 Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Rental discretion is strongly advised. Our Christmases tend to merge into one as we become adults. But the military men and women at Rendlesham Forest in England will always remember the Christmas of 1980, when they were witness to one of the most extraordinary UFO encounters in history. The events that unfolded over that Christmas weekend are sometimes called Britain's Roswell. With dozens of trained military witnesses and official documents, it is cited as the best documented of all UFO cases. One even the most forthright of skeptics have failed to explain away. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos. This is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. If you're new here, welcome to the podcast and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. If you're already a weirdo, please share the podcast with others. Doing so helps make it possible for me to keep creating episodes as often as I do. Coming up in this episode... Imagine celebrating the holidays around your Christmas tree and it begins shaking for no reason. What dark secret made Charlie Lawson slaughter his family on Christmas Day? A Weirdo family member tells of an odd yet heartwarming experience at Christmas. A woman still mourning her husband's passing is visited on Christmas by beautiful balls of light. Ah, the holidays, a time for warmth, a time for joy, time for sorcery, superstition, darkness and boredom. At least it is in Russia. But first, did dozens of military personnel at RAF Bentwater's encounter an alien spacecraft over Christmas 1980? We begin with that story. While listening, be sure to check out the Weird Darkness website. At WeirdDarkness.com you can sign up for the newsletter to win monthly prizes. Find paranormal and horror audiobooks I've narrated. Watch old horror movies for free. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwater's were known as the Twin Bases, separated by an area of woodland called Rendlesham Forest. The two installations in Suffolk, Southeastern England were perhaps the United States' most important military complex during the Cold War and they held a dark secret. This secret was not from beyond the stars, as some suspect of the UFO that visited the bases that Christmas in 1980, but man-made. Even today, it's not officially acknowledged that nuclear weapons were being stored at the bases. A violation of the U.S. and U.K.'s treaty obligations like this would still be a major scandal 38 years later. Some believe the solution to the mystery of the Rendlesham Forest incident lies in the clandestine contents of the weapons storage area at Bentwater's. Indeed, many of the witnesses to whatever it was in the woods that weekend think it was more interested in the bunkers than them. But unlike so many UFO cases, to understand Rendlesham we don't need to rely on wild speculation or any contemporary accounts of those that were there, and most remarkably of all, an audio tape made as senior U.S. Air Force staff encountered a mysterious entity they now believe could not have been from Earth. It probably is not much fun to be on security duty on Christmas night. Thousands of miles from home in a cold British military base on the east coast of England, 20-year-old American patrol sergeant John Burroughs had the short straw that night, guarding RAF Woodbridge's lonely east gate, which edged into the dark woods of neighboring Rendlesham Forest. As the 25th turned into the 26th, Burroughs looked out into the darkness and saw something strange. Colored lights appeared to be hovering and dancing over the trees. Was this some kind of Christmas display? Burroughs had an uneasy feeling that it was something unusual and drove back to the gatehouse to inform the security controller. Security policeman Jim Peniston joined Burroughs at the gate to observe the lights. In his two years working at the base, the 26-year-old Peniston had never seen lights in the Rendlesham Woods before but had witnessed several small aircraft crashes during his career and felt that that might explain what the men were seeing. Relating this possibility to the security tower, at around 3 a.m. Peniston Burroughs and fellow airman Ed Cabinsag were given permission to venture out into the forest to investigate. The men were tentative, and even the trained military professionals found the prospect of driving into the winter woods at night to investigate mysterious lights slightly unnerving. The police partly followed the lights as far as they could in their jeep, then ventured out into the woodland to investigate further on foot. Peniston was sure he could see the outline of an object in the distance, but by now was certain it was no light aircraft. The air was filled with electricity, Peniston recalled. You could feel it on your skin as we approached the object. The men were now on edge, even their radios appeared to have stopped working properly. Reaching a small clearing, Peniston took out a small notebook determined to capture every detail of the incredible scene before him. The two men differ on what the craft looked like, but both concur. It did not appear like anything made on earth. About 9 feet by 6 feet in size, triangular and composed of a smooth, glass-like material with unusual symbols adorning its surface, they were transfixed by the strange vehicle for almost 20 minutes. Underneath a strong, bright light pulsated and red and blue lights swirled around its edges. Peniston scribbled furiously in his notebook, drawing as best he could the shape of the object, but found it increasingly difficult to write as if some strange force was weighing him down. Then, without ever acknowledging their existence, it suddenly shot off into the sky and disappeared entirely from view. Peniston's notebook reveals his palpable sense of astonishment at what he was seeing. Lift off 245, no sound, no air disturbance, takeoff, unknown speed, impossible. What on earth had the man witnessed? Whatever it was, all three were reluctant to go back to their commanding officers and say that they had seen an alien spaceship. Rumors had long circulated around the twin bases of lights in the skies, but most airmen preferred to keep such reports to themselves for fear of ridicule. On returning to the base, the men relayed what Peniston described as a sanitized account of the encounter to their commanding officer, Lieutenant Fred Burrun, and were informed that the nearby radar base had also reported an unusual blip on their radar earlier the previous night. Was this the object the men had seen? Like so much of the Rendlesham incident, we have official documents that confirm that this incident did indeed occur. Burrun's type-written report, dated January 2, 1981, confirms Burroughs and Peniston's sighting. Fred Burrun affirms that the men are reliable and mature individuals and appeared convinced that Peniston had indeed experienced something out of the realm of explanation for him at that time. By now, the strange lights over Rendlesham had also been reported to the local police. Returning the next morning with two officers from the Suffolk Constabulary, Burroughs and Peniston tried to find the location of their mysterious nocturnal encounter. Happening upon what they believed was the same clearing, the men saw three indentations in the ground. Often seized on by skeptics, the subsequent police report states that these indentations were actually rabbits burrows. Peniston, however, is adamant they were not. The ground was frozen and it was just impossible for that to have happened, he stated in a sci-fi television documentary. Peniston believes the officers were reluctant to state what the marks really were, as, like him, they were worried they would be ridiculed. Supportive of Peniston's integration was the fact the three indentations formed an exact equilateral triangle when measured out. Burroughs and Peniston's encounter in the woods might well have been dismissed as a mistake, or even Christmas hijinks if it wasn't for the events of the following two nights. Although the Rendlesham Forest incident is usually reported as two nights of UFO activity, the 25th going into the 26th and then December 27th into the 28th, there was actually a lesser reported sighting the following night. Twenty hours after the burrows and Peniston's sighting, 18-year-old basic airman Laurie Bowen recalls seeing more lights during her midnight shift guarding the east gate. Against a black sky, Bowen saw a ball of orange-red light descend into the forest northwards of her guard post. Five of Bowen's senior colleagues also saw the lights speculating amongst themselves that it may be the British celebrating New Year early. News of the UFO sighting said by now reached to the base's deputy commander, Colonel Charles Holt. Whilst attending a Christmas awards party at the base on the night of the 27th, an ashing-faced Lieutenant Bruce Englund rushed in and told Holt, we've got to talk, now it's back. Holt, then a 41-year-old veteran of Vietnam and Korea, had little truck with tales of UFOs and was irritated that his men were getting distracted from their duties with such nonsense. Determined to find the source of the lights once and for all, Holt led a search party into Rendlesham Forest to look for answers. Holt himself was equipped with a small hand-held dictaphone and his 18-minute tape of the party's expedition into the woods contains some of the strongest evidence presented in any UFO case. As the men roamed the woods and out into a nearby farmer's field, Holt can be heard describing his observations of a red-orange light hovering over the forest, zipping about at unimaginable speeds and directing beams down into the twin bases. As his voice gets visibly more excited, Holt says, see it too, it's back again, it's coming this way, there's no doubt about it, this is weird, it looks like an eye winking at you, it almost burns your eyes, he's coming toward us now. Skeptics have pointed out that light from the nearby Ophirdness Lighthouse filtering and scattering through the branches may have been what the men were seeing. Could the experienced military men really be mistaking a lighthouse for a UFO? Just like burrows and Peniston's encounter, the men were hampered by mysterious failures to both their radio equipment and the portable floodlights they were using to search the forest. Staff Sergeant Monroe Neville accompanied Holt as they inspected the landing site from the previous night. Neville's was armed with a Geige counter, found unusually high readings around the three indentations in the ground. What worried Holt was the beams of light the object was firing towards the ground. Holt says he heard over his radio that RAF vent waters were also reporting light beams over the base. What might have been a curious distraction in the woods now looked like a serious security issue. After hours following the lights around the woods, the object appeared to break up into smaller pieces, then suddenly vanish. Further smaller white lights were then seen sporadically in the sky for hours afterward. From this point on, many of those present during this search believe a vast and clandestine cover-up began, under the nose of even a senior officer like Holt. Whilst Holt himself tried to find out from his men what had happened, other agencies swooped in to interrogate the men about the events of the previous three nights. Jim Pedestan recalls being repeatedly grilled about the incidents by the Air Force's Office of Intelligence, even being administered truth-drug Sodium Penethal on one occasion. Sergeant Adrian Bastenza claims he was interrogated for hours in an underground part of the base by unnamed agents, possibly from the CIA. Ed Cabinsag, who had accompanied Burroughs and Peniston on the first night of activity, says he was ordered to sign a false statement that concealed what he really saw. Wing Commander Charles Gabriel, in charge of all U.S. Air Force troops in Europe, made an unprecedented impromptu visit to the bases, seizing much of Holt's evidence. Unbelievably, Holt was then told the United States had no official interest in the incident. Unsure exactly what to do, and with jurisdiction over the matter officially shared between the U.S. and U.K., Holt was told to hand the matter over to the British Ministry of Defense. Holt's January 13, 1981 memo, entitled Unexplained Lights Summarizing the Events of the Weekend, was sent to British government but received a similar lack of interest. For all those involved, this seemed to mark the end of the matter. Life on the base got back to normal. Unlike many other cases, nothing was made public. There were no false stories about swamp gas or weather balloons or the planet Jupiter. Outside of a bit of gossip among U.F.ologists, events of that amazing weekend would probably have become just another X-file, hidden away in a dusty basement somewhere. That is, until a sensational tabloid scoop nearly three years later blew the whole thing wide open. UFO lands in Suffolk and that's official the U.K.'s News of the World roared. The paper had managed to obtain Holt's top secret memo and was gleefully reporting its contents as well as adding their own imaginative embellishments. This story understandably made a big splash. This wasn't an anonymous source, it was the words of a senior American Air Force colonel in an official memo. The seeming credibility of the document even led to questions being asked of the then conservative government in the U.K. Parliament. Over the next few decades, competing claims would emerge about what happened over Christmas 1980 at the twin bases. More witnesses would emerge, often with incredible claims that were scarcely believable. Skeptics would pounce on inconsistencies and try to find rational explanations for what happened. American airman Larry Warren had been anonymously leaking stories about Randallsham to the UFO community for years and his remarkable account of what he saw would prove to be very divisive amongst the other witnesses. Warren's take on what happened in the woods varied significantly from burrows, penistons and Holt's. According to the then 19-year-old Warren, it wasn't just lights or a craft the search party found in the early hours of the 28th, it was actual alien beings. Was the Randallsham Forest incident far more profound than anyone was letting on? Warren would also make some startling claims about how men in black kind of agents had interrogated him and messed with his mind, possibly planting false or distorted memories. Randallsham Forest was starting to move from a well-documented encounter with a mysterious light to what looked like full-scale science fiction. Critics seized upon people like Larry Warren and the numerous inconsistencies between witnesses. Many, such as Jim Peniston, appear to be telling quite different stories today than they told their commanding officers back in 1980. Was the story being rewritten for dramatic effect? Some have even suggest the whole thing was a hoax, or that the airman had a bit too much Christmas cheer, or perhaps it was simply a mistake, the nearby Ophirdness Lighthouse or an old Soviet rocket burning up in the atmosphere. Regardless of the attempts to debunk Randallsham, the original witnesses, the documents, and the physical evidence all attest to something very genuine occurring at Randallsham in 1980. Had the men really encountered an alien craft? The most cited piece of evidence in the Randallsham Forest case is the so-called Halt Memo, Deputy Commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt's summary of the events of the Christmas weekend in 1980 at the twin bases of RAF Woodbridge and Bentwaters. Halt's Memo provides a rare, direct piece of contemporary documentary UFO evidence signed by a senior member of the U.S. military. Some critics have questioned the dating of this Memo, January 13th, more than a fortnight after the incident occurred, but this appears to be explained by the general confusion over the jurisdiction over the event. RAF Woodbridge and RAF Brentwood were British Air Force bases that were being leased to the U.S. Air Force since 1952. There was a joint jurisdiction over the bases with the British technically having the primary role. The surrounding area, including Randallsham Forest, where most of the activity occurred were under sole British jurisdiction. As such, Halt was told by his own commanders to hand the matter over to the British. With the bases' British liaison Donald Moorland on leave, Halt elected to wait to act until he had discussed it with Moorland. With no further activity and no evidence of any threat, Halt no longer regarded the incident as especially urgent. The Halt Memo was released to the public in 1983 after the American Citizens Against UFO Secrecy Organization successfully launched a freedom of information to release the document. The story was then broken to the general public by the British News of the World newspaper. Both the USAF and the British Ministry of Defense have consistently stated the activity detailed in the Halt Memo is of no defense interest. Former U.K. defense chief and chairman of the NATO military committee, Lord Hill Norton, thinks this stance is not believable, arguing that the events of Randallsham were either genuine or several senior military staff are hallucinating or lying. He stated either of these simply must be of interest to the Ministry of Defense. In the 1990s, while head of the Ministry of Defense's UFO desk, researcher Nick Pope conducted a cold case review into the Randallsham incident. According to Pope, the reality was that the MOD were unable to find any credible explanation for the incident and classified it as unexplained. Pope thinks the original investigation was hobbled by confusion over jurisdiction, the wrong date quoted in Halt's memo, delays and some destruction of evidence. Suspiciously, Charles A. Gabriel, the commander-in-chief of the USAF in Europe, made an unscheduled trip to Bentwaters shortly after the incident. Gabriel was briefed about the incident and removed the large amount of evidence, much of which was never seen again. Pope reveals that Gabriel's intervention caused disconnection at the Ministry of Defense. It directly contradicts the official USAF line that they had no interest in the incident and that it should be handed over to the British. In fact, the Ministry of Defense or MOD was never made aware of Gabriel's visit, what evidence he took and the results of any subsequent investigation. Skeptics have long struggled to dismiss the Halt memo. Colonel Halt's credibility is difficult to question. He had a distinguished 42-year military career and retired in 1991 with the highest peacetime award given by the Secretary of Defense. He never publicly spoke about the incident until he retired and scrupulously sought permission before doing so. Halt is, therefore, the most reputable senior military figure for which we have contemporary documentary evidence unambiguously discussing an encounter in any UFO case. Halt's memo rules out the idea the incident may have been some kind of joke fueled by yuletide spirit. A deputy commander of a nuclear facility like Halt would clearly never escalate such a hoax to the British government. Whilst his memo cannot easily be dismissed, the deputy commander is also the source of arguably an even more convincing piece of evidence in the form of an 18-minute audio tape of a real live UFO encounter. After receiving more reports of lights on the night of 27 December, Deputy Base Commander Charles Halt took a party of men into Rendlesham Forest to try and determine their source. Halt's men were armed with floodlights, jeeps, radios and a Geiger counter. Halt himself took his trusted Lanyard micro-cassette recorder he regularly used to dictate notes during base inspections. Halt's 18-minute tape of the party's seven-hour expedition into the woods is unique amongst all UFO cases in that it contains Halt and several other military personnel's live reactions to UFO phenomena occurring around them. The officers featured on the tape are Halt, Sergeant Monroe Neville's, Sergeant Robert Ball, Sergeant Adrian Bustinza and Lieutenant Bruce England. The men can be heard inspecting the original landing site Burroughs and Peniston found two nights earlier. Disaster preparedness officer Neville's is heard to find unusual radiation readings at the site. Most of the rest of the tape contains the men's reactions to observing multiple unusual white and colored lights flying around the forest and over the bases. On several occasions, the men describe the object exploding into smaller lights which then dart around laterally and vertically. This matches precisely the testimony of Rick Bobo observing the lights from the weapons storage guard tower at Bentwaters. After it was hanging there a long while, I saw things shooting off it really, really fast like little sparks or something. Maybe four or five of them, Bobo told researchers. Towards the end of the tape, the objects start to beam rays of light or energy towards the ground. Now we're observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground. This is unreal, Halt says on the tape. Several of the other men express their amazement at the lights and their strange behavior. One popular suggestion from skeptics to debunk what is captured on this tape is that the men were observing the light from the nearby Ophirdness Lighthouse, but there are some serious issues with that theory. The most obvious is that the lighthouse predates the then 38-year-old military bases yet none of the thousands of men and women who had served at the bases during that time had ever mistaken the lighthouse for a UFO before. Indeed, since these were U.S. Air Force bases with military aircraft coming in and out multiple times a day, it seems somewhat unlikely that trained airmen would make such an elementary mistake. A further problem is that the beam from Ophirdness is deliberately dimmed when shining inland by a blocking plate fitted around the lens. A lighthouse's beam also fails to match the actual nature of the observations the men are heard to be making. Nick Pope rules out the lighthouse as the source of the phenomena, pointing out that it is either not visible or only a tiny pinprick of light from the locations of the sightings. Halt himself also dismissed the lighthouse theory, stating, a lighthouse doesn't move through the forest, the lighthouse doesn't go up and down, it doesn't explode, doesn't change shape, size, doesn't send down beams of light from the sky. Many UFO incidents are debunked by proving they either never occurred or that the witnesses were mistaken. The halt tape is indisputable evidence that the incident did indeed occur and that several U.S. Air Force personnel experienced an unexplained encounter with a UFO. Whether they were all mistaken is open to debate, but if they were, then they are joined by multiple others who witnessed something strange occurring around Rendlesham that Christmas. It is unknown exactly how many of the staff at the twin bases saw UFOs over Christmas 1980. There are at least a dozen named witnesses that have given verifiable, unambiguous on-the-record statements about what they saw over three separate nights, and authors like Georgina Bruni and Linda Moulton-Howe have also tracked down and interviewed several more willing only to talk off the record. However, the observations were not confined just to the U.S. Air Force. Multiple civilians, such as local resident Gordon Levitt, also reported UFO phenomena over the same three nights. Levitt lived in Sudbourne, a small village on the edge of Rendlesham, and reported seeing a UFO sometime on the night of 26 December. In his police statement, Levitt says he saw an unusual glowing object hovering over his garden at about twice the height of his house. Levitt then states the object moved away over towards the direction of the Rendlesham Woods and RAF Woodbridge. Clearly, regardless of what Levitt saw, it is too much of a coincidence that he made this sighting during the same period as the phenomena at Woodbridge and Bentwaters. Levitt's sighting cannot be dismissed as bandwagon-jumping as he reported it contemporaneous and independently to the police. More local residents, amongst them Arthur Smechel and Roy and Marina Webb, also saw multiple lights hovering over the forest on the 26th and 27th of December. Whether all of these observations can be dismissed with conventional explanations is open to question, but other evidence does tend to support that these witnesses saw something out of the ordinary. Although skeptics correctly point out there is no official documentary evidence that incongruous objects were tracked on nearby radar stations during the sightings, there is some reason to suspect otherwise. Some of the military witnesses, such as Jim Peniston and Fred Burwin, had already stated they heard over their radios that radar stations had tracked an uncorrelated target or bogey on radar. In her book You Can't Tell the People, author Georgina Bruni found former radar operator from RAF Watan who claimed that a strange object had been tracked in the Rendlesham area on the night of the first sightings. More recently, two USAF air traffic controllers at Bentwaters have come forward with similar accounts. James H. Kerry and Ivan R. Barker now both admit they had tracked an object moving at impossible speeds on their radarscopes. What impressed me most was the speed this thing had. I have never seen anything so fast in my life. It was Zoom, gone, Baker told UFO researcher Robert Hastings. It covered 120 miles in approximately 8 to 12 seconds. In the 15 years I was an air traffic controller, I had never seen anything travel across the scope that fast, Kerry affirmed. These impossible speeds in the many thousands of miles per hour match almost all of the eyewitness statements who observed the objects in the Rendlesham Woods. The MODs recently released UFO files do demonstrate that they sought to corroborate the radar readings but were hampered by the fact records had been destroyed and some of the cameras used to record the radar readings were not working during the days in question. Most ufologists acknowledge that the vast majority of reported sightings have conventional explanations. Bufora, the British UFO Research Association, analyze over 400 sightings every year and find approximately 95% of them can be explained as natural phenomena such as planets, stars or meteors, conventional aircrafts, wildlife or other unusual atmospheric lighting effects. Numerous skeptics have attempted to fit the Rendlesham Forest incident into the category of mistaken identity. The most popular hypothesis is that the sightings were due to the nearby Overnus Lighthouse. Whilst this explanation does not adequately fit most of the observations, there is a very telling correlation between the Lighthouse's beam rotation and the halt tape. The Lighthouse, built in 1793, makes one full rotation every 15 seconds and flashes once every 5 seconds. When this 5-second flashing interval is overlaid over Colonel Halt's audio tape, it does seem to match the occasions Halt observes a flashing light very closely. Could Halt simply be mistaking the Lighthouse for something more unearthly? It is also notable that the period of the 25th and 26th of December coincided with a confluence of unusual atmospheric phenomena. Shortly before the first cluster of sightings at Rendlesham, a Russian Cosmos 749 satellite burnt up over Western Europe and was widely reported as a UFO by multiple civilians. Another rare event, the burning up of a meteor in the atmosphere, occurred in the early hours of the 26th of December. This meteor produced an unusually bright fireball and was visible throughout southeast England. There are pros and cons to these alternative possibilities. It is certainly a striking coincidence that the period of the observed UFO activity corresponded in time and location with at least three viable sources of false positives, the Russian rocket, the meteor and the Lighthouse. This clearly cannot be overlooked and must surely account for at least some of the lights people claimed to have seen during that Christmas weekend. If these mistaken sightings could be eliminated from the list of observed UFOs at Rendlesham, then the incident might start to look less impressive. However, the rocket and the meteor are both short-lived events and don't adequately explain the nature of most of the observations, nor the fact that they were spread out over several hours over three separate nights. Likewise, the Lighthouse cannot account for the majority of the sightings as it simply was not visible in the locations they were made. One of the most consistent characteristics of famous UFO cases is how evidence and testimony tend to evolve and become more sensational over time, usually to the detriment of the credibility of the case in question. A notable example is Roswell. Ever since the famous 1947 case was rediscovered in the 1970s and 80s, a whole series of dubious new claims about reverse engineered alien technology and even a filmed alien autopsy have come to light. With an endless production line of trashy TV documentaries to gobble up such material, a feedback loop of ever more sensational claims has plagued many high-profile UFO cases. The Rendlesham Forest incident has its fair share of sensational latter-day embellishments like this, although never mentioned in any of the original contemporary documents, Airman Larry Warren has emerged as a prominent and controversial Rendlesham witness in recent years. Warren says he was present on the third night during Colonel Halt's investigation in Rendlesham Woods. His testimony differs radically from the acknowledged core witnesses like Halt in that he claims he saw the investigation party conversing with actual alien beings at the crash site. Warren also says he was brainwashed by men in black style interrogators in an underground facility at the base. Warren's statements have caused a great deal of resentment among the core witnesses. Not only do they not match anybody else's recollections of what occurred, they tend to make the whole event look ridiculous and unbelievable. Records show Warren did serve at Bentwaters, but Halt, Monroe, Neville, Sgt. Pestenza and others have stated they do not recall him ever being present during any of the events that night. Those who know Larry Warren think he is a sincere individual who has been greatly traumatized by his perceived experiences. It is possible his story of being brainwashed may have some truth to it and he was somehow planted with false memories to undermine the credibility of the otherwise credible case. Some of the acknowledged core witnesses have also heavily embellished their stories in recent years. Jim Peniston now says he spent 45 minutes examining the craft he observed in the first night, noting symbols on its body. He also says he touched the skin of the craft and received a telepathic message in binary code. There is no reference to any of this in Peniston's original witness statements, nor is there anything remotely resembling this version of events in his radio communications with his commanders at the base. Peniston has also produced some impressive looking documentary evidence in recent years, such as what he says is his police notebook from the night. The notebook has been covered in television specials and appears to show the notes he made describing the craft as well as drawings of the hieroglyphic-like symbols he says adorned it. However, John Burroughs says he does not remember Peniston making any notes during the entire period that they observed the object. Burroughs also says Peniston did not spend any deal of time examining the craft. The time and date shown in the notebook also does not correspond with the actual time and date of the incident as recorded in the contemporary documents. Peniston's notebook is incredible and if genuine would be a pivotal piece of evidence in establishing the reality of the Rendlesham Forest case. Yet when interviewed for the 1994 strange but true ITV special on the incident, he makes no mention of the notebook at all. Peniston's now-famous sketches of the triangular craft he says he saw in the woods also differ from the sketch of a rectangular object he made for Fred Burrun just hours after the event in 1980. Noted debunker of UFOs and the paranormal, Dr. David Clark, contacted Colonel Ted Conrad in 2010. Conrad was the commander of the twin bases and Charles Halt was his deputy. Conrad was present at the base all through Christmas and believes the only occasion anything unusual occurred was the first night when lights were observed in the woods. Conrad was in radio communications with the search party on the third night when Halt made his famous tape. He says he and the rest of the Christmas awards reception at RAF Woodbridge went outside to try and see the lights Halt was describing over the radio, but saw absolutely nothing unusual all night. If Colonel Conrad is telling the truth, then it does tend to suggest Halt and his men may simply have been misinterpreting a mundane phenomena such as a lighthouse beam as something more spectacular than it was. However, even if he is not attempting to deliberately downplay the events, there appears to be little reason to favor Conrad's account, made from memory some 30 years after the incident over the live recording of the men actually experiencing the events in question. UFO cases are usually contentious. Advocates, certain there is a widespread government cover-up of the truth, tend to disbelieve anything coming from what they deem as establishment sources. Skeptics, meanwhile, often overreach in their absolute determination to debunk controversial events. As the inexhaustible appetite for alien and UFO-related material grows on television, Randallsham has become a popular topic for numerous documentaries in recent years. With this, there has been a troublesome escalation in the outlandishness of the retellings of the events of that Christmas in 1980. Despite this, the hard evidence from the time remains unimpeached. Whatever stories are now being told, something very real did happen in the woods at Randallsham. That, as the Ministry of Defense files themselves now conclude, remains unexplained. Up next, imagine celebrating the holidays around your Christmas tree and it begins shaking for no reason. What dark secret made Charlie Lawson slaughter his family on Christmas Day? And one of our Weirdo family members tells of an odd yet heartwarming experience during Christmas. These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. I grew up in a council house in London. Our house was a two up and two down that had been lived in by a few families before us. The house itself was okay, but a few things happened that creeped us all out. Mom would always sit downstairs knitting and would often scold us children for running up and down the stairs. Sometimes we were to blame, but sometimes we had been out of the house or had been elsewhere in the house. Sometimes at night, we could hear someone running up and down the stairs. It got so bad one time that my father actually sat out in the hallway watching the stairs for a few hours trying to ascertain who was the culprit. Bulbs would burst. We would often turn a light on only to have the bulb explode. Doors would open. We would leave a room, close the door, and return to find the door wide open. The fridge, the TV, our high-fi all stopped working. The new TV would cut out all the time. Anything electrical in that house either broke or didn't work properly. Phantom Voices. We would sometimes think we heard someone calling our names. We would call back to find nobody there. Mimicry, too, because we often recognized the voices. The Shaking Christmas Tree. One Christmas we put the tree up, sat in the living room talking when my father pointed to the tree. Look at that, he said. It's bloody shaking. The whole tree was gently swaying from side to side like someone was shoving it gently. Very creepy. Now, I wouldn't say any of these incidents were particularly dangerous. To me, it seemed to be a child who just liked playing pranks on people. However, that said, it could be creepy and annoying. On Christmas Day, 1929, shots rang out across the countryside near Germantown, North Carolina, as Charlie Lawson murdered his wife and six of his children before taking his own life hours later. To this day, no one knows why he committed these terrible acts. Charlie Lawson had been married to Fanny Manring for 18 years, during which time they had eight children, four sons and four daughters. Their third child, William, died in 1920, but the other seven children were still alive on the morning of December 25, 1929. By Christmas evening, only 16-year-old Arthur would remain in the living world. The Lawson family worked as sharecroppers and finally saved enough to buy their own farm just two years before the tragedy. Not long before that fateful Christmas morning, the whole family went into town to buy new clothes for a family portrait, which would prove to be the last photo of them taken alive. Since new clothes and portraits were unusual luxuries for working-class families of the era, many have since seen this as proof of premeditation on Charlie Lawson's part, perhaps immortalizing his loved ones before he would destroy them. The bloody crime began on Christmas afternoon, as Lawson's daughters, Carrie and Maybell, ages 12 and 17 respectively, were leaving to visit their aunt and uncle. Charlie Lawson lay and wait for them near the barn, and when they drew close enough, he shot them both with a shotgun. He then bludgeoned their bodies, presumably to ensure that they were dead. Afterward, Lawson hid the evidence of his crimes in the tobacco barn. From there, he walked back to the house and shot his wife, who was on the porch, before tracking down his other four children and killing them one by one. He shot his 17-year-old daughter, Marie, first, then his two young sons, James, age four, and Raymond, age two, before beating to death the four-month-old baby Mary Lou. Prior to going on his bloody spree, Charlie Lawson had sent his oldest son, Arthur, into town on an errand, though his motives for sparing the child remains as mysterious as his motives for murdering the others. When his family was dead, Charlie Lawson carefully positioned their bodies, arms crossed with rocks under their heads for pillows. After that, he disappeared into the nearby woods where he stayed for several hours before shooting himself in the head. By the time Charlie Lawson committed suicide, the bodies of his family had already been found, and several neighbors who had gathered on his property heard the gunshot that ended his life. Charlie's body was found by a tree encircled with footprints. He had been carrying letters to his parents and appeared to have spent some time pacing around the tree before finally deciding to end his life as well. At the time, no one seemed to know why Charlie Lawson would suddenly kill his entire family and then himself. Some people believed that a head injury he had sustained months before had been the cause, though an autopsy showed no evidence of brain damage. Other rumors claimed that Lawson had not actually committed the murders at all. Instead, he was an unfortunate witness to some sort of organized crime. He and his family were murdered by gangsters to keep them quiet. In later years, with the 1990 publication of the book White Christmas Bloody Christmas by Trudy J. Smith, a new theory as to the reason behind Charlie Lawson's killing spree came to the surface. According to anonymous sources, as well as relatives and friends of the family, Charlie Lawson was suspected of having an incestuous relationship with his oldest daughter, Marie, who may have been pregnant with his child. In a 2006 book, The Meaning of Our Tears, the author provided more support for this theory, including a conversation with one of Marie's closest friends who claimed that Marie had told her that Charlie had gotten her pregnant. There is however no official report that would support this supposed pregnancy. Arthur Lawson, the only remaining member of the family, grew up, was married, and had four children. Sadly, in 1945, he was killed in a car accident at the age of 32. The eight Lawsons who perished on that Christmas day, including Charlie, are interred together with lost baby William beneath a single headstone, which bears the melancholy inscription, not now, but in the coming years. It will be in a better land. We'll read The Meaning of Our Tears, and then sometime we'll understand. Hi, Darren. I'm a huge fan of your podcast and listen to it every day at work, and I would really love if you included this story as it makes my family so happy as to what has happened. My grandfather recently passed away a few months ago, and it was sudden, unexpected, and very difficult. However, we've been noticing a few things as the holiday season approaches, some things that no one can really explain. Just a few days ago, I was sitting in my living room when I heard something fall in my kitchen. I went out and looked all around, but nothing was out of place, and I checked everywhere. Immediately afterwards, I had called my boyfriend to see if I could borrow his car. Now, he's a heavy sleeper, and it was the morning time, so I had to call a few times and wait for him to answer. All of a sudden, my phone said he had answered as it started timing our call, but all I heard was a static CB radio. I said hello a few times and could hear someone talking, but couldn't make out what they were saying. I assumed it was a bad connection, so I hung up and called again, but he didn't answer. I then proceeded to call a few more times until he finally picked up. I asked him why he waited to answer until now because I assumed he had been awake because he answered before when I heard the radio, but he assured me that he had been asleep the whole time and hadn't picked up the phone because he didn't hear it. This whole thing wouldn't be weird if my pap didn't used to be a truck driver who used CB radios all the time, and they say that spirits can interact with electronics. Also my uncle lives in Texas, we live in Pennsylvania, and he lives with his best friend and his wife and their kids. He showed his friends kids a picture of him and my pap the other day and told them who his dad was, to which they said, oh we know Dale, my pap's name, he comes here a lot but he lives far away. My uncle was speechless. They had never met or seen my pap before. Just a few days ago my mother was home alone and she has a little wind up decoration of a mouse and a little wooden cradle, and when you wind it up, the cradle will rock and a lullaby will play. She got the decoration a few years ago because my pap and grandmother used to have one exactly like it when she was little, but when she was home alone the cradle started rocking and playing the song, and she hadn't twisted the back knob to wind it up at all this year. It just started doing it on its own. When she told my grandmother, she said that she had an experience the other day as well, when she walked into her and my pap's room to grab something and caught a huge scent of my pap. Now he's been gone since May, so there really shouldn't be any strong sense of him anywhere, but she was so taken aback that she started immediately crying and called my aunt. And if this wasn't enough, my other aunt had said that she was home alone unpacking Christmas ornaments the other day when she felt something hit her head. She looked down and found a penny next to her, which had the year 1951 on it, the same exact year that my pap was born. But the best part of this story isn't even those things. My brother is a truck driver for a company and was in a bad accident the other week when a person out of state completely cut him off, to which he rolled his truck into the median. But the thing is, he came out of the accident completely unscratched when he should have at least had a few injuries, possibly major ones. But all he had was a sore neck that the doctor said would go away in a few days. As I said before, my pap was a truck driver himself and loved the job. Does my brother have pap as a new guardian angel? And is he visiting everyone for the holidays and letting them know he's there? I really, really hope so. When Weird Darkness returns, a woman still mourning her husband's passing is visited on Christmas by beautiful balls of light. And the holidays, a time for warmth, joy, and a time for sorcery, superstition and darkness if you're in Russia. These stories are up next. I have always been interested in the paranormal, specifically life after death, and I definitely believe that we simply transform into different energy after leaving this physical realm. There are dimensions within dimensions, parallel universes, etc. I lost two husbands to cancer, and most of my life has been very difficult in terms of what I've lost, the struggles I've had one right after the other for many years so close together. My husband Pete, who I was extremely close to, we were so bonded with each other and it was absolutely heart-wrenching to watch him fight cancer. His personality and spirit were bigger than life. Around Christmas, only six months after he passed, I decided to go to the cemetery even though I know he isn't really there, just as his body is there. Anyway, I'd just come back from the cemetery to put a wreath on his grave, and when I came home I was depleted of energy and so very, very sad. I lit some candles on my dresser near my angel statues for some reason because I rarely, if ever, light candles anymore. I stood there, with my Christmas music on, just watching the candle flicker slightly until it really started flickering a lot. Immediately after the candle seemed to really come to life, I saw a blue energy, not quite an orb, but some serious energy floating around the dresser and near the candle. No, not floating. It was bopping all around, even in jerky movements at times, but then it would move fluidly and circulate all around the pictures on the dresser and near me when I was filming, and then back in the corner again. I do realize that some of these lights are lens flares, but definitely not all of them because I saw these blue and purple orbs before I began filming. Finally, after being transfixed on these energies for a bit, I snapped out of it. Dang, where is my camera? I should be getting this all on video. The holidays, the time for warmth, the time for joy, the time for sorcery, superstition, darkness, and, oh yeah, boredom. At least it is in Russia. It was December at last in the far eastern Russian territory of Primorsky, and I was very keen to experience a Christmas, or whatever they called it, now that I had friends and a girlfriend to share it with. I knew we'd be expected to spend some time with Babushka, but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make. The Feast of St. Nicholas came and went relatively well, a sort of Russian Thanksgiving where family and friends gathered at a massive feast and talked about good times, bad times, and Babushka's neighbor got drunk, naked, and passed out in Ursana. Thankfully, we found her in time before she got too dehydrated. Ah, the holidays. Turns out the holiday season in Russia only starts with the Feast of St. Nick. Then there is New Christmas, which Catholics and some other western religions celebrate on December 25th. Then there is New Year's, which during the Soviet Union was the biggest winter celebration of the year. Since Christmas was banned as a religious holiday, because religion was illegal, the Russians celebrated exactly as they would at Christmas, but on January 1st instead. Then of course, there's old Christmas, still celebrated on January 6th, as it was on the old calendar. All these dates confused me. Did we get gifts on all three days? Could I get gifts on all three days, even if no one else did? These were critical questions which must be answered. The Christmas holiday breaks are so long and so many people are off work during the entire period on paid vacations, many, many Russians get bored about halfway through and are longing to return to work. Really, really long for it. I also discovered that Christmas time, or New Year's time, was a traditionally superstitious period on the calendar. Party games popular during these festive, family-filled times of the year included fortune-telling, unique rituals designed to keep evil spirits away, and of course, one of the favorite holiday pastimes, the Ouija board. Now, don't worry, this won't be another Ouija board story, though every December to January, tens of thousands of Russians do partake. Babushka even had one at her house, a traditionally round one that looked very old and had seen many, many seances over the years. It was around this festive time of year that I had my own Christmas horror. Although Lugia and I were swamped, trying to move into our new apartment building, we spent as much time with Babushka as we could. Pretty much every weekend we spent up at her docca, going over the different holidays and how we'd arranged and scheduled each one. In Babushka's household, they traditionally gave gifts in January, as they were an old and established Russian Orthodox family. We ended up working out a compromise, where Lugia and I would celebrate on December 25th, and we would have another celebration in January with her grandmother. Around January 2nd, we gathered our gifts and hired a taxi to take us out to the village. There was so much to transport, the train wasn't really realistic. Babushka greeted us at the door and supervised as we brought everything in. She was her typical forward self, lingering after kissing me in welcome and grabbing at me as I passed by her. She'd make comments like, silly, or how strong, and I'd respond by calling her turpkey, slang for tart, or other things. She'd laugh and her beady little eyes would twinkle. She loved every moment of it. When we were done, I sat myself up in one of the downstairs bedrooms. I've always been terrible at wrapping gifts. They end up looking like I had used my feet with tape everywhere and seams exposed, revealing the items within. Dreading that prospect, I waited until the last minute, and now had finished wrapping everything for Babushka and Lugia's other immediate family. After a few minutes of focused failure, I heard a knock at the door. Lugia and her grandmother were going into the village center to pick up dinner. I let her know what I wanted, and shortly after I heard the front door to the docca close. It didn't sink in at first, but this was the only time I'd been alone in Babushka's house. I'd stayed there many, many times over the last couple of months, but there had always been at least one other person there with me. I worked steadily for 15 minutes or so before I was disturbed again by a tapping sound. I stopped and looked up, trying to work out where the noise might be coming from. The room wasn't very large, and the windows were sealed tightly, so it couldn't be a draft. A few seconds later, it resumed. Tap, tap, tap. I stood and walked over to the large picture window across the room from me and slid back the curtains. The windows were mostly iced over, but there didn't appear to be any movement. Testing the latches on each of the three windows, I verified they were securely latched. I had just slid the curtains back into their original position when I heard the tapping again. Tap, tap, tap. The sound definitely seemed as though it were coming from somewhere behind me. The door perhaps? I exited the small bedroom and looked down the hall. At first, I assumed it was Babushka playing a trick on me. Tap, tap, tap. Leaving the hallway that led to the bedroom, I stopped out into the large living room where Babushka liked to entertain her guests. Every wall of the room was covered in a lifetime's worth of small trinkets, photos, religious icons, and the like. No fire was going, so the large room was quite cold, and I remember shivering a bit and rubbing my arms. Suddenly, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. A form, dark against the color of the light coming from the bedroom's open door down the hallway. I snapped my head around, but could see nothing. Only the long, narrow hallway, and the glow of the lamps in the room where I had been working. The house was pretty disturbing all alone, so many odd angles and objects covering every surface. The shadows played strange tricks, moving while you were looking away and snapping to perfect stillness when I turned my attention to them. I walked in a circle around the living room, turning on lamps as I went. Even with all of them lit, the room only had a slight glow to it, not even enough light to read in. Babushka did like things dark. The sound had returned. I made my way out of the living room and toward the house's front door. The door was not locked, as is typical in these villages, and I could make out the halo of a street lamp through the iced-over glass in the center of the door. Turning the knob very slowly, I pulled it open in an instant, expecting to catch some neighbor kid playing a trick. The outer world was entirely still. Light snow was falling, soft and dry as talcum powder, drifting down from the inky black sky above. No moon or stars, only the snow, and the amber glow of the village's sodium streetlights reflecting off the powder, giving everything a sharp golden aura. The only footsteps in the snow belonged to Ludya and her grandmother, moving from the front steps and down the street toward the center of town. Even those footprints were quickly filling up, being erased by the night's winter storm. I searched around the perimeter of the house. No other footprints were visible. There were no birds, no animals around that I could see, only perfect stillness. My limbs were getting quite numb by the time I made it back to the front door of the house. I hadn't put on a jacket or anything prior to going out and was now feeling the results. Stepping back into the entry hall, I closed the door behind me and took a few steps back toward the living room. From this position in the house, I could tell the tapping sounds were not tapping at all. They were the sound of footsteps. It sounded as though they were somewhere in the room directly above the front entry hallway. The steps started and stopped, like someone was piecing or possibly swaying or dancing to a rhythm. I moved very quietly back to the first floor bedroom and collected my cell phone as quietly as I could. If there was an intruder in the house, I wasn't going to let them know I was there. Taking each step very cautiously, I made my way up to the second floor and down the hall toward Babushka's bedroom, the room directly over the front entry. Her door was wide open and her curtains were all pulled back, allowing plenty of light from the street to enter the room. The first thing I noticed was a moving shadow crossing back and forth in front of the wall across from the doorway. Back and forth in a steady rhythm, it flowed over the surface of the wall directly across from me. Taking a few more cautious steps, I lifted my phone and tapped 102 police emergency into the touch surface, ready to place the call if necessary. Moving closer to the doorway of her room, I changed my position so I could see further around the corner. The source of the shadow was coming from some kind of blanket or shawl or something that was hanging over the arm of the chair, swaying back and forth as if a steady wind was blowing on it, but all the windows were sealed. That was about enough for me. I turned immediately, rushed down the stairs and out the front door, following what was left of the footprints to meet up with Lodja and her grandmother. When I explained what had happened, she sighed, rolled her eyes and scoffed. I told you the house was haunted. Thanks for listening. If you liked the podcast and you haven't already subscribed, be sure to do so now so you don't miss future episodes. And also, please tell someone else about the podcast. Recommend weird darkness to your friends, family and co-workers who love the paranormal, horror stories or true crime like you do. Every time you share the podcast with someone new, it helps spread the word about the show and a growing audience makes it possible for me to keep creating episodes as often as I do. Plus, telling others about weird darkness also helps get the word out about resources that are available for those who suffer from depression, so please share the podcast with someone today. Do you have a dark tale to tell of your own? Fact or fiction? Click on Tell Your Story on the website and I might use it in a future episode. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The Christmas Invasion is from The Unredacted. Visits for the holidays is from Weirdle family member Ashley Ingram. The swaying Christmas tree is from MyHauntedLife2.com. The Murder of the Lawson Family is by Oren Gray for the lineup. Christmas Orbs is by Janine Fitterer for MyHauntedLife2.com. And Christmas in Siberia is by Drake for your ghost stories. Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Galatians 2, verse 20, I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. And a final thought. Keep striving, for God gives his hardest battles to his strongest soldiers. Habib Akande. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in The Weird Darkness. Well, hello there. It's Santa, and my big night is getting closer by the day. You know, I love milk and cookies when I visit your home each year. Well, the milk can get warm while waiting for me to arrive. And a warm toddy is not the best thing to drink if you plan on staying alert and flying around the world. So this year, I'm asking that you instead leave me a plate of cookies and a nice hot thermos or mug of weird dark roast coffee. It actually tastes like Christmas. It has a hint of cocoa and caramel. And I've been drinking a lot of it recently to wake me up early in the morning to work on toys and take care of the reindeer. So this year, leave Santa a mug or thermos of weird dark roast coffee. Tell your parents they can find it right now at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com slash listen.