The Bentwaters UFOs
Tuesday April 22, 2008 8:27 AM
They say that lightning never strikes in the same place twice, but that is not the case with UFOs. The Royal Air Force base located at Lakenheath-Bentwaters in England was the site of two significant UFO encounters spaced almost exactly 25 years apart. Witnesses at the NATO-affiliated air base reported the first incident in 1956. On the night of August 12th of that year, unidentified objects were spotted in the base's air space. The next night, things got really interesting. A transport pilot flying near the base reported seeing a number of lights in the sky. Controllers in the air tower at the Bentwaters base also observed these unidentified lights as they passed near their location. Base radar confirmed that something was in the skies that night, and it clocked the unidentified objects as flying at an astounding 2,500 miles per hour.
This would have been extraordinary enough, but then a stationary object was sighted hovering just outside of the base. There was enough concern over this object that a Venom night-fighter jet was deployed to investigate. As the fighter jet approached it, the stationary object leapt into motion, rapidly accelerating to supersonic speeds. The UFO seemed to be taking evasive action, zipping here and there in the sky with the fighter jet struggling to keep up. The chase lasted for over 30 minutes, and before it was over, the UFO had turned the tables on the jet, whose pilot had to initiate some evasive maneuvers of his own to get the object off his tail. Running low on fuel, he landed, and a second jet was sent into the skies after the thing. This Venom fighter quickly developed instrument problems, however, and was rapidly grounded. The UFO left shortly afterward, as mysteriously as it had arrived.
As interesting as the night of August 13, 1956 proved to be at the Bentwaters base, the nights of December 26 and 27, 1980, were even more bizarre. The various reports connected with these winter nights have made the Bentwaters case famous among all the recorded incidents of British UFOs. A number of books of have been written about those nights, and although the British Office of Official Secrets has since released the only official written documentation of the Bentwaters UFOs, many UFOlogists insist that these documents were sanitized to obscure what really happened.
First, witnesses living near the Bentwaters base reported seeing lighted objects fall from the sky in the wee hours of December 26th. According to William Birnes' UFO Encyclopedia, British and American air traffic controllers in both civilian and military sites tracked these objects. The UFOs were headed in a trajectory toward Rendlesham Forest.
What happened next is a matter of some debate. The least conservative reports of the incident suggest that a UFO landed or crashed in the Rendlesham Forest, very close to the Bentwaters base. By some reports, base personnel made visible contact with extraterrestrials from the craft. The official documents released from the British Office of Official Secrets of course contains none of this. One thing is certain — a number of people saw something in the skies on those cold nights immediately following Christmas, 1980. Perhaps the UFOs had returned to apologize for leading the Venom fighters in such a merry chase 25 years before.
