Was Rendlesham Forest a prank by British Air Service?

[Ninshub]

Nick Redfern over at MU:

The Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident: Exposed as a Top Secret Experiment

Nick Redfern    May 4, 2020

“In the final days of December 1980, strange encounters and bizarre incidents occurred in the heart of Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England. Based upon their personal encounters, many of the military personnel who were present at the time believed that something extraterrestrial came down in those dark woods. What if, however, there was another explanation for what happened four decades ago? What if that explanation, if revealed, proved to be even more controversial than the theory that aliens arrived from a faraway world? The ramifications for the field of Ufology would be immense. In my new book – The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy – I reveal that one of the most famous UFO cases of all time was really a series of top secret experiments using holograms, mind-control programs, deception, disinformation, conspiracies and cover-ups. The shocking truth of a forty-year-old mystery is now revealed.” Those are my words. They also happen to be words I absolutely stand by. (...)

Who knows? But a prank involving all those convenient popular words, I doubt it. For a start, the name Derren Brown has never even been mentioned! 

This guy's channel is a great one for counter-evidence as he does his research really well.  Here he includes a link to a document on the Rendlesham forest incident which is very telling!

LOL, after my reply to you on the other thread, this was the one I settled onto out of all his videos, JUST NOW.

LOL, after my reply to you on the other thread, this was the one I settled onto out of all his videos, JUST NOW.

More strange because when looking through his videos, I actually wanted to look at another one but was drawn to this one.

[Laird]

Here's a recent (30 April 2026) Guardian article, an edited extract from Chasing Aliens by Daniel Lavelle, which has me reconsidering the soundness of the skeptical content linked to in this thread.

The Rendlesham Forest mystery: ‘It’s the perfect storm of a UFO case’

Unsatisfied, Halt penned a signed memo a few weeks later, which detailed the events more fully – the patrolmen seeing the “strange glowing object in the forest” that was “triangular in shape” and “hovering or on legs”, the object disappearing and then being briefly sighted again. He then described what he saw: the depressions in the earth and the lights in the sky. The memo corroborates part of Penniston’s story, but there is no mention of him analysing the craft for 45 minutes while scribbling into a notebook.

After I met Pope, I walked the tall streets of Manhattan and wrestled with all I had heard and read about Rendlesham. The story is extraordinary, like something out of a Marvel movie. Maybe it boils down to nothing more than a group of easily excitable Americans getting spooked by a deer, a lighthouse and some stars. But I found the witnesses’ stories compelling and I believe they saw real aircraft displaying strange characteristics. I don’t accept that stars, meteorological conditions and a lighthouse could fool people to such a wild degree. Halt has said he was well aware of the presence of the lighthouse and has pointed out that neither stars nor lighthouse beacons zip across the sky and shoot light beams down to Earth.