USAF sergeant Jim Penniston claimed to have touched the UFO at the centre of the UK’s most dramatic alien encounter – but said its pilots were not extraterrestrials and instead time travellers
A former USAF sergeant who witnessed “The UK’s Roswell Incident” claims that after he touched an “alien spacecraft”, he was left with a “message from the future” implanted in his brain.
Jim Penniston was on duty at RAF Woodbridge in December 1980 when a number of unexplained lights were seen in nearby Rendlesham Forest. Multiple service personnel saw the lights, and with the Cold War at its height there were immediate security concerns.
“Staff sergeant Jim Penniston was the on-duty flight Chief at Woodbridge,” explained podcaster Andrew Gentile. “He grabbed airman Edward Cabansag and they headed to the east gate to get a clear picture of the situation.”
They thought the likely explanation was that an aircraft from nearby RAF Bentwaters had crash-landed, but they were puzzled at the lack of sound from the supposed crash. And they couldn’t rule out an incursion from Soviet spies.
What the men found was something else altogether. Jim Penniston’s notebook recorded a sighting of an aircraft “of unknown origin” that had strange hieroglyphics increased on its outer shell. And his notebook contains something even stranger.
Penniston described the craft as “triangular” with blue, white and red lights and the surface seemed “smooth. But alongside his incredible description and sketches, were pages and pages of zeros and ones that looked very much like binary code.
According to Andrew, Peniston said the code was was “information downloaded to me from the UFO”. He said he had no idea how the information got into his head.
“Jim was asked if it was binary code, but he didn’t know what that was,” Andrew said. “So they sent the numbers to a computer expert to see if there was anything to it.” The expert hadn’t been briefed on what to expect, but his verdict was almost unbelievable. He said it was a “message from the future”.
Decoded, the “message” read: “Exploration of humanity continuous… continuous for planetary advance. Eyes of our eyes. Origin year 8100.”
After that cryptic message, there was a list of coordinates for locations around the world: Caracol in Brazil, Sedona in the US state of Arizona, the Great Pyramid of Giza, Mount Taishan in China, Peru’s mysterious Nazca Lines, the Temple of Apollo in Greece and – most baffling of all – an unremarkable patch of sea west of Ireland which is simply listed as “The Origin”.
That spot is roughly the site of the island of “Hy Brasil” a mythical island that doesn’t currently exist but was marked on numerous ancient maps. “All of the locations in the binary code are known as highly spiritual places, but they’ve also been called portals to other dimensions or to other planes of reality,”Andrew continued.
“Because of this, Jim Penniston doesn’t think the Rendlesham UFO was extraterrestrial. He thinks it was us. He thinks this was a message from humans from 6,000 years in the future”.
The concept that UFOs are time machines rather than spacecraft has become an increasingly popular theory in recent years. After completing 20 years service with the USAF, Penniston has written a series of books describing his encounters in the forest in the early hours of Boxing Day 42 years ago, but the mystery of exactly what happened remains unsolved.