The Halt Memo

The Halt Memo is the official January 1981 memorandum written by Lieutenant Colonel Charles I. Halt, deputy base commander at RAF Bentwaters, documenting the unexplained lights and physical traces his own security personnel had investigated in nearby Rendlesham Forest over several nights that December — a first-hand account written on U.S. Air Force letterhead by an active-duty officer describing an event he investigated personally, rather than a secondhand or civilian report. Halt's memo, later obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request years after it was written, described suspicious lights maneuvering in the forest, a metallic object with unusual markings some airmen approached and touched, and elevated radiation readings recorded at the reported landing site — details that make it one of the very few UFO case documents anywhere in the world written by a deputy base commander in an official capacity rather than compiled after the fact by a civilian investigator working from witness interviews. The memo's existence is exactly why Rendlesham became known as "Britain's Roswell": it provided a rare piece of internally generated, contemporaneous military paperwork rather than resting entirely on later witness recollection, giving skeptics and believers alike an actual primary-source document to analyze directly rather than argue over secondhand testimony.