Clueless article on "Rendlesham Forest"

[SLVA]

Anyway I don't see what a lighthouse has to do with what Lt Col Charles I. Halt reported in his memorandum. Have you read it ?

It is one of the most ridiculous debunking hypothesis ever, that shows that debunkers really are fanatics.

Yes sorry, there it all is in Post #10 by justcurious - spot on! (I scanned through the thread on page 1 first time round) Those B&W photos of the scene were reproduced in Left At Eastgate I think it was.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

Oh well, if you think that about Brian Dunning, we're not even close to being in the same mindset. You've made up your mind about what happened in this case and you're unwilling to look at other, more plausible explanations. I guess we'll just leave it at that.

This makes a few times now that you've put forward a rather curious version of the word "plausible" to me. Lighthouse beams that do not exist are not plausible. People failing to see a beekeeper standing directly in front of them in an open field is not plausible either. The world you seem to believe in is vastly more strange than the one I do.

What I said about Dunning is completely accurate. Why don't you email him and ask where he gets his information? All he does is read longer pieces from other debunkers and then condenses the talking points to short pieces for his site. Ask him how many investigations he's done. But hey, here's an idea: Don't rely on Dunning so much. Had you not you might have avoided the public embarrassment of endorsing a fictional lighthouse beam that was EASILY proven nonexistent. Dunning doesn't care that it doesn't actually exist, nor does Magaha. So both of them will continue to promote it no matter what. And well, there's no better an example of propaganda than that. I wouldn't point a person looking for accurate information about UFOs or anything else in the direction of Dunning anymore than I would Michael Sala. Both are identical figures. They have a worldview to promote and they're not going to allow facts to get in their way.

Edit: I've looked back over this thread and noticed that my language might be getting a bit unnecessarily testy at times and I apologize for that. But it irritates me to no end that these things have to be explained over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. I can't count how many times I've had to discount this absurd lighthouse claim on forums like this one. In a perfect world when something gets proven wrong everyone would be aware of it and you wouldn't have to keep going through the same song and dance each time it gets mentioned. But this isn't a perfect world and with guys like Dunning and Magaha, who both know damned well that the lighthouse beam they talk about never actually existed, continuing to promote deliberate falsehoods in an effort to trick people into looking no further I suppose I'll probably have to explain this a dozen times more in the future.

 

[justcurious]

This is what they saw close-up OK ?

The object was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, approximately two to three meters across the base and approximately two meters high. It illuminated the entire forest with a white light. The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a bank(s) of blue lights underneath. The object was hovering or on legs. As the patrolmen approached the object, it manoeuvred through the trees and disappeared. At this time the animals on the nearby farm went into a frenzy. The object was briefly sighted approximately an hour later near the back gate.
CHARLES I. HALT, Lt Col, USAF
Deputy Base Commander

I tend toward the psi-op hypothesis on this one, but seeing what they reported, those guys have the right to suppose that it was not of this world.

Believing that a lighthouse can induce such illusions is totally fanatical.

And I'm not talking about the traces...

 

[SLVA]

OK, now I've read the Ridpath in full this bit is a good example of his overall agenda:

."Evidently his rather garbled second sentence is a concatenation of the reactions “Is that all?” and “Aren’t they any bigger than that?”..." If you haven't heard the tape in full you might think it was something other than what it sounds like - a genuine recording of some very real and concerned witness testimony (they go on to describe shards of molten substance falling from the craft as it happened in front of them.

"..... and surely too small for the presumed landing gear of an object described by some witnesses as being “as big as a tank”...."
How should you assume what it weighed or what was keeping it in the air?

Who is Ridpath and why the article ? Only the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Astronomy no less. I'll guess I'll have to go with the 'but he wasn't there and didn't witness what it described on the tape' line?

 

[Sean Elifritz]

Btw, here's a video of the lighthouse:

Pretty extraordinary, eh? Really goes to show just how comically maniacal this "plausible explanation" is.

 

[Angel of Ioren]

Btw, here's a video of the lighthouse:

Pretty extraordinary, eh? Really goes to show just how comically maniacal this "plausible explanation" is.

And here's another video:

http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/vince.mov

This is going nowhere. I never said it had to be the light house - one video makes it seem like it is, the other doesn't. Each side has an agenda to push and a book to sell. I prefer to stick with the explanations based in reality, not those creating aliens to fit into a solution. If the light house explanation is wrong, well, so be it. I don't care, I wasn't there, I've done no research apart from reading what's been presented by both sides. I don't know how much research you guys have done, and if you have and come to the conclusion that the only explanation is an aircraft that's of non-human origin, well that's fine. I don't believe that's the case - but I apparently

might have avoided the public embarrassment of endorsing a fictional lighthouse beam that was EASILY proven nonexistent

even though one video clearly shows it exists.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

And here's another video:

http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/vince.mov

This is going nowhere. I never said it had to be the light house - one video makes it seem like it is, the other doesn't. Each side has an agenda to push and a book to sell. I prefer to stick with the explanations based in reality, not those creating aliens to fit into a solution. If the light house explanation is wrong, well, so be it. I don't care, I wasn't there, I've done no research apart from reading what's been presented by both sides. I don't know how much research you guys have done, and if you have and come to the conclusion that the only explanation is an aircraft that's of non-human origin, well that's fine. I don't believe that's the case - but I apparently even though one video clearly shows it exists.

Wtf? All you did was provide another source to what I've been saying. All that lighthouse does is flash when the beam hits the plate. Both videos show that. Just because your video sports a couple idiots pretending it means something incredible doesn't change anything. The debunkers have been saying for decades that the lighthouse beam would actually shine between the trees and all this other nonsense.

Edit: And obviously they are standing much closer to it than what the Rendlesham witnesses were because it's brighter in your video than it should be. The video I posted showed accurate distances. And that young guy is hilarious, "illuminates the forest." Lol, it's not even illuminating you! It's just a blinking dot.

 

[ArchieBedford]

I heard the article live, when it was broadcast. Now I'm about as far from a conspiracy theorist as you could imagine, but it seemed to me to be just a hit-piece, curiously aired the very morning Leslie Kean's new book was published. Very odd.

I've seen the Orford Ness Lighthouse from Rendlesham Forest. The idea that the triangular, metallic airborne craft, glowing with red and blue lights, that Jim Penniston and his colleagues went right up close to, touched and drew; that left three dome-shaped indentations in the forest floor in the shape of an equilateral triangle of which Col. Halt subsequently took plaster casts (he still has them), and left broken tree branches above in the forest canopy caused by its descent - the theory that the Orford Ness Lighthouse caused that phenomenon is clearly complete BS.

The way Ridpath and his ilk work is that they know most listeners will know nothing about the case and will have never scrutinised any of the witness testimony, let alone ever met or interviewed them. Most listeners just hear superficially about the Rendlesham UFO incident over the years and due to their very slight acquaintance with the facts can easily be manipulated into believing all these civilian and military witnesses (in charge of an enormous quantity of nuclear ordnance) on three consecutive nights got in a frenzy over a distant lighthouse, that they all saw every night for years. Don't mention the damaged trees or the indentations on the ground; don't mention the scorched vegetation; don't mention the elevated radiation levels; don't mention the multiple witness testimony of the structured triangular craft; don't mention the burned circle of dessicated soil in the field at Capel Green where the craft was surrounded on the third night by 30 armed US servicemen, or the medical reports of all the airmen with retinal damage due to the ferocity of the light and heat emitted by the craft; don't mention AFOSI personnel swarming all over the base in the subsequent days intimidating airmen into silence, or the Halt Memorandum, or the documented damage to the nuclear ordnance seemingly caused by one of these "visitors" firing beams down through the steel-concrete weapons bays.

Just say they saw the Orford Ness Lighthouse, and the suckers will be fooled.

 

[SLVA]

A message to the guys up the page a bit, chill guys....
It is a BIG case in Ufology this one, so it's bound to polarise us this one.
Angel, it doesn't necessarily have to be aliens. It could be psy-ops or terrestrial all be it not one of ours...

 

[Angel of Ioren]

A message to the guys up the page a bit, chill guys....
It is a BIG case in Ufology this one, so it's bound to polarise us this one.
Angel, it doesn't necessarily have to be aliens. It could be psy-ops or terrestrial all be it not one of ours...

Well, that I can get behind. At least psi-ops or a different aircraft of terrestrial origin involves something that is known to exist. I'm just against the whole thing being aliens, which is what I have mentioned above. The lighthouse is a possible explanation - I can't say if it's the correct one although some here assert that it is absolutely not.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

Well, that I can get behind. At least psi-ops or a different aircraft of terrestrial origin involves something that is known to exist. I'm just against the whole thing being aliens, which is what I have mentioned above. The lighthouse is a possible explanation - I can't say if it's the correct one although some here assert that it is absolutely not.

That is Vallee's hypothesis, that it was a psychological warfare experiment conducted against our own troops. I don't subscribe to it, especially since Penniston says that on the first night he actually touched the object. And really, it's just a guess. There's no more evidence for it than anything else. But hey, at least it makes better sense than the silly lighthouse idea.

By the way, here's that lighthouse keeper interview. It starts at around the 8:50 mark:

 

[The Pair of Cats]

This makes a few times now that you've put forward a rather curious version of the word "plausible" to me. Lighthouse beams that do not exist are not plausible. People failing to see a beekeeper standing directly in front of them in an open field is not plausible either. The world you seem to believe in is vastly more strange than the one I do.

What I said about Dunning is completely accurate. Why don't you email him and ask where he gets his information? All he does is read longer pieces from other debunkers and then condenses the talking points to short pieces for his site. Ask him how many investigations he's done. But hey, here's an idea: Don't rely on Dunning so much. Had you not you might have avoided the public embarrassment of endorsing a fictional lighthouse beam that was EASILY proven nonexistent. Dunning doesn't care that it doesn't actually exist, nor does Magaha. So both of them will continue to promote it no matter what. And well, there's no better an example of propaganda than that. I wouldn't point a person looking for accurate information about UFOs or anything else in the direction of Dunning anymore than I would Michael Sala. Both are identical figures. They have a worldview to promote and they're not going to allow facts to get in their way.

Edit: I've looked back over this thread and noticed that my language might be getting a bit unnecessarily testy at times and I apologize for that. But it irritates me to no end that these things have to be explained over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. I can't count how many times I've had to discount this absurd lighthouse claim on forums like this one. In a perfect world when something gets proven wrong everyone would be aware of it and you wouldn't have to keep going through the same song and dance each time it gets mentioned. But this isn't a perfect world and with guys like Dunning and Magaha, who both know damned well that the lighthouse beam they talk about never actually existed, continuing to promote deliberate falsehoods in an effort to trick people into looking no further I suppose I'll probably have to explain this a dozen times more in the future.

The trouble is that the debunkers try to put up prosaic or plausible explanations for this case using such outrageous and poorly thought out excuses such as the light house.(Don't even get me started on the flaming pile of horseshit theory!). If you are going to try and explain this case away with a simple explanation, please at least try to use one that is halfway plausible .
All this does is make them seem foolish to those who cast a truly sceptical eye on this case.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

Reminds me of how the the self-righteous believers bristle when Venus is brought up to explain THEIR case. And yet we have clear evidence (agreed upon even by UFO supporters) that Venus is often mistaken for a flying object with extraordinary flight characteristics--EVEN THOUGH IT IS VENUS!

The believers sniff and say that THEIR UFO is no Venus.

I thought the video showing lighthouse (at dusk) showed a very likely candidate (combined with other factors including confusion--something that ALWAYS gets glossed over by believers as they describe their cases as though they occurred in a lab under controlled circumstances!).

Lance

Oh, you thought? Well, I wasn't aware of that. Since you are the grand emperor of rationality and knowledge I suppose I should cast aside the common sense telling me that dozens of men wouldn't be fooled into thinking about Martians because of a teeny weeny, stationary, blinking light five miles away that had always been there. Shit, a week ago 3 friends and I were fooled into thinking for about 17 minutes that America had been overrun by zombies after we foolishly misidentified a firefly that landed on a porch swing. Hey, coulda' happened to anyone.

 

[The Pair of Cats]

I thought the video showing lighthouse (at dusk) showed a very likely candidate (combined with other factors including confusion--something that ALWAYS gets glossed over by believers as they describe their cases as though they occurred in a lab under controlled circumstances!).

Well this just sums up my case perfectly. I'm surprised you didn't bring up the BALL LIGHTNING coming out of the SWAMP GAS near URANUS.

(BORROWED from the justcurious post...with thanks.)
"The object was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, approximately two to three meters across the base and approximately two meters high. It illuminated the entire forest with a white light. The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a bank(s) of blue lights underneath. The object was hovering or on legs. As the patrolmen approached the object, it manoeuvred through the trees and disappeared. At this time the animals on the nearby farm went into a frenzy. The object was briefly sighted approximately an hour later near the back gate."
CHARLES I. HALT, Lt Col, USAF
Deputy Base Commander

Yeah Lance you've got me convinced. The good Lt Colonel and his men were obviously all on LSD when they went traipsing into the forest that night and i could easily see how he would have mistaken what he saw for a LIGHTHOUSE. Was it VENUS? Or were they just CONFUSED? It's just unfortunate for Lt Colonel Halt and his men that you weren't there at the time to ease their troubled minds with your Venus solution.
I'm also sure the past 36 years would have been a tad less frustrating for them with that knowledge on board.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

So Ad hominem, huh? Nice...



Or you could explain why that happens to pilots and police and many other folks all the time with Venus (as an example only) but the same principle couldn't apply here even as the witnesses precisely call in and out the light at the EXACT same frequency as the lighthouse swings.

A pitiful effort.

Lance

Lol, I'm not going to be drawn into a big religious debate again. I already concluded one with your partner in crime. If you want to center in on one tiny segment of the series of events and ignore every other detail of the incident like the beams the object shot to the ground, it weaving through trees, it breaking into 5 white objects, Penniston actually freaking touching it, and everything else to satisfy some strange emotional need you have than knock yourself out.

 

[The Pair of Cats]

Oh, you thought? Well, I wasn't aware of that. Since you are the grand emperor of rationality and knowledge I suppose I should cast aside the common sense telling me that dozens of men wouldn't be fooled into thinking about Martians because of a teeny weeny, stationary, blinking light five miles away that had always been there. Shit, a week ago 3 friends and I were fooled into thinking for about 17 minutes that America had been overrun by zombies after we foolishly misidentified a firefly that landed on a porch swing. Hey, coulda' happened to anyone.

Yep Penniston, Halt, Warren and Burroughs were just having a flashback from some of those Rendelsham Forest mushrooms that they had gotten from the farmer with the flaming pile of horseshit who regularly roamed the area peddling his wares. But as i said before if Lance, the Grand Poohbah of the Paranormal Skeptoids Society, was there he would have been able to mellow them out with the prosaic and maybe a bit of Dr Hynek style swamp gas theory.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

Sure and don't let the fact that Penniston's story has grown and grown and grown (somewhat like the nose of a certain puppet) bother you a bit!

The first rule of the true "scientific" believer is to throw out the contemporaneous reports (which were much more prosaic) and accept the latest and greatest ooga booga like Penniston's suddenly appearing notebook (with the wrong times and dates, etc) which was denied by Burroughs (along with the "inspection Penniston supposedly made).

Certainly if Penniston tomorrow reported a 40 foot tall bunny, you would be asking me to EXPLAIN THE EARS! EXPLAIN THE EARS!

It's sad, really.

Lance

What do you mean by "first" rule? A first rule implies that there is a second and possibly even a third. But you know as well as I do that you have one rule and one rule only: Alien spacecraft do not and can not exist. And because that's the only rule you operate by it is why you feel justified in offering up ludicrous explanations for any and all sighting reports. You don't know what these things are anymore than I do about disco dancing but to scoffers the ends justifies the means. It doesn't matter to you that your so-called explanations are doused with horseshit and often ignore 90% of the given case's data. What does matter to you is convincing all of us poor, sad, gullible believers-in-aliens to abandon our silly ways and see things in the enlightened way that you do. If ya' gotta' fudge a detail or two to make us see the light or even be a bit of a presumptuous twat at times who claims to know what every unidentified light in the world is from the comfort of your living room better than someone looking right at it does that's OK because at the end of the day you're doing more good than harm, right? Lol, y'all don't know half as much as you think you do.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

I do admit some rhetoric sometimes...

And I don't really expect to convince you. The truth is that for most reports there is no way to check all the details and get all of the real story. I am always gonna go with a plausible prosaic explanation--you are free to go the opposite way.

Occasionally something can be checked out--like in the Ted Phillips fiasco unfolding in these very forums. And you know, even there when there is the possibility of a slam dunk debunking of a claim, I still don't expect many believers to change their minds at all.

That is the sad truth.


Lance

That isn't true at all and you know it. I was convinced that Ed Walters, Bob Lazar, Stan Romanek, and plenty of others were hoaxers. Hell, I don't even accept Roswell as a good case nor do I believe in the "vast government conspiracy" everyone is always telling me about. When someone points out a legitimate problem with a case I listen. But simply throwing shit at the fan and hoping some of it sticks like Magaha did with his lighthouse, meteors, and car headlights isn't going to work with me so long as I still have a few neurons firing in my head.

 

[Hotkafka]

The Ian Ridpath article seems to avoid dealing with a good number of details mentioned in the report... I.E. the radiation readings, the trace evidence, the physical description of the craft, the bank of blue lights. Seems a rather myopic attempt at reconstructing a sighting.

 

[Sean Elifritz]

I notice you avoid the unpleasantness of the Penniston's ever-growing story.
Very wise.

Lance

And what is this "unpleasantness" that you speak of? Enlighten me. Hopefully it's not going to be a mindless smear job like what Klass waged on Walton.