Now that Colonel Halt’s tape recording of his nocturnal expedition has been released it is possible to make sense of what happened at Rendlesham just after Christmas 1980. The Halt memorandum claimed that, after seeing lights about 0300 UT on 27 December 1980 (lights which led them to believe that an aircraft had crashed), security patrolmen entered the forest outside the Woodbridge air base. There they saw a light which they considered to be a hovering craft.
The Men in Black, sinister anonymous characters who allegedly threaten and intimidate UFO witnesses, seem to have been around for as long as the UFO phenomenon itself – much to the chagrin of some researchers. Threats are sometimes delivered by telephone, often ordering the witness to keep quiet about their sighting – or else: No doubt some of these mystery callers are part of hoaxes by disturbed individuals. Nevertheless, some cases beg a different explanation, a more disturbing one.
We all agree, don’t we, that Christians in general, and Catholics in particular, ought to cringe at the name of Galileo, because of the way he was treated by the Church. Galileo, as we all know, was persecuted by the Church, and attempts were made to suppress his theories and discoveries because of the stupidity, ignorance and general fat-headedness of the Pope and his henchmen. This is more or less the generally accepted view, but is it true?
When Professor Challenger wanted to prove to zoological sceptics that pterodactyls weren’t extinct after all, he merely arranged an expedition to an unknown plateau in the Matto Grosso and caught one. The sight of the gargoyle-faced nightmare filling London’s Queens Hall with the “dry, leathery flapping of its ten-foot wings” and with a “putrid and insidious odour” as it circled overhead left Challenger’s enemies in no doubt: the pterodactyl tribe most certainly was not extinct!