Editor’s note: This is a narrative retelling in Jim Penniston’s voice based on his public statements, witness reports, and official documents. Key dates, names, and documents referenced are drawn from contemporary sources, including the Halt memo and audio, police notes, and later publications. Wikipedia
1) Before the lights
Christmas on base is never quite festive. It’s thinner coffee, fewer faces, and the kind of quiet that gets into your bones. Woodbridge and Bentwaters sat like twin sentries on the Suffolk coast, American run, British soil, Cold War in the background like a low drum. We kept to our shifts, logged our rounds, checked our gates. And if you asked me what was going on that day prior to everything kicking off? Routine. The sort of routine that makes you think nothing surprising is left in the world.
I remember the damp in the air and the way the forest held the cold. I remember the East Gate — familiar metal, familiar view — and the fence line that told you where our responsibility ended and the trees began. Inside the wire, it was checks and sign-offs. Outside, it was dark needles and a narrow track that seemed to swallow sound. No alerts, no scramble. Christmas night sliding into the early hours after, and I was expecting a long, dull shift to round it out. Then the radio woke up.
The call was simple, and it came in hot enough to cut through the fog: lights in the forest. Low. Moving. Not aircraft lights — or so the men on the spot insisted. We asked tower. Nothing on the board, nothing inbound, no training flights. The word “downed craft” hung in the air, and that’s the kind of phrase that turns everyone serious in a heartbeat.
I was told to go take a look.
2) Who reported it first
The first eyes on were the lads at the East Gate. They’d seen the lights from just outside the fence, past the trees, towards Rendlesham. The time was around three in the morning, and the description was enough to put “possible crash” at the top of the list. You don’t ignore that. A downed civilian aircraft is our problem whether or not it’s on our side of the fence. We respond. We secure. We call it up the chain.
So it was me — Staff Sergeant Jim Penniston — and with me Airman First Class John Burroughs and Airman First Class Ed Cabansag. The three of us were sent to check. We had torches, radios, and the same thought any sane person would have in late December: that we’d find broken metal and a fire we needed to cordon off until the proper crews arrived. That was the expectation, anyway. Wikipedia
3) Into the trees
We crossed beyond the gate and stepped into the dark. You can tell yourself you’re ready for anything, but the forest at that hour is its own kind of space. Our torches picked out boughs and puddles and the frosted breath in front of our faces. Every few steps, we checked bearings, checked distance from the fence, checked the glow ahead that wouldn’t quite resolve into anything ordinary.
At first I argued with myself: maybe a flare; maybe a farmer’s light; maybe a wreck with the fuel still burning. But the colour wasn’t right and the behaviour wasn’t right. Fire dances. This didn’t. It pulsed. It brightened and dimmed with a rhythm like it had a plan. We spoke little on the way in. The three of us fell into that pace you use when you’re spooked but don’t want to say it out loud.
The animals should’ve given us away — owls, foxes, whatever else moves at that hour — but it was quiet. The only sound was our boots scuffing and the occasional clag of frost giving way. We cleared a line of trees, and the light grew ahead, low to the ground and beating softly like a heart.
4) The clearing
We broke into a small opening and there it was: not a bonfire, not a burning engine, not wreckage. An object. I can’t tell you the exact measurements from memory with a tape-measure’s precision, but to my eye it was two to three metres across at the base and roughly two metres high, triangular in form, set low — either resting in the grass or just above it. Around the base, a band of blue light; above that, red lights pulsed in sequence. The surface didn’t reflect our torches like normal metal. The light seemed to bloom across it and roll away.
I moved to the side, trying to build a picture from different angles. I kept one eye on the object and one eye on the trees, because the mind plays tricks when you want an exit. Burroughs stayed a step or two back; Cabansag too. Neither of them needed telling to keep a safe distance. You don’t walk right up to an unknown thing with all the confidence in the world. You take it a yard at a time.
Closer in, I saw markings. Not stencilled numbers, not rivet lines, not anything I would call standard aerospace. These were shapes — glyphs, if you want a word for them — each one hard-edged, geometric, set along a panel like they were meant to be read. I took my notebook out and sketched them in the torchlight, turning my wrist to keep the beam off the paper. The shapes held together in a way that didn’t feel random. I wanted them recorded before I did anything else.
5) Touch
There’s a decision point when training collides with instinct. Training says you close distance and identify hazards, within reason. Instinct says you leave the unknown alone. I split the difference: I approached slowly, watching for heat shimmer, fluids, wires — anything that might snap or burn. Nothing like that. No seams, no vents, no visible hardware. Just that surface and those lights.
I reached out and laid a gloved hand on it.
Warm. Not engine-hot, not would-burn-you hot. A steady warmth that felt internal, as if the thing kept a temperature for itself. The skin — if you can call it that — was smooth, almost like glass, but there was a faint bite to it, a texture you only feel when you’re that close. Under my palm, a vibration; under that, another. It didn’t buzz like something mechanical. It thrummed.
I don’t have better words for what happened in my head. A flood. Not pictures. Not voice. Ones and zeros. A sequence so clean it felt like it belonged to another place, pouring through thought too quickly to grasp, then too insistently to ignore. I took my hand away and suddenly the normal world rushed back in — the torch beam, my breath, the cold. I remember writing, hurriedly, trying to catch the shapes I’d seen earlier, and then writing numbers I didn’t fully understand writing, and then looking up because the light had changed.
The object brightened. The band at the base lifted with it, and the whole thing drew up and away, quiet as a held breath. We watched it slip between the trees and then it was gone, leaving us with the sound of ourselves, the smell of the forest, and damage we could point to: branches broken, bark marked, ground disturbed. The clearing didn’t look like it had before we arrived. It looked like something had been there.
6) Who else was there, and what they saw
It was me in front; Burroughs and Cabansag with me. They’ll tell you about the lights — the movement through the trees, the sudden brightness, the way the glow played out across the trunks. They’ll tell you about a beacon-like effect in the distance on the approach, and later critics would replay that point again and again. But on the ground, in that moment, our expectation of a wreck had turned into something none of us had been trained to catalogue. Wikipedia
Others were at the perimeter coordinating radio. We weren’t a cast of hundreds; this wasn’t a circus. It was the three of us on foot, deeper than we expected to go, looking at something we couldn’t file under the usual headings.
7) Who I reported it to
Back at base the adrenaline ebbed, and then the embarrassment hit: how do you write this in a way that doesn’t sound like you’ve gone daft? You don’t own words for some experiences, but you still try. You file what you saw, what you did, what the other men with you saw and did. You hand it up the chain. You answer questions. You log the time and place and any marks you saw. You give them the notebook sketches. You stick to the facts as cleanly as you can: the approach from East Gate, the clearing, the object’s size and shape to the best of your eye, the band of light at the base, the red pulses above, the warmth and the vibration through the glove, the ground traces.
It didn’t get laughed off. At least, not in the moment. The chance that something had come down out there — and the damage we observed — meant it had to be treated seriously enough to go back in daylight and check. Which is exactly what happened.
8) What happened next (the second night)
The next night, Deputy Base Commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt took a team into the forest with instruments and a microcassette recorder. Halt was a pro; he didn’t spook easy. He was methodical, and he documented what he saw and measured. On tape he notes ground indentations — three small depressions in a triangular pattern — tree damage, and radiation readings that nudged over background in certain spots. He also describes lights moving through the trees and, at one point, a beam of light directed downwards. You can still listen to that recording today; the tone in his voice says more than any later argument. ianridpath.com
Halt would later send a memo to the Ministry of Defence titled “Unexplained Lights”, summarising the first night’s security patrol sighting and his team’s findings on the follow-up. That memo is dated 13 January 1981. It would become one of the case’s anchor points, surfacing publicly in the United States in 1983 thanks to Freedom of Information requests. nicap.org
And the local police? They were called, too — in the early hours and again after dawn. Their notes say they saw nothing out of the ordinary, only the distant Orford Ness lighthouse, and that the indentations we showed them could have been made by animals. That set the tone for years of argument after: two tracks of thought that never quite meet. Wikipedia
9) The description you asked for — size, colour, shape, markings
Let me put it all in one place. The object I saw in that clearing was triangular in overall planform. Its footprint — eyeballing it — was a couple of metres across, perhaps three at most, and roughly two metres high, set low in the clearing. No wings, no tail, nothing that said “aircraft” as we know it. Along the base: a steady band of blue light. Above: red pulses that didn’t match any beacon I’d seen before — and I’d seen a few.
The surface acted strangely with our torchlight. Rather than a hard reflection, the beam seemed to soften on contact and roll along the skin of the craft. I didn’t see seams, rivets, access panels, fasteners. I saw smooth material and, on one flank, a string of symbols: sharp-edged, geometric, laid out like you’d lay out letters or numerals meant to convey something. Those markings are the ones I took down in my notebook. I traced them as neatly as I could with my torch skewed away to keep the glare off the page. The arrangement felt deliberate and consistent, not decorative.
When I touched it, the temperature felt stable and the vibration came through as a low thrum. That tactile memory is the part that returns in quiet moments — more than the lights, more than the movement — because touch sticks.
10) The binary and the diary
The diary, the glyphs, and the numbers came with me out of the clearing. There’s been plenty said since — too much, some days — about how those ones and zeros ended up on the page and what they could mean. I’ll only say this: I didn’t sit down in the barracks and invent sequences of digits as a hobby. I wrote what poured through my head when I touched the thing because I didn’t have a better option.
Years later those sequences were run through decoding attempts — the kind anyone who dabbles in computing or signal work would try — and out came words and coordinates. Phrases like “Exploration of Humanity” and a reference to an “origin year 8100” have done the rounds, along with coordinates that point to old, storied places on Earth: Giza, Nazca, others. Some people take that as proof the craft was mapping us. Others say nonsense, a retrofitted story, a Rorschach test for believers. You can find a whole spectrum of views in print and online. The fact remains: I wrote the numbers in 1980 because I felt I had to; the meaning — if there is one — has been fought over ever since. Macmillan Publishers
11) The lighthouse, the fireball, and the pushback
No account of these nights gets far without someone bringing up Orford Ness. A lighthouse sits on that shingle spit east of us, and its flash has been accused of everything except tax fraud. Critics argue the initial “descending” light was a bright fireball seen over southern England around that time, that the steady flashing aligned with the lighthouse’s five-second cadence, and that what we took for landing marks were rabbit scrapes or other normal ground disturbances. They’ll add that the police, called out in darkness and then again late morning, saw nothing odd and were satisfied the lights were coastal. They’ll note that later star-like objects observed on the second night could have been bright stars sitting low over the trees, distorted by atmosphere. That’s the tidy version. Wikipedia
I’ve heard it all. I’ve stood in that forest and looked east. The lighthouse is real; its flash can be seen through gaps in the trees. But the craft in the clearing wasn’t a rotating lamp two miles off. The warmth under my glove wasn’t a trick of the eye. The glyphs weren’t a lighthouse beam. I understand the need for mundane explanations; most of the time, they’re correct. I just don’t think they explain that specific set of events in that specific place at that specific hour.
12) Halt’s tape and the “pod marks”
Halt’s audio isn’t poetry. It’s a working officer narrating measurements and bearings with the occasional surprise slipping through. He speaks about a “point of light,” about “minor readings” on an AN/PDR-27, about three shallow impressions, about a flash rate that, yes, invites another lighthouse debate. He also captures moments that still make people sit forward — the report of a beam coming down, the sense from more than one man that something was moving with intention beyond the trees. You can argue interpretation forever; you can’t argue that the tape exists and that it contains a contemporaneous record. ianridpath.com
As for the “pod marks,” the triangle on the ground — I saw disturbances. Were they profound? No. They were shallow, like something light had rested there. Could animals or forest litter make such marks? The police thought so when we showed them in daylight. But if you ask me what made them, I’ll tell you what I told the report: they looked like the places a three-pointed base would touch down. That’s an observation, not a religion. Wikipedia
13) The paperwork and the leak
The Unexplained Lights memo that Colonel Halt sent on 13 January 1981 put a sober gloss on a messy couple of nights. It wasn’t written to be a campfire story. It was written as a notice up the line: this happened, these were the observations, this is the summary. That memo ended up public in America under FOIA around 1983, and after that the case took on a life of its own. Press, radio, TV. Over the years, more documents filtered out of British files — not a smoking gun, as the Ministry liked to say, but enough correspondence and internal notes to keep the argument warm. nicap.org
Different people read those papers and find whatever fits their prior. Skeptics see a lack of urgency and call that proof nothing serious occurred. Others see the very fact of the memo and the tape as proof something was out there we couldn’t pin down. I don’t blame anyone for reading it their way. But the paper trail snaps a chalk line through the middle of the story: men saw strange lights; men measured odd readings; a senior officer wrote the Ministry; and the police logged what they thought were ordinary causes.
14) The men beside me
I talk about Burroughs and Cabansag because they were there. Without them, I’m just one man in the dark. The record captures their initial statements and later interviews, and if you chase this subject you’ll see those documents quoted and picked apart line by line. People treat wording like fingerprints. They should. But they also forget the conditions — time of night, temperature, stress, the thousand ways memory compresses and blanks when you’re amped.
What matters to me is this: we moved on those lights in good faith, expecting wreckage; we saw an object we couldn’t classify; two nights later, a deputy base commander took instruments into the same patch of woods and came back with more questions than answers. That’s not hysteria. That’s a sequence.
15) The questions everyone asks (and my answers)
What was going on that day before the craft?
Nothing special. Holiday shift, routine checks, Cold War background hum, the usual low-manpower feel of Christmas duty. The most exciting thing before the call was the cold air and the promise of a quiet night.
Who first reported it?
Security at the East Gate flagged the lights outside the fence, near the forest, around 03:00. We were sent on that basis. Wikipedia
What did you see? Size? Colour? Shape? Marks?
Triangular, about two to three metres across at the base and roughly two metres high. A blue band of light around the base, red pulses above. Surface that didn’t reflect like ordinary metal. A string of geometric symbols on one flank. Warm to the touch, with a low thrum through the glove.
You touched it — what did you feel?
Warmth. Smooth surface with a faint bite under the fingers. Vibration. And in my head, a sudden stream of ones and zeros that I later wrote down without fully understanding why.
Who else was there with you?
John Burroughs and Ed Cabansag were with me in the forest. Others remained nearer the perimeter or on radio. Two nights later, Lt. Col. Charles Halt led a separate team with instruments and a recorder. Wikipedia
Who did you report it to?
Up the chain on base, as per normal procedure. The following night, Halt took the matter in hand, documented findings, and later wrote the memo to the MoD dated 13 January 1981. nicap.org
What happened next?
Halt’s night in the forest. Ground impressions, minor radiation readings, moving lights, and the tape that’s been replayed for decades. The local police logged what they thought were ordinary causes (lighthouse, animals). The MoD treated it as low significance, then the memo surfaced publicly in 1983 and the whole case went wide. ianridpath.com
Tell me about the diary and the code.
Symbols copied by torchlight from the craft’s flank; later, pages of ones and zeros I wrote after contact. Years on, some decoded those digits into words and coordinates — “Exploration of Humanity,” talk of an “origin year 8100,” sites around the globe — which sparked arguments that haven’t stopped. Macmillan Publishers
16) What the police said; what the astronomers said
The Suffolk Constabulary notes matter because they ground the story in the ordinary. Called at night: they saw the lighthouse. Called again in daylight: they saw impressions that looked like animal marks. Meanwhile, astronomers pointed to a fireball over southern England around that time; skeptics matched the red flashing light described in the forest to Orford Ness’s cadence and posited bright stars for the rest. None of this offends me. If you’re trying to reduce the unknown to the known, you start from there. But those explanations don’t account for everything we logged on the ground. Wikipedia
17) How memory ages
Time does odd things to a night like that. You replay it too often and it begins to feel like a tape with worn spots. People ask the same questions again and again, and you find yourself fixing details as best you can, anchoring them to the entries in the notebook and the places where others’ records overlap. For many, Rendlesham is an argument on the internet. For me, it’s cold breath in a clearing and a surface under my glove that shouldn’t have been there.
I understand the suspicion. I’ve met it face-to-face. I’ve also watched men who pride themselves on their good sense get quiet when the tape of Halt’s night plays. The most I can do is say what I saw, admit what I don’t know, and refuse to invent more than I’ve already written.
18) What still sticks
Not the colours — though I remember the blue at the base and the red pulses clear enough. Not the size — though I can point to “roughly two to three metres” and hold my hands out like that explains anything. What sticks is the way the surface felt warm in freezing air and the way the vibration found my bones. What sticks is the way the light brightened right before it lifted, and how the quiet that followed felt louder than any engine.
The rest — the arguments, the papers, the interviews — are a storm that blew up after. The night itself is simpler, sharper, closer.
19) If you want the documents
If you’re the sort who wants paper, it exists:
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Colonel Halt’s memo to the MoD, dated 13 January 1981, subject “Unexplained Lights”, which surfaced publicly in 1983 through FOIA in the U.S. It summarises the first night’s sighting and the second night’s investigation. nicap.org
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The microcassette “Halt tape,” a real-time narration of the second night’s walk, instrument readings, bearings, and observations. ianridpath.com
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Police notes that say they saw the lighthouse at night and ordinary ground marks by day. Wikipedia
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Later books and chapters that include scans and transcripts — among them a volume that places my notebook’s code in an appendix and reprints documents for anyone who wants to squint at them. IUCAT
None of that proves a provenance. It only proves we weren’t telling ghost stories in a pub. It proves the events were logged, measured, and sent up the line.
20) What I think it was — and what I’m willing to leave unsaid
People always press for a label: alien craft or black project or future humans on a day trip. The honest answer is that I don’t know what flag to pin on it. I know it wasn’t a broken Cessna. I know it wasn’t a pile of flares. I know that for a few silent minutes in a Suffolk clearing I stood next to a shaped object that behaved like a machine but didn’t behave like any machine we had names for. I know that when I touched it a river of numbers rushed my head in a way that still seems absurd when I say it aloud, and I wrote them down because I didn’t want to lose them.
Beyond that, I can speculate like anyone else. But speculation isn’t the job. The job is to tell you what happened to me and what happened to the men around me, and to point you to the places where the record lines up with that telling.
21) The long echo
Time gives every strange event a second life. For Rendlesham, the second life has been decades of retellings, sceptical breakdowns, reconstructions on TV, and late-night radio. The story outpaced the men who lived it — that’s how these things go. I’ve sat in rooms where people I’ve never met explained to me what I must have seen. I’ve been told I touched a lighthouse, that I dreamed it, that I was fooled by lads with a police car and modified lights. The theories multiply. Some are clever. Some are taking the mick. The Skeptic
Meanwhile, if you walk out there on a cold night and shut up long enough to hear your own breath, you can still feel the place tighten around you the way it did for us. The trees remember. Or maybe I do, and I project. Either way, the clearing is still a clearing, and the lines my torch threw across those markings still run straight as if my hand were there again.
22) Why I keep talking about it
Because silence lets other people write the story for you, and I don’t fancy being a minor character in my own life. Because somewhere between the lighthouse and the ledger there’s the thing itself, and if I keep the account clean enough maybe it helps someone else recognise a pattern when it comes for them. Because the choice is simple: either I say it, or the night says nothing, and I owe the men who were out there with me better than that.
23) The case as I’d present it to a stranger
Two nights after Christmas 1980, personnel from a U.S. base in Suffolk saw lights where no lights should be. A small team — me, Burroughs, Cabansag — went into the trees. In a clearing, we observed a triangular object with a base band of blue light and red pulses above. I saw and copied geometric markings. I touched the surface; it was warm and thrummed. The object lifted and left without a sound. We reported back.
The following night, a deputy base commander led a team with instruments to the same area. They found shallow marks in a triangle, tree damage facing the clearing, and minor radiation readings higher than background. The officer recorded much of it on tape and later wrote a memo to the British Ministry of Defence summarising both nights. The local police, called both at night and by day, recorded that they saw only the lighthouse and ordinary ground marks. Later, astronomers and skeptics offered mundane causes; the debate has lasted ever since. My notebook from that night includes copied symbols and binary digits that others later interpreted.
That’s the spine of it. The rest — the arguments and the interpretations — hang from it like ribs. Wikipedia
24) If you’ve read this far
Then you already know the parts you came for: what was happening that day (not much), who first saw the lights (men at East Gate), what I saw in the clearing (triangular craft, blue base light, red pulses, geometric markings), what I felt when I touched it (warmth, vibration, the shock of numbers), who stood with me (Burroughs, Cabansag), who I reported to (up the chain, then Halt took over), what happened next (Halt’s investigation, memo, the tape, police notes), and what sat in the diary (glyphs and binary). You also know what the skeptics say: lighthouse, fireball, stars, animals. All of that sits in the record waiting for anyone with patience.
Do I think those explanations fit the thing under my hand? No. But I accept that a tidy world prefers tidy answers. If you need one, take it. If you want mine, I’ve given it to you here without embroidery.
25) Closing
I can still feel the cold through the glove and the warmth under it. I can still hear the quiet that spread out after the light lifted. Whatever label you stick on it, it happened. And if the world never gives us a neat conclusion, that’s fine. Conclusions are for reports; nights like that don’t end so clean.
— Jim Penniston (first-person narrative reconstruction)
Sources & documents referenced
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Wikipedia overview for dates, locations, police notes, lighthouse/fireball explanations, and second-night summary. Wikipedia
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Lt. Col. Charles Halt’s memo, “Unexplained Lights,” dated 13 Jan 1981; released via FOIA in 1983. nicap.org
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“Halt tape” transcription/analysis and radiation/indentation notes. ianridpath.com
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Suffolk police evidence summaries and lighthouse line-of-sight arguments. ianridpath.com
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Book references (including appendices with Penniston’s code and documents). IUCAT
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Binary code discussions, claims and critiques (for context). Hangar1publishing
