Britain’s Roswell has a real signed memo from a US Air Force officer
In the early hours of December 27, 1980, security patrolmen at RAF Woodbridge, a joint US and UK airbase in Suffolk, England that housed nuclear weapons, reported strange lights descending into the adjacent Rendlesham Forest. Over the following nights, Lieutenant Colonel Charles I. Halt, the base’s deputy commander, personally led a follow-up investigation. On January 13, 1981, Halt composed a formal memorandum to the UK Ministry of Defence describing what his team observed. That memo, not secondhand testimony decades later, is the primary source document at the center of what is often called Britain’s Roswell.
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Get the dossier: $5 instant download →Charles Halt was not a civilian witness or a junior enlisted airman. As deputy base commander, he personally led a follow-up patrol into the forest on the second night of activity, carrying a handheld tape recorder that captured his real-time, unscripted reactions in the field, a recording that surfaced years later through a separate FOIA request and has never been publicly disputed as authentic. His formal memo followed weeks later, filed through proper Air Force channels to the British Ministry of Defence, and was declassified via FOIA in June 1983.
The memo documents security patrolmen encountering a metallic, triangular object with colored lights in the forest on the first night, an object that appeared to maneuver through the trees as they approached, and physical traces at the site. On a subsequent night, Halt’s team observed star-like objects moving rapidly in sharp, angular movements and varying in color, along with a beam of light directed down near the base itself. The memo also notes elevated radiation readings at the site, a detail later investigation treated with limited scope and never fully released publicly by the Ministry of Defence.
This establishes that a senior, named US Air Force officer, in a formal capacity, filed an official written report describing multiple nights of unexplained aerial phenomena and physical traces near a base housing nuclear weapons, and that this memo has been treated as authentic by the Ministry of Defence and the US Air Force alike since its declassification. This is a rare case where the primary witness held real institutional authority and left a contemporaneous documentary record, not a testimony reconstructed decades later.
What this does not establish is the object’s nature. No formal US Air Force investigation report from 1980 or 1981 has ever been publicly identified or declassified, and the Ministry of Defence’s own contemporaneous handling of the case, including the radiation data, was limited in scope, with the detailed analysis never publicly released. The memo is a credible primary source. It is not, on its own, an explanation.
Document: Memorandum from Lt. Col. Charles I. Halt, Deputy Base Commander, RAF Woodbridge, to UK Ministry of Defence. January 13, 1981.
Declassified: Via FOIA, June 1983.
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