's, it's official because it produced part of a, the U S air force headed document, a single page memorandum that's become very famous and one of the top 10, uh, arguably the top 10 UFO documents ever to go into the public domain. And, and basically that document was written by the former Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt, who at the time was a Lieutenant Colonel. He was the deputy base commander of what was unequivocally a nuclear weapons storage area base. It housed tactical nuclear weapons. How do I know that? Uh, one, I've interviewed, uh, six military witnesses for my book, which we'll come on to, uh, who all said it was new tactical nuclear weapons, but also either a kind of a, uh, kind of an insight because when I was in the Royal Air Force police for six years, for three of my six years, I guarded nuclear weapons at two nuclear weapons storage areas, uh, one at RAF Honington in Suffolk. Um, and then RAF Larbrook in what was then, um, Germany. It was very close to the Dutch border. Uh, now the life in Larbrook is now closed. I'm not sure about Honington, but suffice to say, three of my six years, I guided nuclear weapons and it basically was the same. Right. So the two incidents that you need to remember that are in all the narratives is the landed craft, the triangular, uh, reference to this memorandum written by Colonel Holt. Now the memorandum is really interesting because what it says, there's only three paragraphs, but it's, it's explosive because it, it basically says, and it emerged in early 1983, just before the news of the world headline. Um, and basically what that three paragraph says, the first paragraph says, goes on about Jim and John's encounter with the triangular craft. The second paragraph goes on to give the measurements and, uh, basically the physical description of the craft. And then the third paragraph is extraordinary. And this is the other part of what's in every narrative. Holt will say that two nights after John and Jim were out in the forest, he gets told at a Christmas party, uh, that a UFO has been seen again in the forest. Uh, what we're going to do about it. And basically says he was told to form a small team, go out and investigate. A long story short, he goes out with the team, uh, into the forest. Now, when he arrives, there are already maybe 25, 30 other airmen in what's an area that we now call the staging area. It's basically the vehicles could only go into the forest down a number of tracks. And the track where all the vehicles went came to a dead end about 400 meters away from what would turn out to be an important location called the farmer's field, right? They couldn't go any further because there was no road. It was just dirt track so that all the vehicles ended up parking there. And it's now being identified as what's called the staging area where all the vehicles, all the light holes, light holes were portable generators to light up the forest, which is another story in itself, but they all ended up there. And lots of people milling about when Holt got there with his team, he said, I won't keep everybody back. Um, I'm going to lead my small team out into the forest and go to the original landing site of John and Jim's or Jim's Penison, Sergeant Penison's. So they do that. Everybody else is kept back at the, uh, at the staging area. They go out, they go to the landing site. They do measurements, the craft or whatever was described earlier. The UFO is gone by this point because there's been a time lapse because he's had to get changed out of his Christmas best do into his combats as it were, et cetera, et cetera, and get to the locations, pick up people, blah, blah, blah. So time has elapsed. Um, and basically he leads a team of five people, five, including himself out into the forest. They go to the original landing site, checking depressions, and he is taken with him a little portable dictaphone. And every now and again, he's making sporadic, uh, updates. Uh, yeah, we're at the original landing site and, uh, yeah, we'd take, taking measurements, that kind of thing. And then whilst they're there, one of the people in his team says, what's that over there? There's a, there's a light over there. Can you see it? And basically they all start looking and they confirm that they're looking at something that they say is between the trees. Uh, and so cutting long story short, they end up following this object, which they describe as like, uh, a red, the size of a car, uh, dripping, what appears to be molten metal. It's got a dark center that appears to be winking at you and it maneuvers between the trees. Now I'm best put this, uh, simply now the trees in 1980 are not the trees that are there now. Yep. Uh, 90% of the trees, uh, were destroyed in a freak storm in 1987. So then they were replanted with a different variation of tree, a different type of pine. It's significant. This, and it's largely forgotten is that originally it was Corsican pines. Now Corsican pines are a bit like matchsticks. They're like that. And they don't have any roots until about 15 to 20 feet off the ground. So if you can imagine when they're, you've often seen in forest that they're, uh, put in rows. So they're like pencils, you know, they're, they're, they're like, uh, military soldiers stood up. So anything that was seen underneath that canopy of 15 to 20 foot could easily maneuver under the canopy. Yeah. And there's quite a big gap between the trees. So it is comfy come, uh, conceivable that this is all totally as, uh, Holt described. So basically they follow it. Eventually they follow it through the forest until they see it in the open ground for the first time, open air, as it were, away from the forest. And that's across the other side of what's called a farmer's field. So you have a scenario where Colonel Holt and his small team and these other four people with him, uh, looking across a, what was then a grass field, uh, across to, uh, maybe 300 meters to the other side of the field where there was a farmhouse as a reference point with lights on and they, uh, and the best way to describe it is how Holt described it to me personally, when I took him around the forest in 2010, uh, and, and asked him to retrace his steps, basically, which had never been done. Uh, and he said, I'm stood by this marker tree and there's a tree, a big old tree that's virtually opposite the farmhouse building. And he says, this is where we were when we first saw the object in the clear, as it were. And it was over the other side, very close to the farmhouse. But he said, this is important. He said it was to the left of the farmhouse, low to the ground. And they even had an early, uh, night vision star scope, uh, that, uh, Monroe Neville is one of the people with him, uh, was able to see the darkness and say that, yeah, there is an object in his night vision, basically to the left of the farmhouse. And he says, this is important. He says, because I knew where the lighthouse was and that's over way to the right of the farmhouse, way up on the horizon. And then every five seconds, you'd see this blip one, two, three, four, five blip. And that was the lighthouse beacon four or five miles away. Yeah. So that's the significant that he was saying, it's not the lighthouse. I knew where it was. And it's to the left of the farmhouse, low to the ground. And he said, it was casting a, uh, so bright was the light that it was casting a red light into the windows of the farmhouse. And it kind of almost made the farmhouse look like it was on fire. And then he says, as we're watching it, suddenly the red light explodes into five different white objects that then, one by one disappear. So there's one big red object that then size of a car that then explodes into five that then go all off and disappear. So there's nothing. They then see from their position that beyond the farmhouse way in the distance, they can see lights maneuvering in the sky, two to the north, three to three to the north, two to the south. And so they cross the farmer's field on foot and literally walk down the side of the farmhouse, which is still there and there still is a pathway. And from there, people will describe it as going into the second farmer's field, going across a creek. And then eventually they're in another field. And they, at one point, Holt says, there's an object, he's coming towards, it's coming towards us. It's crazy. It's shining a beam down at our feet. And basically what Holt describes is an object that's in the sky maneuvering at speed, stopping above their heads at maybe a thousand feet, two thousand feet, and then shining akin to a laser beam down at his team of five feet for about 15, 20 seconds. And then it blinks off, goes back out into the distance. So that's the, essentially the story that's in all the documentaries. Yeah. My contention on, uh, with all of that is that I believe that's now a controlled narrative. And I'm, and those events happened. I've no doubt that those events happened, but there are a lot more things that happened that I think have been suppressed for a number of reasons. Yeah. That, that classic story is one of my earlier UFO memories. Um, I'm obviously based in the UK as well, we've got a channel here, sky one. Yeah. I don't think it's called sky one anymore. I should know that because I've worked for sky. Um, but so sky one used to have all the kind of cool American shows on it when there was a lot of limited channels. And I think it was on something like strange, but true one of those channels and it had the recreations and it would have the cool narration. And it had, you know, Sergeant Jim Penniston was walking in the forest and it shows you him. And I always remember him going up the object and the actor walking towards the object. So have they told the story that you remember then? A hundred percent. Yeah. And just when you say that, that's the one everyone, that's the classic, you know, if it's a 30 second clip or a 30 minute movie or an hour long, whatever it might be, that's some of the story you see. And what interests me is I've spoken to all types of folks on this podcast about Rendlesham who have, I've had folks on talk about the lighthouse narrative. I've never bought that. I've never been able to see. And even when there's been competing theories, most folks argue the lighthouse narrative is very lazy and very weak in terms of what was seen, what was saw. What was interesting, just before you go into some information is even that perspective idea that one person can be close and see an object and one person can be slightly further away. Because again, referring to my own sighting in the nineties, there was five of us and I'm the only one that can remember any sort of detail about the object. The rest can remember seeing lights and seeing something, but they can't remember exactly what they saw. Yeah. And we were, we were next to each other as well. So that's always a really interesting point, but let's, what about this, Gary, was it you wanted to explore before we get to the actual, you know, research and investigation you've done? Was it something that didn't sit right with you or did you just want to know more? No, I, I bet what prompted me to reinvestigate as a cold case review was that I was asked in 2017 to buy a guy called Dion Johnson, who I didn't know, never heard of him. But he'd, he'd, he'd basically admit or bumped into, uh, the original military whistleblower of the case, Larry Warren. Uh, we can talk about him separately because it, but this is how it came to me as it were, what prompted the reinvestigation. I'd been following the case for a long time, seen all the documentaries and, but, but from afar, well, I wasn't a public researcher, uh, such, uh, and then literally Dion rings me up and said, Larry Warren has recommended, uh, you, uh, because you know, all the, the Rendlesham case a lot. Uh, and I'd met Larry Warren a couple of times because he was well known within the UFO community as I was starting out. So we did come across paths. We weren't friends as such, but you know, he, so I got on with him fine and I'd met him at various conferences. Uh, and I'd always, uh, found his story very compelling. Uh, and I was a serving detective, so I'm pretty good at sussing out people. And I didn't think it was a lie or anything like that. And he taught, he was very accurate with a lot of his description, extremely accurate in certain details that he added, which suggested it was very real. So anyway, Dion rings me up and says, I met Larry Warren by chance. I want to do a documentary. Now he was a documentary filmmaker per se, but more with making promotional videos, introducing cars and you know, a new car comes on the range. It wasn't doing long documentaries anywhere above five minutes kind of thing. So it was a big ass, but he asked me and he said, I would like you to be the lead researcher for this documentary that he was going to call capable green. And initially it was going to really tell the story about this field, which were the farmer's field that I referred to that Holt talks about seeing the objects in the farmhouse. That's in, in colloquial terms referred now to as the farmer's field. And it plays in a very important part in the Larry Warren story that does not fit with the narrative that you've seen for the last 50 documentaries kind of thing. Um, but it did originally and we can come onto that. And anyway, I thought, well, okay, I've done various documentaries over the years, many documentaries. Um, but nobody's ever asked me to be the lead researcher it as it were. And I thought, well, if I'm going to do this, I have to be totally accurate. I don't want anybody to catch me out. So, so I, it prompted me to think, right, I'm going to do a really major deep dive. And I thought I knew the case pretty well at that point, 2017. Uh, and I did by anyone's normal narrative. But the reality was that when I did the deep dive, which took five years, uh, I re I found so many, what I would think, uh, uh, valuable old interviews in old obscure UFO publications online, uh, not online, but little booklets and things like that. Uh, I then ended up meeting a lot of these witnesses, new witnesses emerged. Uh, I re-interviewed people for what turned out to my book, my book, uh, I'd no intention when I did the reinvestigation to write a book, but after about, uh, three years into that, um, my then second wife said to me, you've got too much material for a documentary. And I thought, well, I have it. Uh, and I thought, well, I could maybe do a book. Uh, and then it took me three years to write the book, suffice to say, five year reinvestigation, three years to write the book, which was called non-human, the Rendlesham forest, UFO incidents deliberately with an S, uh, 42 years of denial. And the reason why I said that is because after that five year reinvestigation, three years of writing the book, I ended up with a lot of questions, but what I had established to my satisfaction as a former detective, that there were 17 different timed UFO related events over not two days, but probably about a week long period, which was a major change in the narrative. For example, a guy called um, and Steve Wagner, USA air force security police. I interviewed him and he told me, uh, that he'd had an incident on the 23rd of December. Well, nobody had ever talked about the 23rd of December. I mean, this going back to the, this, the original story that I put out, the original story is based on that one page memorandum written by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Holt. He retired as a full bird Colonel, but he was then a Lieutenant Colonel. He signed it. So that makes it amazing that somebody of his rank, especially in what turned out to be a nuclear base has said, I've seen multiple UFOs myself. Uh, and there's also a triangular landed craft of unknown origin two nights earlier, major big deal. Suffice to say that that memorandum, um, is only a hint at other things, I believe. Uh, but I think there's a narrative around that, which will maybe come on to the politics sector further down the line, but suffice to say that there's a lot more information that I gleaned that had never seen the light of day on any TV documentary, and to this day still hasn't because nobody will go near it because it threatens the existing narrative. And we'll talk about that. That's the, some of the internal politics that's going on. But suffice to say, credible military witnesses tell me lots of other accounts. I interview a guy called Sergeant Adrian Bustinza, a sergeant. And for me, he is one of the best Reynolds and witnesses, uh, ever to come forward. And yet nobody knows his name. Unless you're absolutely avid, avid Reynolds and reader fan of the case. And what was so amazing about Adrian Bustinza is Adrian Bustinza had made sporadic comments in, uh, emails, Facebook comments over the years, um, about the case and that he was involved and that he corroborated the original military whistleblower, Larry Warren's account. Now, I think at this point, it's probably a good idea to tell you what that account was that set it aside from the existing narrative. Absolutely. Am I right in saying Bustinza, you spoke to him, the interview was something like three and a half to four hours long? Four and a half hours transatlantic call cost me 120 quid. Um, but it was some of the best money I ever spent. Um, but it was extremely tiring because it was all through the night. And you will know now as a, as a podcaster doing interviews that you've got to really have your mind in focus, what you're going to ask next, or you kind of mentally working out the answer that I've just give you. And then you're thinking, I want to get that bit in. It's tiring, mentally very tiring. Well, this was done at four and a half hours. I can confirm that is correct. But suffice to say that he 90% corroborated this original military whistleblower story. Now, what you've got to understand is, and this is part of the politics, uh, that they, that I believe that the TV narrative is totally controlled. The book narrative is totally controlled. The media narrative in the UK and the US is controlled by probably just four people. We can come on to that. Suffice to say that, um, before Colonel Holt retired, before Jim Penniston retired, before John Burroughs retired from the US Air Force, the only person that was really mentioned with the story as a first-hand witness who went on camera was Larry Warren. For about eight years on his own, he was the only person who would go on camera when the story broke in 1983 and it kind of went viral as things did in newspaper terms in 1983. He was the only one that said, I am Larry Warren. I was involved in this incident. This is what happened to me. Nobody else would. Holt was known because his name was at the bottom of the memorandum of signing it. But Holt did not give any TV interviews until 1991 when he'd retired. So from 1983 to 1991, there was only one person whose story was being told and was regularly being told in the very earliest documentaries and that was Larry Warren. Now, Larry Warren's story turns out to be nothing like Colonel Holt's, Jim Pennison and John Burroughs. But remember the context. Larry Warren was there for eight years first and then it gets a bit murky when these people retire. So what is Larry Warren's account? Well, Larry Warren's account was he was a young 19-year-old, green as grass, first tour overseas tour, only just joined the US Air Force. His first tour is shipped across to Bentmore. He says that he is on a perimeter post guarding this little shack, for want of a better word, we would call in the in the military a sanger and you've got sandbags there and whatever. It's a little concrete structure. And he was then told to to close his little post down, wait for a truck to come and pick him up. And that was it. So he closes his post down on the radio. I'm closing it down, blah, blah, blah. I'm waiting to pick up. Truck comes along. He's picked up. He doesn't know what he's going to do next. He's only been on shift a few days. Doesn't have a clue what's going on. Thinks there's probably some kind of exercise going on. Hasn't really heard any chatter or anything about what may or may not be going on in the forest or on the bases. And then he ends up going into Rendlesham Forest and eventually he's turned left into the forest down this dirt track, which was then a very dirt track. Now it's almost a road because it's now a very well-worn stone path, as it were, that's become a walking trail for a Rendlesham tour. But then it was just a dirt track. Can't go any further. He's at the staging area. He will say that he sees Holt arrive. Now bear in mind he'd met him because he'd just got there and it was part of his introductions. This is the deputy base commander, blah, blah, blah. And he said he was tasked to go with a number of other airmen and walk into the forest as a small group. There were different groups being sent in different directions. But he isn't told to that and he's 19. He's just a young airman and he just does as he's told. And he's told to go in the forest with us. Now what Larry Warren will say is he went through the forest and eventually they come to the edge of the forest and then there's a farmer's field in front of them. And he said, as I was approaching the edge of the forest, I could see that the field was illuminated in some way. He didn't know how, but it was illuminated. He could see that there was light as he was going towards the edge of the forest. And he said that the tree where he came out and he's got a market tree different to Holt's market tree. It's about 50 meters. As you look at the field from his perspective to the right from what turned out to be Holt's market tree. And it's like a double oak. It's got a different set of branches. And he says, part of the tree was illuminated. And he says, so as I get to the edge of the field, the tree is partly illuminated. The field is partly illuminated. And he says, as I see the fields for the first time, I can see a strange, glowing, yellowy, green fog on the ground. And he says, it's about 50 feet in diameter and it's hugging the ground in a set shape, which sounds bizarre, that's maybe one to two feet off the ground. So it's a very weird. And he said, what's even weirder is that there's USA for security police in a cordon around it, like the guard in it. He's then told to go out into the field and join this cordon, which he does. And he can, and he's very precise as to where that location is. He's the only person ever to be really that precise about a location where a craft was, other than when Holt says it was low to the farmhouse, near the farmhouse, to the left of the farmhouse. So right, this is a very specific about where this event had occurred. So he goes out, joins this cordon, there's the fog there. And literally, as soon as he gets part of the cordon, he said he hears over the radio some saying, it's coming. And he's thinking, what's coming? And then the next thing that he sees that's coming from what he now realizes from the direction of the sea, from the North Sea, is a small red light that's like the size of a basketball. And it arcs towards over the trees and then over the field. And it stops directly above where this yellow glowing mist is, ground hugging mist, for a few seconds. And then there's an explosion of light. And everybody's just doing that because it's incredible bright light, like an explosion of light. And then when his eyes focus, where the mist had been, there is a translucent, shimmering, wedge-shaped craft there. That is all for part one. Part two will be out in the next couple of days. You can listen to this episode already in full, ad-free, and with no sponsors, for less than the price of a coffee. If you head on over to Patreon or Apple, you can subscribe to the podcast for less than the price of a coffee or take up the two weeks free trial that are available on those platforms. You can head on over to Spotify and search That UFO Podcast Premium and get access to this episode in full. No adverts, no sponsorships, and also with some extra bonus content as well. Thanks for listening, folks.