You Can't Tell the People

I (Herr Direktor speaking) have just finished Georgina Bruni's brilliant account of the Rendlesham Forest Incident, You Can't Tell the People. The title comes from the Great Bitch Thatcher who, when Bruni asked her/it about what she/it knew about UFOs, replied 'You've got to get your facts right, and you can't tell the people.'

The Rendlesham Forest Incident is legendary as being the 'British Roswell', and is generally taken to be a sighting by several USAF men on a night patrol in Rendlesham Forest, which is just outside the former USAF/NATO bases at RAF Bentwaters and Woodbridge in Suffolk. The story goes that, on 27 December 1980, these guys saw lights in Rendlesham Forest and decided to investigate, and apparently they saw a craft land amongst the trees.

Sceptics decry the whole thing as either a deliberate hoax, or that the men saw the nearby Orford Ness lighthouse.

Georgina Bruni demolishes the lighthouse theory in You Can't Tell the People, and also the rest of the sceptics' arguments that somehow everyone was mistaken. (Why aren't sceptics ever sceptical about scepticism?!)

She gets people to talk for the first time, and reveals that there was not one incident, but FOUR, the first beginning late on Christmas Day 1980, and with UFO activity occurring for the next three nights after that. If that is not enough, on the third or fourth night there was a major incident, during which the famous 'Rendlesham Tape' was recorded. This was a tape recording made by the Deputy Base Commander at Woodbridge, Lt. Col. Halt, as events unfolded in the forest. Only 18 minutes of Halt's more than 5 hours of tape have ever been made public, and Bruni states that Halt will NEVER release the remaining material. This was the night during which something not only landed, but was also witnessed not only by Halt, but also by at least 50 military personnel, some of whom seem to have been brainwashed afterwards so that they would either forget about it and/or provide disinformation.

The most disturbing aspect of the book is, however, not the possibility that something very strange occurred during Xmas Week 1980, but the sheer lengths that the British and - more importantly - the Americans went to to cover it up. It struck me yesterday that the cover-up is not so much about aliens / extraterrestrials / ultraterrestrials, but about the fact that if they admitted that something had actually happened, they would lose face. It's all about maintaining one's authority. And, heaven forbid, should the CIA and their cohorts in Area 51 ever lose that.