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On Saturday we went to Sizewell and walked down the beach to the bird reserve visitors’ centre. There were almost as many binocular-wielding twitchers as there were actual birds but it still made for a pleasant, interesting walk. We stopped for tea and picked up some leaflets; among them one for Rendlesham Forest.

So it was that we found ourselves driving out there on Sunday.

The forest is famous as the site of the most significant UFO encounter in Britain. In December 1980, airmen on the US airbase in the middle of the woods reported seeing strange lights in the sky. Three of them set out to investigate, but then radio communications started to break up, and so while one stayed back at the edge of the trees the other two ventured forward.

Eventually they came to a clearing where they saw three ‘mechanical’ lights that hovered just a few inches above the ground. The animals on a nearby farm were getting distressed and the airmen could hear the sound of women screaming. Eventually the lights shot off into the sky.

A couple of days later a tall pillar of light appeared in the sky, which when the airmen went back to investigate opened up at the top to reveal a large black eye. Radiation levels at the site were ten times the background norm when measured the following day, and the investigators found three indentations in the ground that could have been where the feet of a craft had come to rest.

Nothing has ever really been proven one way or the other about the sightings, and nobody has properly explained what caused them. However, the forest was extensively replanted after the storms of 1987, but no trees would ever grow in the clearings where the lights had apparently come to rest.

Now you can visit those clearings by following the UFO trail that leads you through the forest’s broad, open paths, and that’s just what we did.

We’ve driven through the forest loads of times but never broken off from the road and so didn’t know quite what to expect. As it turned out, it was very much like Thetford, with a lot of pine trees and some fern, but also camping areas and, on its edge, agricultural land.

Walking through it on our own was quite spooky. In places, where the canopy is thick, it can turn quite dark, and we were the only ones about. Now and then pine cones would drop down, and sometimes a whole branch would come crashing to the ground and make us jump. The biggest surprise, though, was the family of deer that ran out from the treeline and straight past us, not two metres away. We saw them again some minutes later standing in a clearing. We stopped; they stopped. We all looked at each other, wondering who would move first. Eventually we did, but not for the next five minutes, and all that time we stood watching each other - them just as curious as we were.

As for aliens - well, apart from the markings on the back of the trail signs, which show an alien head and some strange code that apparently appeared there last year, we saw none.

Probably for the best.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.