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beginning. security. THE 155 SPECIAL EFFECTS crashed UFO was actually planted in the minds of witnesses from the A forestry worker next came forward with his story. He had found an area where the tops of the branches were broken and the trees scorched. He reported it but there was no follow-up. A fourth man, a civilian electrician, was brought on the base to repair guiding lights on tall poles at the end of the main runway. He thought they must have been destroyed by an aircraft making an emergency landing. What seemed especially strange to him was the fact that during the whole time of the repairs he was surrounded by extraordinary Taken together, these reports seemed to substantiate the actual reality of an encounter between U.S. Air Force officers and a landed UFO in an English forest. INVESTIGATION The story of the Rendlesham case, which I summarize here from the book by Butler, Street, and Randies, developed between 1981 and 1984 as the three English investigators explored new leads and obtained data from new witnesses. An important informant was a civilian radar opera- tor at Watton in Norfolk, who said that on December 27, 1980, an unusual object was tracked heading in from the coast, and it was lost near Rendlesham Forest. Of special interest was the fact that two intelligence officers from the U.S. Air Force—presumably the now infamous OSI that employed Richard Doty in New Mexico—visited this English radar station within two days of the tracking and requested the recordings for study. They told the amazed radarmen that they had tracked a metallic UFO. Again, these normally tight-lipped officers were uncharacteristi- cally talkative, adding that the mysterious object had been confronted by military men whose jeep had stalled as they got close to it. They even volunteered that the object was observed on the ground while it was being repaired by the alien crew, and that this was seen by high-ranking