Charles I. Halt is a retired United States Air Force colonel and the former base commander of RAF Bentwaters, near Woodbridge, Suffolk. After serving in Vietnam, Japan and Korea, he was assigned to Bentwaters as deputy commander. The Rendlesham Forest incident of late December 1980 occurred shortly afterwards.  In the late hours of December 27, and early December 28, 1980 then Lieutenant Colonel Halt led a patrol to investigate an alleged UFO landing site near the eastern edge of Rendlesham Forest. During this investigation they witnessed several unidentified lights, most prominent of them being a bright flashing light in the direction of Orford Ness. In January 1981 Halt composed an official Air Force memorandum listing details of the events. The memo was then dispatched to the Ministry of Defence. Halt also made an audio tape recording of the incident After retiring from the US Air Force in 1991, Halt made his first public appearance in a television documentary, where he confirmed the authenticity of the Rendlesham Forest incident. His book on the subject is entitled The Halt Perspective. In June 2010 Halt issued a notarized affidavit in which he summarized the alleged events of the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident and concluded: "I believe the objects that I saw at close quarter were extraterrestrial in origin and that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted – both then and now – to subvert the significance of what occurred at Rendlesham Forest and RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practiced methods of disinformation."