The Craft Of Unknown Origin

There's a very cool Wisconsin MUFON meeting coming up next month that I would like to go to, because -- holy crap! -- the guest speaker is one of the eyewitnesses to The Rendlesham Forest Incident, otherwise known as "The British Roswell!" Why it's called this I don't know, because Rendlesham doesn't involve any crashed spaceships or alien corpses or government coverups, but I guess every country wants its own Roswell, and our British friends need something to feel good about these days, so I'll let them have this one.

I first heard of The Rendlesham Forest Incident (can we just call it RFI from here on out? thank you) a few years back when I saw it re-enacted on some Discovery Channel UFO show which seemed to be repeated about 15 times a day every flipping day for several months. Because of this endless repetition, I quickly grew tired of the whole thing and forgot about it. But now Rendlesham's back, and this time I'm paying attention.

It's a pretty cool story, actually.... For three nights running in December, 1980, a whole bunch of US military men stationed at RAF Bentwater and RAF Woodbridge, two NATO air bases in the UK, were run ragged chasing a cone-shaped object that prowled around the bases and landed in the nearby Forest -- Rendlesham Forest, in fact. The object, which came to be known as "The Craft Of Unknown Origin," or COUO, was seen by 80 witnesses, and left behind "ground traces" and "radioactive anomalies." At one point, strange entities were seen outside the COUO, apparently attempting repairs. Also, a dog died.

Did this strange object kill a dog? If so, what else might it kill?

So the guy who will be speaking at the Wisconsin MUFON meeting next month is one Sgt. James Penniston, USAF Retired. This is the man who was in charge of security at RAF Woodbridge the night the COUO first appeared, which means he was in charge of the team that was sent out to investigate what was at first thought to be a crashed airplane, which means he was one of the first to lay eyes on the strange object, which means he discovered the strange black markings on the side of he cone that may or may not have been alien symbols... No matter how you slice it, that's pretty cool.

Ultimately the COUO took off straight up into the sky at a speed that Penniston described in his log book as "IMPOSSIBLE!"

I'll tell you what else is impossible: Penniston will be showing off -- for the first time anywhere -- an actual model of the COUO! It took them 32 years to build a model of a cone? IMPOSSIBLE! Will there be models of the strange entities? Of the dead dog? Those are models I'd really like to see, and I think these chaps have had more than enough time to make them.

You can learn more about the RFI here... If you dare.