Charles I. Halt

There's a little confusion over the exact dates in this case, and I want to explain it now because you're going to see both versions if you go looking for yourself.

The best known official memo written after this incident by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt dates the first incident to the early morning of December 27th.

But police records and other accounts place the initial investigation on December 26th.

Most reconstructions use December 26th for that first night.

So...

This is the deputy commander.

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt was the deputy base commander.

When the reports reached him, he was in a position to take them seriously because this has happened again.

There is an actual historical record that allows researchers to examine what was reported at the time.

Halt described military personnel investigating unusual lights and an apparent object in the forest.

His memorandum recorded a metallic-looking triangular object approximately two to three meters across at its base and about two meters high.

with a pushing and pulsing red light and blue lights underneath.

Now, that alone deserves serious historical attention.

And then there are the physical traces, the marks on the ground.

Halt's report described three depressions in the ground along with observations concerning marks on nearby trees.

The document also recorded radiation readings taken during the investigation.

And a lot of the folks involved in this have had experiences.

I know that Charles Halt Colonel Charles Halt had some strange otherworldly experiences related to his earlier experience at Malmstrom, or excuse me, at Rendlesham.

And so I think that, you know, there's a...

There's a phenomena here that goes beyond just simply seeing a UFO or seeing something strange.

The lights had returned to the forest.

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, the deputy base commander, decided to put an end to what he assumed was a massive prank or a misunderstood natural phenomena.

He gathered a team of men, grabbed a Geiger counter, a night vision scope, also known as a starlight scope, and a micro cassette audio recorder, and marched into Rendlesham Forest.

But instead of debunking the event, Halt became its most credible witness.

Moments later, they noticed three star-like objects in the night sky, two to the north and one to the south.

They were moving in sharp angular patterns that defied conventional aerodynamics, occasionally beaming down intense streams of light.

In Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt's official memo, he wrote, quote, "It illuminated the entire forest with a white light.

The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath.

In 2002, files relating to the incident were released for public inspection.

Included in them was a memorandum from the base's deputy commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, to the Ministry of Defence.

In the memo, Halt described how three USAF patrolmen reported seeing a strange glowing object in the forest, which was metallic and triangular in shape.

It illuminated the entire forest with a white light.

It served as the primary home for the 81st Fighter Wing and secretly housed a substantial arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons.

Colonel Charles Halt, served as the Deputy Base Commander at RAF Bentwaters under then Colonel Gordon Williams.

On the night of December 28, 1980, Colonel Halt and several service members, including a number of base security personnel, witnessed UFOs maneuvering over the base.

One UFO interacted directly with Halt and his men, at one point shining a bright beam of light down to the ground in front of them.

Colonel Halt will be appearing as one of our featured speakers at the MUFON symposium this year, and I am very fortunate to have him with me here tonight.

Colonel Charles Halt, welcome to the MUFON podcast.

Thank you very much.

My pleasure.

Their job included maintaining airspace integrity, and as such, when a luminous event appeared in the tree line of Rendlesham Forest, it naturally drew their attention and concern.

The next development came when Lieutenant Colonel Charles I Halt, then deputy base commander, decided to capture the unfolding story with a tape recorder he brought into the forest.

The resulting eighteen-minute audio log is more than a diary.

It includes real-time commentary about lights, strange metallic objects, and sudden changes in the night's ambient conditions that only a man in his forties could describe with such immediacy.

Parallel to Halt's verbal account were readings taken by an AN/PDR-27 survey meter, a portable radiation detector commonly used by military technicians.

Those measurements, recorded at what later investigators described as the site's depressions or landing areas, reported beta/gamma levels hovering just above baseline at zero point one milliroentgens per hour with occasional spikes of zero.

So seven mR/hr.

Reliability is another dimension that turns the story from legend to evidence-laden case study.

This brief yet unsettling report became the first documented trigger in what would evolve into a chain of investigations and eyewitness accounts, culminating in a rare official acknowledgment by the military of an unidentified aerial phenomenon that was recorded with both audio and written notes for posterity.

Within a few days, Lieutenant Colonel Charles I Halt, Bentwaters' deputy base commander, highly regarded for his methodical record-keeping, arrived at the forest with a dictaphone and notebook, fully prepared to capture every observable detail.

He reported first encountering an intense, red, sun-like glare that hovered over the trees before resolving into five discrete white objects that appeared to drift in a straight line across the darkness.

After the encounter, Halt drafted the Halt Memo, a succinct but comprehensive account that remains one of only two official U.S. Air Force documents describing an alleged UFO contact on British soil.