Encounter in Rendlesham Forest

March 3, 2014
Pope (The Uninvited) collaborates with retired U.S. Air Force veterans Burroughs and Penniston to detail their uncanny experiences at Rendlesham Forest, England. In December of 1980, Burroughs and Penniston, who were stationed there, were sent into the forest to investigate red and blue lights believed to be related to a plane crash. Upon closer inspection, they found a strange, smooth craft that was decorated with strange symbols that they are convinced was a UFO. Pope starts off strong in his account of the subsequent investigations, including internal memos and transcripts of interviews with others who returned to the site to corroborate Burroughs and Penniston’s experiences. However, Pope eventually loses his narrative thread by entertaining a number of theories, ranging from the plausible to the far-fetched, in search of an explanation. It is not until the book’s waning chapters that Pope reveals Penniston’s shocking claims that the UFO flashed a series of ones and zeroes—later transcribed as binary code—to him while he was bathed in the light. Pope never reaches a definitive conclusion, but his questions and detailed evidence certainly give readers on both sides of the UFO debate plenty to chew on.

April 1, 2014

In December 1980, two Royal Air Force (RAF) bases adjacent to the Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk, England, were being used by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) when air force staff allegedly sighted a UFO. Pope (Open Skies, Closed Minds) later worked for several years for the Ministry of Defense investigating such episodes. He evolved from skeptic to true believer and here revisits this most famous British UFO encounter with two of the men who claimed to have witnessed the incident, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, both USAF (ret.) who now lecture on the topic. The alleged eyewitness descriptions of the event (one coauthor now claims he touched the UFO) read like sf, while the newly declassified government documents that Pope quotes from seem rather tame by comparison and don't add much to the story. The book is slowed down by Pope's section on what skeptics believe about the occasion, in which he makes it clear that he doesn't agree. VERDICT Hard-core UFO enthusiasts who liked Larry Warren's Left at East Gate, may also like Pope's book, while nonbelievers will not find either title an objective study that will change their minds.--Mary E. Jones, Los Angeles P.L.

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