Most convincing ufo encounters?

[frogmarch]

12. Rendlesham Forest incident

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident

Excerpt:

Jim Penniston and John Burroughs went to investigate the craft together. In an interview with Larry King on 9 November 2007, Jim Penniston claimed that he did a 45 minutes full investigation of the craft on the ground, touched the craft and took photos of the craft.[38] John Burroughs apparently contradicts this in a separate interview in Robert Stack's Unsolved Mysteries. He states that after suddenly encountering the craft on the ground, "We all hit the ground, and it went up into the trees". The interviews with Jim Penniston and John Burroughs have subsequently been made available on Youtube.[39][40]

Science writer Ian Ridpath investigated the incident in 1983, initially for BBC TV's Breakfast Time news programme,[41] and on 5 January 1985 wrote an article for the Guardian which did much to discredit the accounts of the UFO sightings at Rendlesham.[42] Ridpath asked local forester Vince Thurkettle about the flashing light, and he indicated that it originated from the lighthouse at Orford Ness, which as seen from the forest edge appears to hover slightly above the ground and would appear to move as the witnesses moved between the trees. At that time, the Orford Ness lighthouse was the second-brightest in Britain with an intensity of 5 million candelas.[43] In the Halt tape (mentioned above), one can hear an unidentified airman call out "There it is again ... there it is" with an interval of 5 seconds, the same frequency at which the Orford Ness lighthouse flashes.[16] Had a UFO been present, the airmen should have reported a second source of light (the lighthouse) in the same line of sight. Video footage of the lighthouse as seen from Colonel Halt's vantage point at the edge of the forest shows it flashing at this rate.[44]

Thurkettle saw the alleged "landing marks", as did the local police, and believed them simply to be old "rabbit diggings" covered with pine needles.[45] USAF photographs of the marks discovered by researcher Georgina Bruni were sent to the MoD by Lord Hill-Norton in 2001 and released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007.[46] Moreover, the supposed burn marks in the trees were actually axe cuts made by foresters that indicated the trees were ready to be felled. To give further pause to accepting the alleged UFO sighting, a meteor "almost as bright as the full Moon" was spotted over Southern England at exactly the time of the initial reports of a bright object "landing" in the forest, according to Dr John Mason, who collects reports of meteor sightings for the British Astronomical Association. "Nothing came down in Rendlesham Forest," concludes Ridpath.[47]

Crucial amongst the evidence is the interpretation of the levels of radiation in the area (clearly heard on the "Halt tape&quot . Experts at the UK’s National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) have pointed out that the equipment used for this measurement was not intended to measure background radiation and therefore the readings at the low end of the measurement scale are meaningless.[13][14]

People who want with all their hearts for it to be true that ETs are visiting Earth are going to keep on believing it is true, regardless. The Rendlesham Forest incident is just one of many supposed UFO incidents (including Roswell and The Battle Over LA) that have been debunked but won’t go away.