At about 3:00 a.m. on December 26, 1980, Sergeant Jim Penniston and a team of other servicemen at RAF Woodbridge ventured into the Rendlesham Forest to investigate strange lights that had been witnessed descending into the trees.

In an interview years later (watch it here), Penniston would recall the event, which is now known as the Rendlesham Forest Incident.

At the time, he had expected the situation to be routine – a downed aircraft of some sort, nothing extraordinary. But what he found instead was an unidentified craft unlike any he had seen before. A bright light glowed, eventually subsiding to reveal a black, triangular object with a metallic, though seemingly glassy, surface. It glimmered with strange red and blue lights.

Penniston could see no landing gear, no exhaust, no windows. He did, however, notice some symbols, and for a moment he thought, hopefully, that he would find what he’d expected – an insignia referring to some top-secret U.S. government test craft, or perhaps a failed NASA experiment. But upon closer inspection, the symbols appeared more like hieroglyphs, cryptic designs that he could not understand.

As he would later share in the 2014 book Encounter in Rendlesham Forest. the sound in the area deadened. When at first they could hear the trees and animals within the forest, near the mysterious craft they could hear nothing. Static electricity tingled their skin and raised their hair. Time itself felt like it slowed down.

Penniston described it as a “dragging of time.” After the ordeal was finished, the servicemen noticed their watches were incorrect, and what had felt like only a few minutes had actually been a few hours.

A Telepathic Message

“During the night I was often wakening with thoughts, or rather images, of visions of ones and zeros running through my mind, my mind’s eye…” – Jim Penniston, Encounter in Rendlesham Forest

Before he and the others returned to report their findings, Jim Penniston did something that would change the course of his future forever – he placed his hand upon the mysterious glyphs on the surface of the craft. When he did so, he became engulfed in a bright white light, and lost all sense of sight and sound.

When he “awoke” from this trance-like state, he found himself standing near the craft. It began to glow once again, then ascended above the trees and vanished in an instant.

The following day, Penniston began to see them: images in his mind of thousands of ones and zeros. He didn’t know what to make of them, but he wrote them down in his notebook, along with drawings of the strange glyphs (you can view these drawings here).

As soon as he finished writing them down, the images of the ones and zeros vanished from his mind. He put the notebook away, out of sight, and forgot about them.

The Binary Code

It wasn’t until the year 2010, after being contacted to share his story on the popular History Channel program Ancient Aliens, that Penniston revealed the existence of his notebook filled with the cryptic ones and zeros.

Along with the help of Linda Moulton Howe and other experts, he discovered that the ones and zeros were actually binary code, and when translated contained the following message:

What he saw astounded him: had he been granted an otherworldly message in binary code? It consisted of what seemed to be coordinates to locations around the world: Caracol, Belize; Sedona, Arizona; the Great Pyramid of Giza; the Nazca Lines in Peru; Tai Shan Qu, China; the Portara at the Temple of Apollo in Nexos, Greece; and a purported location of the mysterious phantom island, Hy-Brasil.

Deciphering the Future

Penniston, as well as others who have analyzed the strange message, does not believe that the craft he saw at Rendlesham Forest was extraterrestrial in nature.

Instead, looking closely at the contents of the message, a bizarre possibility unravels: is it a message from the future?

The Rendlesham Forest Incident Information Portal contains images of Penniston’s drawings, as well as scans of the 16 or so pages upon which he wrote the cryptic binary message.

It also posits that the binary message itself is actually the product of human time travelers from the year 8100 (hence “Origin Year 8100”). These same time travelers, whatever their purpose (“Exploration of Humanity,” perhaps?), are also responsible for most UFO sightings, and are in fact the ones leaving mysterious crop circles around the planet.

It is suggested that these crop circles are actually markers for fellow time travelers to assist them in navigating multiple timelines.

The coordinates in the message may be the locations of hidden portals on Earth that would allow for travel to other worlds. Or, perhaps, they mark the locations where the time travelers have traveled before. But this is just speculation.

An extraordinary tale, one with many questions – and surrounded by a great deal of skepticism. What do you believe?