Encounter in Rendlesham Forest: The Inside Story of the World's Best-Documented UFO Incident

Encounter in Rendlesham Forest (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014) tells the December 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident from the inside: Nick Pope, the former head of the MoD's UFO desk, wrote it with John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, two of the patrolmen who went into the forest outside RAF Woodbridge after lights were reported. It retells the three nights, Lt. Col. Charles Halt's investigation and memo, the airmen's interrogations and their later health problems.

Its later chapters carry Penniston's account of a binary message: ones and zeroes he says the craft flashed at him, written in his notebook and later decoded. That part of the story is not in his early accounts and has no corroboration from other witnesses. Publishers Weekly noted that the book never reaches a firm conclusion about what happened.

The book is the authors' testimony, not an official record. Sceptics attribute the first night's lights to a fireball and the flashing light to the Orford Ness lighthouse; the MoD concluded the events posed no threat to national security.

The first chapter, "Ground Zero", is published by AbeBooks with the publisher's permission. It reconstructs the first night from the patrolmen's side: Burroughs and his supervisor Bud Steffens seeing coloured lights in the forest from the East Gate, Penniston touching a hull that felt like glass and symbols that felt "like sandpaper", the craft rising through the trees, the airmen's watches running forty-five minutes slow, and three fresh indentations in the frozen clearing the next morning, when Halt was told they had been "chasing UFOs". The account is the witnesses' own, as written with Pope.

Sources: Publishers Weekly · Rendlesham incident record · AbeBooks excerpt