Rendlesham Forest 1980 footage—has anyone actually examined the original film reels?

I've been reading about the Rendlesham Forest incident for about six months now (cheers to whoever recommended that podcast in the Books thread), and I keep finding references to "video footage from the night" but I've only ever seen three short clips circulating online, all of which are grainy as hell and could frankly be anything.

My question: where is the original film? Has anyone on this forum actually seen the master reels, or are we all just circulating copies of copies of copies like we're in some paranormal game of telephone?

Because either the footage exists and proves something interesting, in which case why is nobody making a massive fuss about it, or it doesn't exist and we've all been talking about phantom evidence for forty years. One of those things has to be true, yeah?

The footage issue with Rendlesham is more complicated than "where's the tape." Most of what we know about the incident comes from witness testimonies, particularly from former US Air Force personnel stationed at RAF Woodbridge. There were supposedly some preliminary video recordings made, but they've either been lost, classified, or - and I hate to say this on a paranormal forum - possibly never existed in the first place.

The American military has been pretty quiet about the whole thing, which tells you either nothing happened, something happened and they covered it up, or we're all chasing ghosts.

Because either the footage exists and proves something interesting, in which case why is nobody making a massive fuss about it, or it doesn't exist and we've all been talking about phantom evidence for forty years.

Welcome to paranormal investigation, mate. This is basically the entire genre. We speculate endlessly about evidence that's either missing, ambiguous, or conveniently classified. It's frustrating as hell, but that's also kind of the point - if there were clear, undeniable proof of anything, there'd be nothing left to argue about on forums.

There ARE contemporary reports from the incident, just not video footage in the way you're imagining. Personnel filed official documentation, and some of that has been declassified through Freedom of Information requests. That's actually more useful than dodgy video footage would be anyway - eyewitness accounts from trained military personnel with nothing to gain from lying are worth more than a blurry tape that could show anything.

Look up the Halt Memorandum if you haven't already. It's not a smoking gun, but it's the closest thing we have to an official record.

This is why I don't get excited about historical UFO cases anymore. They're always just out of reach - the evidence is always damaged, lost, classified, or destroyed. Convenient, innit? At some point you have to accept that either nothing happened, or the people involved decided a long time ago not to tell us about it. Either way, analysing footage that doesn't exist is just creative fiction.