Strange Arrivals Grim & Mild

On Christmas night, 1980, a light is observed descending into a forest just outside RAF Bentwaters, a British military air base on the eastern coast of England. Three American servicemen leave the base and follow the light into Rendlesham Forest. What they see marks the beginning of a three-night incident known as Britain’s Roswell.

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Two nights after the first encounter, strange lights are once again seen above RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge. The US Air Force dispatches a group into Rendlesham Forest to investigate. The leader of the group makes an audio recording of the hours-long incident that follows, involving multiple unidentified lights that seem to invade the airspace above facilities where nuclear weapons are stored.

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The British tabloids get wind of the Rendlesham encounter and it becomes public in 1983. The news prompts a closer look at the Rendlesham narratives, and researchers put forward alternative explanations that don’t involve unknown craft entering the air space above RAF Bentwaters. Twenty years after the encounter, the UK Ministry of Defense releases its Rendlesham file. What’s inside is not what researchers were expecting.

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The three main witnesses to the Rendlesham Forest encounters agree about the basic events that happened over the three nights. But there are parts where they don’t agree, and that's where things get even stranger. And what, exactly, did they encounter during those 72 hours? They don’t agree on that, either.

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In 1964, a patrolman on a desert stretch of highway hears an explosion. Investigating, he sees two beings standing outside an egg-shaped vehicle. As he watches in terror, the vehicle takes off with a great noise and recedes across the landscape. To find answers, the Air Force sends Project Blue Book personnel to determine what has happened. With them is consultant J. Allen Hynek, who becomes a key figure in the development of how we view UFOs.

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J. Allen Hynek joins the Air Force’s UFO investigation effort in its earliest stages. He finds most cases easy to explain, but become increasingly troubled by the ones that he can’t. During the Spring of 1966 in Michigan a series of UFO sightings, including by police and almost 100 students at a local college, seems to have the potential to spark the mass panic that the Robertson Panel feared.

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