A former United States Air Force Colonel claims he has obtained additional evidence that an alien UFO landed near an American air force base in Suffolk in 1980.

Since the mysterious incident, Colonel Charles Halt has claimed that the unusual sighting of a flying object near RAF Woodbridge, near Rendlesham Forest, was a UFO.

He has now told the BBC that he has gathered statements from radar operators at RAF Bentwaters, another base around three miles away from RAF Woodbridge, that claim they witnessed the UFO flying overhead.

Halt, who now lives in the US state of Virginia, claims that these military witnesses to the event did not want to speak about it until after they left the forces, fearful for their jobs. Now, three decades later, he says they have supplied him with written statements.

The statements apparently say that an unidentified object was tracked during the incident, on 26 December 1980.

The radar operators say in their statements that they saw the object go across their scopes, which monitored an area 60 miles across, in two or three seconds, meaning whatever the object was, it was moving at tens of thousands of miles an hour.

He claims that they also say the object moved back across their scopes, stopped, and then went in to the forest near to where it was sighted.

Halt wrote a memo to the Ministry of Defence two weeks after the incident. In it, he claims that three servicemen on a routine security patrol saw "unusual lights" near to the ground, just outside of RAF Woodbridge.

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Thinking an aircraft may have crashed, they went to investigate. Halt wrote in the memo that they reported seeing a "strange glowing object" in the forest, which was metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, around two or three metres across.

As they approached further, the object maneuvered through the trees and disappeared, emitting bright lights. The memo adds that nearby farm animals went into a "frenzy" at this point.

Halt later went out to the location of the sighting and took radiation recordings, apparently finding that radiation levels were higher than usual around three depressions left in the ground. During this investigation, he recorded what he was doing on a hand-held voice recorder.

The apparent evidence for the sighting, and the fact that the details of it were recorded at the time by military officials, has made it a favourite case of UFO hunters.

He believes that there has been an effort by the British and American security services to cover up the incident and play down its significance.

Suffolk Police were called shortly after the incident and put the strange sighting down to lights coming from the air base and a nearby lighthouse.