UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

“In the final days of December 1980, strange encounters and bizarre incidents occurred in the heart of Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England. Based upon their personal encounters, many of the military personnel who were present at the time believed that something extraterrestrial came down in those dark woods. What if, however, there was another explanation for what happened four decades ago? What if that explanation, if revealed, proved to be even more controversial than the theory that aliens arrived from a faraway world? The ramifications for the field of Ufology would be immense. In my new book – The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy – I reveal that one of the most famous UFO cases of all time was really a series of top secret experiments using holograms, mind-control programs, deception, disinformation, conspiracies and cover-ups. The shocking truth of a forty-year-old mystery is now revealed.” Those are my words. They also happen to be words I absolutely stand by.

That’s right: after having spent a long time digging into certain aspects of the Rendlesham affair, I’m sure that aliens never, ever landed in the forest. In many ways, it was something much stranger. As to why I come to such a controversial conclusion, read on. In the final days of December 1980 multiple, strange encounters and wild incidents occurred in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England. And across a period of three nights, no less. Based upon their personal encounters, many of those who were present believed that something almost unbelievable came down in the near-pitch-black woods on the night of December 26. Lives were altered forever. That said, let’s now get to the heart of the controversy.

One of the most important revelations in this overall story concerns the locations of where the monumental events happened. I’m actually not talking about Rendlesham Forest. At least, right now I’m not. Rather, I’m talking about the surrounding locales and their mysterious histories. And why do I consider it my duty to bring your attention to those same surroundings? I’ll tell you: it’s vital to note that for decades the entire area around those famous woods acted as a powerful magnet for classified government programs, sensitive military operations, and top secret projects. They were all of a highly important – but down to earth and domestic – nature. On January 28, 1935, the Tizard Committee, established under the directorship of Sir Henry Tizard, convened its first meeting. It ultimately led to the top secret development of a workable radar system of the type that was employed in the Second World War.

To understand the wider scope of this part of the story, we must address one of the strangest – and one of the most enduring – stories from the Second World War. Arguably, it has become a legend; a most grim and grisly one, too. It concerns a small village in Suffolk called Shingle Street. It is located in between the aforementioned Bawdsey and Orford. As the Guardian newspaper says: “Shingle Street itself has been the subject of fevered speculation ever since it was evacuated in 1940. Conspiracies include rumors of a German landing and a shoreline littered with burning bodies, schemes to protect the coastline with an impenetrable barrage of flames and the testing of experimental chemical bombs. Four dead German airmen were certainly washed up on the beach, and weapons testing did result in the Lifeboat Inn being blown up. As for the rest, the conspiracy theories rumble on.”

We’ll now take a look at a place called Orford Ness and what went happened there in the 1950s. The U.K.’s National Trust state: “The 1950s saw the construction of specialized facilities to exploit new post-war technologies such as nuclear power. AWRE [Atomic Weapons Research Establishment] Orford Ness was one of only a few sites in the U.K., and indeed the world, where purpose-built facilities were created for testing the components of nuclear weapons. At the height of the Cold War AWRE and the Royal Aircraft Establishment used Orford Ness for developmental work on the atomic bomb.” Moving onto the 1960s, there is the following from the National Trust: “In 1968 work started on the top secret Anglo-American System 441A ‘over-the-horizon’ (OTH) backscatter radar project, finally code-named ‘Cobra Mist.’ The Anglo-American project, whose main contractor was the Radio Corporation of America, was set up to carry out several ‘missions.’ including detection and tracking of aircraft, detection of missile and satellite vehicle launchings, fulfilling intelligence requirements and providing a research and development test-bed…”

All of the above, top secret research was undertaken only a handful of miles from Rendlesham Forest. That’s right: the area has been the location of highly classified experiments since the 1930s. My research has led me to conclude that the “UFO incident” was just another secret experiment. One of the most important parts of this story revolves around the testing of advanced holograms. There is strong evidence that demonstrates the military men in the woods were led to believe they were seeing a UFO landing, and alien activity, when in reality things were very different. Namely, a huge operation designed to deceive on a massive scale. Ray Boeche is someone who has a longstanding involvement in the Rendlesham case. I interviewed Ray extensively for my book. He met with two U.S. Department of Defense whistle-blowers who told him what really happened at Rendlesham Forest. Ray said to me: “They said there was a sense that this was maybe, in some sense, staged. Or, that some of the senior people there were more concerned with the reaction of the men, how they responded to the situation, rather than what was actually going on. That this was some sort of psychotronic device – a hologram – to see what sort of havoc they can wreak with people.”

Jenny Randles was onto this angle too: “This is a device which manipulates the subatomic basis of matter at a quantum level and builds a bridge between mind and physical substance. If I understood it correctly, this supposedly stimulated the mind into having vivid hallucinations but, at the same time, created physical effects in the real world which could take on a semblance of the appearance of the hallucinated images.” Clearly, exposing military personnel to advanced hologram-based technology in those woods, and late at night, would have been a perfect way of gauging just how successfully the manufactured visions had achieved their goals. Those goals were: the creation of holographic UFOs that could interact with not just the environment, but with those who were in its presence, too.

There’s also evidence that at least some of the men were affected by hallucinogens. Over the years, the late Georgina Bruni (who wrote You Can’t Tell the People) provided me with various data that related to a connection between the Rendlesham Forest experiment and scientists at Porton Down, Wiltshire, U.K. As the BBC note, U.K. military personnel were regularly used in secret mind-altering experiments at Porton Down in the 1950s and 1960s. So, why not use American personnel who were stationed to the United Kingdom in December 1980? The BBC say: “Porton Down was set up in 1916. It was a center designed to test chemical and biological weapons. Nerve gases such as Sarin and CS gas were tested on volunteer servicemen. Servicemen were offered around £2 and three days leave as an incentive to take part in tests. Very few servicemen knew what they were volunteering for and some were even told it was research into the cure for the common cold. In 1953 it is alleged that serviceman Ronald Maddison died after taking part in a Sarin gas experiment. In 1962, one of Porton Down’s own scientists, Geoffrey Bacon died of the plague. Since the end of WWII, 20,000 people have taken part in experiments at Porton Down.” LSD was tested at Porton Down, too. On military personnel, no less. And as the Guardian newspaper stated in 2005: “Fifty years ago, Eric Gow had a baffling and unexplained experience. As a 19-year-old sailor, he remembers going to a clandestine military establishment, where he was given something to drink in a sherry glass and experienced vivid hallucinations.”

It was in January 2001 that the then-retired – and now late – British Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Hill-Norton, decided to get into the Rendlesham Forest controversy. Having had an interest in UFOs for decades, he used his considerable clout to try and figure out what occurred in 1980. It was hardly an easy task for Hill-Norton to achieve. Of specific interest to Hill-Norton were the claims of a connection to the activities of the Porton Down staff. He wanted to know “whether personnel from Porton Down visited Rendlesham Forest or the area surrounding RAF Watton in December 1980 or January 1981; and whether they are aware of any tests carried out in either of those two areas aimed at assessing any nuclear, biological or chemical hazard.”

Hill-Norton got a response from the government he had dutifully worked for. It was not, however, the reply that he hoped for. The reply came from Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean. She spoke on behalf of the MoD, who provided nothing but a concise comment that didn’t really advance the investigation into the case at all. The baroness said: “The staff at the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) Chemic and Biological Defense (CBD) laboratories at Porton Down have made a thorough search of their archives and have found no record of any such visits.” It has to be said that government agencies – and their fawning lackeys – can be extremely careful about what they say and how they say it. It should be noted that Baroness Symons never said that there was no Rendlesham-Porton link. What she said was that no evidence of such a connection had been found. That’s a very different thing, altogether. Playing things carefully and tactfully provides government personnel with a perfect “get out clause,” in the event that additional information might later surface that shows the earlier claims to have been erroneous.

Mind-control, hallucinogens, holograms, and a location that has been a hotbed for highly classified experiments since the 1930s: they were all key components that led to the creation of one of the most famous UFO cases of all time. Except for one thing: the whole situation was nothing but an incredible, disturbing, series of tests to see just how far the human mind could be manipulated – and how such technologies could potentially, one day, play significant roles on the battlefield.

With UFOs whizzing about, doing physics-defying aerial acrobatics, and hovering close to the ground, one might get the impression that it is all rather dangerous and an accident waiting to happen. Indeed, this seems to be the case, as there have been numerous reports of near-misses with UFOs and various aircraft over the decades. Yet sometimes these UFOs truly learned the hard way, and actually collide with other objects. From trains, to planes, to automobiles, to even other UFOs, here are some of the strangest cases of UFOs crashing into other vehicles.

One of the last things one might expect to crash into a UFO is a train, yet on January 14, 2002, that is exactly what allegedly happened in the area of Paintsville, Kentucky, in the United States. At approximately 2:50 AM in the early morning hours, a coal train was lumbering along its course when the electronic systems on the train starting going haywire. As the crew tried to figure out just what was going on, they turned a bend at a stretch called “milepost 42” and that was when they noticed lights headed in their direction. It was assumed that this was an oncoming train, and so they killed their own lights so as not to blind the incoming conductor. However, this was no train. The witness describes what happens next in his official report with the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) as follows:

As we rounded the corner our onboard computer began to flash in and out, speed recorder went nuts, and both locomotives died. Alarm bells began to ring and thats when we saw the objects. Apparently scanning the river for something, the objects, (at least 3) had several “search” lights trained there, the first object hovered about 10 to 12 feet above the track. Metallic silver in color with multiple colored lights near the bottom and in the middle, no windows or openings of any kind that we could see. Approximately 18 to 20 feet in length and probably ten feet high. With both engines dead as we rounded the corner we made little noise and the first object did not respond in time, I estimate that we hit the object at 30 mph with 16,000 trailing tons behind us. It clipped the top of our lead unit then skipped back slicing a chunk out of our trailing unit and first two coal cars. The other objects vanished into thin air.

After this, the train came to a stop around 2 miles after the impact, screeching slowly to a grinding halt after the emergency brakes had kicked in, and the power to their systems jumped back to life. They notified their dispatcher and then surveyed the damage, finding the cab of the rear locomotive to be “demolished and smoking” and the second two cars looking as if they “had been hit with a giant hammer.” Despite the extensive damage, the train was deemed track worthy, and was able to limp along the rail back to the yard, and this is where things would get perhaps even stranger than they already were. The witness explains:

We pulled into Paintsville yard at approximately 5:15 am. The huge overhead lights lining the yard were noticeably dark and the only lights came from what we assumed were railroad officials’ vehicles parked near the end of the track. We pulled to a stop and began unloading our grips off the wounded train. We could hear what sounded like an army of workers immediately tending to our train. Vehicle doors slamming, guys running by in weird outfits and lights glaring from all directions, the one thing missing was railroad officials. A guy named Ferguson shook my hand and asked me to follow him into the old yard office. We did, once inside they, and by they I mean I have no idea who these people were, began to ask us hundreds of questions, they then told us for our own protection we’d be medically tested before we could leave.

I asked repeatedly to talk to my road foreman or trainmaster and not only were these requests denied but they confiscated my conductors’ cellular phone. Hours later we were led outside the old yard office and the strange things continued to happen, the 2 locomotives and two cars were removed from the rest of the train we had brought in and my only guess was parked 4 tracks over under a huge tent like structure buzzing with activity. We were led off property and told due to national security our silence on this matter would be appreciated. We were then put in a Railroad vehicle and taken to Martin Kentucky were we went through questioning again with railroad officials and were then drug tested.

What exactly happened here? Was this an actual collision with a UFO and how did a slow-moving coal train manage to hit it? Who were those officials they were interrogated by? or is this all some sort of hoax? It is hard to say, but a train crashing into a UFO is not something you see every day. Our next tale is almost as unlikely, and was reported by a Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson, of Marshall County, Minnesota. On August 27, 1979, Johnson was on patrol near the North Dakota border when he saw a strange light apparently off in the wilderness. As he took a side road to get closer, the light apparently began to approach his car at an amazing rate of speed. It seemed to almost be on a collision course, and Johnson lost consciousness after being blinded by a bright flash to the sound of breaking glass. When he came to he was still sitting in his stalled car, happy to be alive but alarmed that he could not see anything. Oddly, his car had travelled some distance from where the object had engaged him, and he would say of his bizarre experience:

I noticed a very bright, brilliant light, 8 to 12 inches in diameter, 3 to 4 feet off the ground. The edges were very defined. I thought perhaps at first that it could be an aircraft in trouble, as it appeared to be a landing light from an aircraft. I proceeded south on #220. I proceeded about a mile and three tenths or a mile and four tenths when the light intercepted my vehicle causing damage to a headlight, putting a dent in the hood, breaking the windshield and bending antennas on top of the vehicle.

At this point, at the interception of the light, I was rendered either unconscious, neutralized or unknowing for a period of approximately 39 minutes. From the point of intersection, my Police vehicle proceeded south in a straight line 854 feet, at which point the brakes were engaged by forces unknown to myself, as I do not remember doing this, and I left about approximately 99 feet of black marks on the highway before coming to rest sideways in the road with the grille of my hood facing in an easterly direction. At 2:19 a.m., I radioed a 10-88 (Officer Needs Assistance) to my dispatcher in Warren.

The officer called on his radio for help, and he was rushed to the hospital with what looked like burns on his face and irritation of the eyes. Meanwhile, the patrol car he had been in was found to have a smashed in right side headlight, a crack in the windshield on the driver’s side, an unusual circular dent on the hood, also on the driver’s side, and a roof antenna that was bent over at a 60-degree angle. The windshield was particularly weird, as it seemed to have sustained “inward and outward forces acting almost simultaneously.” All of the damage was on the driver’s side of the vehicle. The interior clock was also found to be 14 minutes slow, and oddly Johnson’s wristwatch had the same anomaly. Experts who examined the vehicle would be unable to explain the peculiar damage it had incurred, and it did not seem to be any normal collision, with the official explanation being “mechanical forces of unknown origin.” Luckily his eyes would heal and he would regain his eyesight.

A place where one would perhaps more expect to see some sort of UFO collision is with aircraft in the sky, and while there have been many reports of near-misses with UFOs over the years, there was in 2013 an account of a plane possibly actually crashing into one. The Air China Boeing 757 passenger plane was allegedly flying at around 26,000 feet on a course from Chengdu to Guangzhou, when about 20 minutes into the flight things got bizarre. The crew would report that out of nowhere the plane was rocked by a very strong impact and a loud thud reverberated through the aircraft, frightening the passengers and causing the pilot to enact evasive maneuvers. The plane was given permission to make an emergency landing, and although amazingly no one had been hurt, it was found that the front of the plane had an enormous dent in it. At no point was there any radar signature of anything else in the vicinity of the plane that could have hit it, and this has led to speculation that the plane actually hit everything from a flock of birds to an unmanned drone, to of course a UFO. Unfortunately, Air China would refuse to give any further details, and Chinese authorities have allegedly just sort of swept it all under the carpet. The former U.S. government UFO investigator Nick Pope would say of the outlandish incident:

Whatever struck the aircraft will have left evidence. Analysis of the damaged nose cone should reveal microscopic traces of whatever struck the aircraft, or possibly even larger pieces of debris. So this is a solvable mystery. The only question is, will the notoriously secretive Chinese authorities reveal the truth about what happened? Cases like this show that whatever people believe about UFOs, there are serious air safety issues here. MoD and CAA files contain dozens of reports of near misses between UFOs and commercial aircraft. It’s only a matter of time before there’s a catastrophe. From the look of the photos, this disturbing incident came very close to blowing this aircraft out of the sky.

The damaged Chinese plane

There does not appear to have been any further information released by the Chinese government or the airline, leaving this purely in the realm of speculation, but it is intriguing nevertheless. What is probably more spectacular than a plane colliding with a UFO is a UFO smashing into another UFO, and that is what reportedly happened in a report given to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). It began with a sighting made in Rosh Haayin, in Israel, on September 28, 1995, by a man called Spasso Maximovitch. He purportedly saw in the sky a silvery glowing object that apparently separated into several other smaller objects as he watched in amazement, even managing to capture the event on videotape. He then went about watching the skies constantly after that, becoming obsessed with witnessing the objects again, and on June 24, 1996 it seems his patience paid off.

On this occasion he saw what looked to be the same object he had observed before, or at least one very similar to it, and he began to film it. At the same time, he noticed another object just like it streaking through the sky from the west, and headed straight towards the first object. According to Spasso, the second object approached at a very fast speed and collided with the first one, causing an explosion, all of which was captured on film. Spasso then turned the video evidence over to a journalist named David Ronen, with the local UFO magazine called “Maariv,” and a copy of it managed to find its way to UFO researcher Barry Chamish. The tapes were sent by Chamish to London for examination, even as other analysts pored over the footage trying to figure out what it shows. According to MUFON, one of these was a professional photo and video analyst by the name of Jeff Sainio, who said of the footage:

When the 2 objects apparently collide and explode, the apparent size of the light expands by a factor of roughly 2.5; this does not appear to be due to overexposure, but is the real size of the object. The last 2 frames of the video are NOT overexposed, but diffuse; since overexposure is not involved, this indicates he actual size of the explosion is shown. The real increase in size of the bright area is certainly much larger than 2.5.

In the video the explosion moves downward; this is probably due to camera motion of the startled videographer; the reference tower is too smeared to verify this conclusion. The explosion is not due to any conventional method I am familiar with; conventional, large explosions require much more than 1/4 second to disappear, and usually generate flaming debris that falls from the explosion. Neither characteristic is seen here. The acceleration, light size, and explosion are not explainable in any convention way that I know of, and this case remains unidentified.

A still from the Israeli footage

Strangely, shortly after the footage was made public, Spasso Maximovitch seems to have dropped off the grid and vanished. According to Chamish no one has been able to locate him, and besides being rather ominous, it also leaves us with not much more to go on. We are left with a compelling piece of footage of an alleged UFO collision, but little else, and so far it has remained inconclusive. You can read Sainio’s full analysis and see the video here. Is this hoaxed footage, and if not, what are we looking at here? If it was really UFOs, then how in the world did this collision happen? Was it pilot error, a malfunction, or maybe even intentional? There is no way to know.

It certainly seems that UFOs are not totally above making mistakes, and that sometimes their antics can lead to accidents. With aircraft this seems to be a particular area of worry, and there have been those who have seriously considered the threat that this may cause to airspace. But is any of this real at all, or is it just sensationalized stories, perhaps born from mundane reasons? Is there truly anything to worry about at all? Who really knows, but it all makes for some fascinating cases.