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peared. 156 REVELATIONS officers from the nearby base, with the commanding officer himself conversing with the occupants. Although the English investigators kept being rebuffed by the British Ministry of Defense—the woman in charge of answering queries about UFOs even denied to their face that any close encounter had ever been reported to their office!—a breakthrough occurred when a document that was held back because it was covered by the Official Secrets Act in Britain was released by the U.S. Air Force on the other side of the Atlantic under the Freedom of Information Act. That key document was a memo from Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt. While it did not go into all the details that informants had already leaked to the investigators, it did authenticate the major facts: yes, unusual lights had approached the base about 3:00 A.M. on December 27, 1980. Yes, security personnel responded and found a strange glow- ing object in the forest. It was metallic, triangular, with a pulsing red light on top and blue lights at the bottom. Yes, depressions and radioac- tivity were found the next day. Yes, there was a red light that seemed to throw off light particles, broke into five white objects, and disap- Armed with this undeniable official memo, the women returned to the base, interviewed Halt and other officers and filled in many of the gaps in the record. One of the security people who had watched the object, the young man designated as Art Wallace in Sky Crash, who was in fact Larry Warren, was tracked down in the United States where the Air Force had reassigned him after the incident. He added many details. Others, including Halt's teenage son, confirmed the exact location and the events on the base that surrounded the landing. These disclosures failed to resolve some of the contradictions in the story. Did the landing occur on the twenty-seventh, as initially reported, or on the thirtieth, as indicated by some witnesses? Was there another event on the twenty-sixth, as some later disclosures seemed to show? Were there sightings on successive nights? And who was in charge at the time, Lieutenant Colonel Halt or Wing Commander Gordon Wil- liams? Finally, were actual aliens seen or only an object with some