After the initial UFO incident on the 25/26 December 1980, all the witnesses were asked to either write or sign statements explaining what had transpired – this is a standard Air Force procedure. The witness statements were retrieved by Barry Greenwood (an American investigator for Citizens Against UFO Secrecy), forwarded to Jan Aldrich who later sent them to James Easton. Extracts of the witness statements were first published in James Easton’s “Rendlesham Unravelled” article.
Burroughs’ statement
“On the night of 25-26 Dec at around 3:00, while on patrol down at East Gate, myself and my partner saw lights coming from the woods due east of the gate. The lights were red and blue, the red one above the blue one, and they were flashing on and off. Because I’ve never seen anything like that coming from the woods before we decided to drive down and see what it was. We went down east-gate road and took a right at the stop sign and drove about 10-20 yards to where there is a road that goes into the forest. I could see a white light shining into the trees and I could still see the red and blue one. We decided we better go call it in so we went back up towards East Gate and called it in. The whole time I could see the lights and the white light was almost at the edge of the road and the blue and red lights were still out in the woods. A security unit was sent down to the gate and when they got there they could see it too. we asked permission to go and see what it was. We took the truck down the road that leads into the forest.
As we went down the east-gate road and the road that leads into the forest, the lights were moving back and they appeared to stop in a bunch of trees. We stopped the truck where the road stopped and went on foot. We crossed a small open field that let into where the lights were coming from, and as we were coming into the trees there were strange noises, like a woman screaming. Also the woods lit up and you could hear the farm animals making a lot of noises, and there was a lot of movement in the woods. All three of us hit the ground and what ever it was started moving back towards the open field and after a minute or two we got up and moved into the trees and the lights moved out into the open field. We got up to a fence that separated the trees from the open field.
You could see the lights down by a farmer’s house. We climbed over the fence and started walking toward the red and blue lights and they just disappeared. Once we reached the farmer’s house we could see a beacon going around, so we went toward it. We followed it for about 2 miles before we could see it was coming from a lighthouse. We had just passed a creak and were told to come back when we saw a blue light to our left in the trees. It was only there for a minute and just streaked away. After that we didn’t see anything and returned to the truck.”