The Rendlesham Forest Incident (1980)

• Pre-dawn, 26 Dec 1980 — lights appeared in the forest beyond Woodbridge's East Gate. Patrolmen, thinking an aircraft had crashed, entered and described a small glowing object with symbol-like markings; three ground depressions were later noted.
• Pre-dawn, 28 Dec 1980 — deputy base commander Lt Col Halt led a team back, narrating into a handheld recorder. He described a pulsing light and beams projected to the ground. This "Halt tape" later became public.^[1]

In January 1981 Halt wrote a memo — the famous "Halt Memo" ("Unexplained Lights") — to the UK Ministry of Defence describing the sightings and radiation readings.^[1] MoD UFO files later declassified to The National Archives show the case was assessed as of no defence significance and was not deeply investigated.^[2]

• Orford Ness lighthouse — from the forest, the lighthouse's rotating beam aligns with the described direction.
• Bright fireball plus expectation — the first night may have begun with a re-entering meteor or fireball.
• Radiation readings — later analysis judged Halt's readings close to local background, not anomalous.^[3]

Rendlesham matters because the witnesses were trained military personnel with a contemporaneous recording and an official memo — a higher evidentiary tier than most civilian cases.^[1] Yet the lighthouse-plus-fireball combination remains the most widely accepted conventional explanation.^[3] It shows how "high-credibility witnesses" and "a mundane explanation" can both be true at once.