The Roswell/Rendlesham Competition

After the 1978 promotion of Roswell by Stanton Friedman et al., many countries vied to produce their own Roswell incident.

Today, the U.K. ufologists, boosted by our friend Nick Pope, have almost made the December 1980 Rendlesham episode as noteworthy in UFO lore as Roswell has become.

The 1980 affair has developed into a mythos not unlike the Roswell “event” but without dead alien bodies and an official military press release.

The current take on the Rendlesham “sighting” is heralded by men who were stationed at a military base nearby [Bentwaters/Woodbridge] and on patrol at the edge of the Rendlesham forest.

The two heaviest hitters for a Rendlesham extraterresrial visitation are John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, both making extensive television and conference appearances to tout their story that they encountered an alien craft in Rendlesham forest.

Since 1980, both men, and their commanding officer Charles Halt, have come to believe and proselytize their “encounter” as an extraterrestrial encounter.

But watching the three men, and in particular, Burroughs and Penniston, one has to come to the psychiatric conclusion that these fellows are enmeshed in a folie à deux or folie à trios – a “communicated insanity” [Psychiatric Dictionary, Fourth Edition, Hinsie and Campbell, Oxford University Press, 1970].

That is, these men did experience an unusual observation but, over the years, have extrapolated that observation, abetted by UFO researchers and buffs, into something quite beyond what actually occurred.

I won’t go into the vicissitudes of the evolutionary delusion because my point is that the UK contingent of ufologists – those on the believing end of UFO as ET craft – are pushing and have been pushing for several years now to make the Rendlesham incident comparable to the Roswell incident.

They want pride of place in the ufological pantheon just as some U.S. UFO researchers have garnered from Roswell.

Why?

UFOs make those involved a little or a lot crazy.

Facts and reality are set aside for fiction and contrived psychotic imaginings.

RR