A US Air force engineer maintaining a nuclear-capable fighter-bomber at a forward base in the UK says he witnessed “something” scratching on the aircraft’s canopy. Airman James Stewart was based at RAF Woodbridge, site of the notorious Rendelsham Forest UFO incident.
But Stewart’s experience took place on Boxing Day 1979 – exactly one year before the sighting often described as “The UK’s Roswell Incident ”. He only came forward with his full account after a new book mistakenly claimed he had been present at the 1980 sighting.
Investigator Gary Heseltine spoke to Stewart, using enhanced interrogation techniques that he learned during his years in the police force. He explains that the so-called “Rendelsham Incident” was in fact a series of sightings over a number of days – with several “precursor” events taking place up to a year before.
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Initially, Gary had assumed that Stewart’s encounter was part of the well-reported Rendelsham sighting. But it was only when he actually spoke to the former aircraft engineer that he realised that there had been another “ alien ” incursion a year before.
“He was working outside middle of the night on his own repairing one of the last three F4 Phantom fighter jets that were on the base,” Gary explained to podcaster Chris Lehto .
“He’s working underneath it middle of the night, and there is the little step ladder going up to the cockpit … he feels a shudder as if something has just jumped or or standing or collided with the tail of the aircraft.”
As Stewart began to get up to investigate, there was an eerie sound: “He hears what is like a scratching on on glass – akin to a clawing sound. He’s thinking ‘What the hell is that?’ and he climbs up the little ladder to the cockpit and founds three scratches on the front cockpit of the aircraft …he knew that that was new damage.
“He then feels a second vibration, as if something has jumped from the tail of the aircraft down to the ground. He looks down the spine of the aircraft and he sees in the moisture and the dew of the night some footprint. He doesn’t recognise them but just some kind of footprint…”
The unseen intruder then hurried off into the darkness, towards nearby Rendelsham Forest. Stewart then says he heard gunshots, as if the airbase’s security guards had engaged a trespasser. Then, Stewart says, he saw a UFO slowly descending into the forest, as if to meet whoever or whatever had just run out of the base.
Stewart’s boss then turned up in a vehicle and whisked him away from the scene. “There’s no reason for this guy to make it up,” Gary said. “And it’s a sensational account”.
Gary’s researches into the main Rendelsham encounter, a full year later, suggest that US military personnel had professional video cameras set up in the forest to record the “alien landing”. Almost as if, he speculates, they knew something was going to happen.
“That gives that more credence to Larry Warren, who was the original military whistleblower,” Gary added. “He had always said that by the time he got involved in his event it was like they were expecting something to arrive because there were movie cameras there.”
He believes that somewhere, under lock and key, the US military is concealing hard evidence of visitors from another world – or possibly from another time – visiting a nuclear bomber station at during one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War.
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