The Rendlesham Forest incident - still no solid answers 45 years on?

I've been reading up on the Rendlesham Forest incident from 1980 (Suffolk military base, US servicemen witnessing... something) and I'm genuinely baffled. Here we are in 2024 with everyone carrying HD cameras on their phones, and we still don't have clear footage of that event, yet we have seemingly endless shaky mobile videos of 'UFOs' that are almost always explainable.

My question: why is one of the UK's most credible alleged UFO sightings - witnessed by trained military personnel - so poorly documented? The witness testimonies are all we really have. Does that make it more or less credible in your opinion?

I'm genuinely asking - not trying to be a debunker. Just confused about how the most documented sighting has the least documentation.

Rendlesham is fascinating precisely because it's credible - you've got trained observers, multiple witnesses, a documented record made at the time. But credibility of witnesses doesn't equal credibility of their interpretation. Those servicemen were trained to identify aircraft, not unexplained lights in the sky. What they saw could have been anything - helicopter with searchlight, atmospheric phenomenon, misidentified aircraft performing unusual maneuvers. None of those need to be extraterrestrial.

The lack of physical evidence is actually the smoking gun for me. If a craft genuinely landed in that forest, there would be soil samples, burn marks, something. We've got witness testimony from people who, in all fairness, were probably shocked and confused in the dark. That doesn't make them liars, but it does make their observations less reliable than physical evidence would be. Compare this to places like Roswell or Skinwalker Ranch where people at least claim to have physical materials.

I think the reason we don't have footage is simple: cameras in 1980 were bulky, slow to set up, and required film. Modern phones are instant. But also, in the 80s people's first instinct wasn't to record everything. By now, if something genuinely anomalous happens, it gets documented from 50 different angles within seconds. Rendlesham was pre-smartphone era. That's actually what makes it interesting - it's a genuinely strange event without the baggage of dodgy video evidence.

Rendlesham was likely the Orfordness lighthouse beam misidentification, honestly. The declassified documents show the timeline matches up pretty well. Not every mystery stays mysterious forever - sometimes the answer is just 'trained observers saw something they didn't immediately recognise'. Happens all the time in aviation. Doesn't make it sinister.