NARRATOR: In Suffolk County, England,
there is a remote forest in the village of Rendlesham that
has become famous for being the site of one
of the most extraordinary UFO encounters ever reported.
And some of those who experienced
it believe this incident also involved time travel.
The event occurred on December 26, 1980.
Airman John Burroughs was performing a routine security
check at a US Air Force base when
he received orders to investigate
a possible downed aircraft.
JOHN BURROUGHS: My supervisor called me on the radio
and asked me to meet up with him so we
could check the east gate.
We were driving down the road leading to the east gate
to check on it when all of a sudden,
he saw some strange lights in the forest.
[music playing]
So I decided to call it in and let them know
something strange was going on.
They decided to send one of the security units down,
which was Sergeant Penniston He got down there,
and he saw the same strange lights that we were seeing.
JAMES PENNISTON: I could see all these multiple color lights
and things like that.
And the air felt different.
I don't know how to really explain that,
but it did feel like there was electricity
on our skin and hair and stuff.
But that progressively got worse the closer we got to the tree
line, and it got more intense.
JOHN BURROUGHS: There seemed to be,
like, an electricity charged atmosphere.
And then also, there were points where it seemed like everything
was going in slow motion.
NARRATOR: As the serviceman approached the strange lights,
Sergeant Penniston reportedly saw a large craft
just beyond the tree line.
JAMES PENNISTON: The craft was triangular in shape,
measuring about 6 to 7 feet high, black in color.
I had come around to the far side of the craft,
and that's when I noticed that there
was inscription on the side.
You know, it is about 3 feet long, maybe 6 inches high.
And so I'm expecting to fin--
I don't know-- some kind of prototype stuff, USAF.
I'm looking for something very familiar.
[music playing]
Instead of something familiar, I see
these pictorial-type glyphs.
And I got running my hand over the side of the craft.
I don't know how to explain this.
It's like someone was holding a picture up, OK?
I could see it in my mind's eye, zeros and ones.
So I recorded those one after another.
GARY HESELTINE: When Penniston touched the craft,
he then said that he felt a strange download of information
to his mind, and he felt compelled the next day
to write down a series of zeros and ones, which
we now regard as binary code.
NICK POPE: Years later, a computer programmer took
this information, ran it through a translation program,
and a message emerged.
The message read, "exploration of humanity,
continuous for planetary advance.
Eyes of your eyes, origin year 8100."
When one sees origin year 8100, one is forced to speculate,
might we be looking not just at extraterrestrials but time
travelers from the future?
NARRATOR: After the incident, the US military
conducted a brief investigation but allegedly
tried to keep the eyewitnesses away from the press.
But for Airman Burroughs and Officer Penniston,
the event wasn't easy to leave behind.
Both men had lasting physical effects from the encounter
and even reported strange dreams.
JOHN BURROUGHS: After the incident,
I started having throat and eye problems.
At one point, my gums turned white.
I also had vision problems.
And when I went and saw the doctor,
one of his first questions was, had I
been ever exposed to radiation?
I've definitely had dreams about it.
And I still have feelings about what happened
and what could happen in the future.
JAMES PENNISTON: I got out of the service in 1993.
Then I was out about maybe three months,
and then I started getting these dreams and nightmares.
During the dreams, I could see that these
were time travelers 40,000 to 50,000 years in the future.
I see that the purpose to come back
was to correct things, was to fix things.
Something horrible has happened, something they have to correct,
but it requires time travel.
It requires going back into the past.
I never had a feeling of it being extraterrestrial.
It's always been that they were simply us in the future.
NARRATOR: Could it be that the craft reportedly witnessed
by James Penniston and John Burroughs
came not from a distant star but from a distant point in time?