Hello from Lincolnshire — came here because of Rendlesham but stayed for the vibes

Evening all. I've been lurking on Quirk Reports for about four months and finally decided to stop being a coward and make an account. My name's Pete, I'm 43, I work in IT (I can hear the collective groan, yes I know how it sounds when an IT bloke starts talking about unexplained phenomena, I've made all the jokes at my own expense already), and I live in Lincolnshire which, as it turns out, is an absolutely excellent county for this sort of thing given that it contains roughly forty percent of Britain's active military airspace and also the proximity to Suffolk.

My entry point was Rendlesham Forest. I grew up near enough to have heard the local stories - it was the kind of thing that circulated in a slightly embarrassed, half-joking way when I was a teenager, people's dads who knew people who knew people, that sort of thing. Then about two years ago I actually read Encounter in Rendlesham Forest by Nick Pope, Jim Penniston, and John Burroughs properly, cover to cover, and I realised I'd been dismissing it on the basis of exactly the kind of secondhand half-knowledge that I'd normally find irritating in other contexts. Whatever happened in those woods in December 1980, it was not nothing.

Since then I've been reading widely - Halt memo, Cash-Landrum case, the UAP congressional hearings in the US, and quite a bit of historical British material including the Berwyn Mountain incident, which I think deserves more attention than it gets. I'm not a believer in the capital-B sense; I don't have a fixed theory. I'm just someone who's convinced that the mainstream dismissal of this subject is intellectually embarrassing and that the truth, whatever it is, is probably more interesting than either "it's all weather balloons" or "it's all little grey men."

Happy to be here. Go easy on me for the first few weeks.

Welcome, Pete! Lincolnshire represent - I'm just over the border in Nottinghamshire and have done a few watching sessions near the Wash which, for reasons I cannot fully articulate, feels like a productive area. Your IT background is an asset here, not a liability, in my experience. The ability to think systematically and be appropriately sceptical about data quality is genuinely useful in a community that can sometimes get a bit... enthusiastic about the evidence.

Another Rendlesham entry point! It's practically the funnel that catches everyone eventually. Welcome to the forum. The Berwyn Mountain incident is indeed criminally underrated - partly because the initial investigative work was done by a relative amateur who made some avoidable errors that gave debunkers easy targets, and partly because "Wales" doesn't have quite the same romantic cachet as Suffolk woodland for some reason. The core of it is genuinely strange though and worth your time.

Welcome Pete. The Cash-Landrum case is one of the most distressing cases in UAP history and I think you're right to bring it up - it tends to get lost between the sexier "lights in the sky" cases and the full-on abduction literature, but two adult women and a child who suffered demonstrable radiation-type injuries after a roadside encounter with an unidentified craft is... not something you can wave away. Betty Cash spent years trying to get recognition from the US government. It never really came.

Whatever happened in those woods in December 1980, it was not nothing.

This is the precise position I landed on after about a year of research, and I think it's actually the intellectually honest place to be. The debunker explanations require you to believe a remarkable number of trained USAF personnel consistently misidentified a lighthouse and/or got confused about the date of a meteor. The true-believer explanations require quite a lot of other things. "Not nothing" is where the evidence actually points and it's more uncomfortable than either extreme.

Hello and welcome! Fair warning: if you start digging into the Berwyn Mountain incident, make sure you find David Clarke's work on it - he's done the most rigorous analysis and while he arrives at a fairly mundane conclusion, his methodology is sound and it's worth understanding the strongest case against anomalous explanations before you decide what you think. That applies generally in this field actually. The debunkers are sometimes wrong but they're not always wrong, and the cases that survive serious scrutiny are the genuinely interesting ones.

IT professional here as well (infrastructure, before anyone asks, not software, which I feel matters somehow). You're in good company. The Halt memo is the bit I always point people to when they're on the Rendlesham rabbit hole - a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force filing a memorandum about a structured craft he personally observed at close range is not a thing that gets explained away by mundane causes. Whatever you think it was, that document exists and it says what it says.

Welcome to the forum Pete. Don't let the occasional sceptic get you down - we've got a good mix here and the debates are usually more entertaining than heated. Just don't mention Spring-heeled Jack in the Historical Cases thread unless you've got a thick skin, there's a long-running argument about whether he belongs in cryptid territory or UAP territory that has been going since approximately 2019 and nobody is winning.