RAF Woodbridge, in Suffolk, was a United States Air Force base beside Rendlesham Forest. The deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles I. Halt, wrote a one-page memorandum on 13 January 1981, subject line “Unexplained Lights,” on Air Force paper, and sent it to the British liaison. It was not classified. The Air Force later threw out its own copy. In June 1983, under the Freedom of Information Act, it had to get another from the Ministry of Defence to answer Robert Todd. The original is at the National Archives in Kew. The News of the World put it on the front page on 2 October 1983.

Halt dated the first report to about 3 a.m. on 27 December 1980. He was writing from memory, two weeks on, and the shift pattern and his own tape put that night a day earlier, in the early hours of 26 December, and his own night in the forest on the 28th rather than the 29th. The memorandum itself says this. Two security policemen at the back gate saw unusual lights outside the base. They thought an aircraft might have crashed or been forced down. The flight chief on duty let three patrolmen go out on foot. They reported a glowing object in the trees, metallic in look and triangular, about two to three meters across the base and about two meters high, lighting the forest white, with a pulsing red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath, hovering or on legs. As they approached, it moved through the trees and disappeared. The animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy. About an hour later the object was seen briefly again near the gate. The memorandum does not name the men. They have since been identified as Airman John Burroughs, Airman Edward Cabansag, and Staff Sergeant Jim Penniston, the flight chief who went with them.

The next day, three depressions were found where the object had been reported on the ground: an inch and a half deep and seven inches across, set in a triangle. Halt’s night in the woods, which his memorandum dates 29 December and the tape places on the 28th, was a check of that spot with a radiation meter, and a micro-cassette he switched on and off. The memorandum says beta and gamma readings of 0.1 milliroentgens, the peaks in the three depressions and near the center of the triangle, and moderate readings, 0.05 to 0.07, on the side of a nearby tree that faced the marks. The tape does not match those figures. On it the peaks are talked through as a few hundredths above what the meter was reading nearby. Later in the night, Halt writes, a red sun-like light was seen through the trees. It moved and pulsed. At one point it seemed to throw off glowing particles, then broke into five separate white objects and disappeared. Right after that, three star-like objects were noticed, two to the north and one to the south, about ten degrees off the horizon. They moved in sharp angular jumps and showed red, green, and blue lights. Through an eight-to-twelve-power lens the northern ones looked elliptical, then round. They stayed up an hour or more. The southern one was visible for two or three hours and from time to time beamed down a stream of light. Halt writes that he and numerous others saw what is in those two paragraphs.

Years later Penniston said he had walked up to a craft, found the surface warm and smooth, and seen symbols on the side, and that it then rose over the trees and left at speed. That is not in the 1981 memorandum, and the other men on the first patrol did not describe it. In a statement taken afterward, Cabansag wrote that from a vantage point what they had been following looked like a beacon light off in the distance.

The light Halt’s tape picks up, flashing through the trees in line with a farmhouse, flashes at about five seconds. That was the rate of the Orford Ness lighthouse, about five miles east, one of the brightest on the coast, and it sits on that line of sight. The local forester, Vince Thurkettle, pointed astronomer Ian Ridpath at it within days of the story breaking in 1983. The three small depressions are the sort of mark animals leave. The Ministry of Defence did not interview the airmen. David Clarke’s later interviews with Halt’s commander, Colonel Ted Conrad, the British base commander Donald Moreland, and Simon Weeden, who had the memorandum on the Ministry’s desk, agree that London treated it as a minor lights report and stopped. No second official report was written.