Halt Tape — Lt Col Charles Halt's Microcassette Recording, Rendlesham Forest December 28, 1980

Brief

Lt Col Charles I. Halt led a patrol into Rendlesham Forest behind RAF Woodbridge and narrated his observations live onto a hand-held microcassette recorder while a Geiger counter registered above-background readings at the alleged landing site and airmen reported pulsing lights overhead. The recording runs approximately 18 minutes and captures Halt and his team describing an unidentified object at close range. It reached the public in 1984 via UFO researcher Robert Todd after Halt confirmed its authenticity, and has since been mirrored at Wikimedia Commons and on collaborators' sites. No equivalent real-time audio record from a commissioned officer at an active UAP incident is known to exist in the declassified US military corpus.

Metadata

Agency

United States Air Force (RAF Bentwaters, 81st TFW) / UK Ministry of Defence

Release

1984-01-01

Type

VIDEO • .ogg

Length

5.1 M

Tags

pulsing lights, landing trace, ground radiation, Rendlesham Forest, 1980, audio record, RAF Woodbridge, above-background Geiger readings

Key points

• The recording was made on the second night of the Rendlesham Forest incident — December 28, 1980 — not the first-night landing trace event.
• Halt held the rank of Deputy Base Commander, 81st Tactical Fighter Wing, RAF Bentwaters, making him the most senior uniformed witness on record for this incident.
• A Geiger counter registered above-background radiation readings at the alleged landing site during the patrol, providing instrumental data concurrent with the visual observations.
• Airmen accompanying Halt reported pulsing lights overhead while the recorder was running, placing multiple witnesses on tape in real time.
• The tape was made public in 1984 — roughly four years after the event — via researcher Robert Todd, and Halt personally confirmed its authenticity.
• The recording was not formally declassified through a government review process; it entered the public record informally, a distinction with implications for chain-of-custody and evidentiary weight.
• The source file is an OGG audio asset with no extracted transcript text, meaning no verbatim page-level citations are possible from this release package.

Most interesting

• Halt narrated continuously while the events unfolded, making this a near-unique artifact: a field-grade officer producing a self-documented, real-time account rather than a retrospective report.
• The Geiger counter readings place this incident in a small subset of UAP cases with contemporaneous instrument data rather than witness testimony alone.
• The recording's informal path to the public — via a civilian researcher rather than a FOIA release — means no official review or redaction process was applied before it circulated.
• At 18 minutes, the tape captures sustained observation rather than a momentary sighting, suggesting the phenomenon remained present and observable for an extended period.
• The incident occurred at RAF Woodbridge, a NATO installation, giving the event a joint US-UK jurisdictional character that the UK Ministry of Defence co-credits as the producing agency.