The surviving Ministry of Defence record of the Rendlesham Forest incident begins not with rumours or witness interviews or speculative claims but with a formal memorandum submitted through official channels by a serving United States Air Force officer. Everything that follows in the MOD files, from reconstructed administrative fragments to handwritten remarks, is the government’s own paper trail. The story of what happened in the forest in late December 1980 is preserved here as the state received it. There are no embellishments in these documents. No sensational language. No efforts to dramatise or to explain away. The record shows what was reported, what was observed, what was measured and what the Ministry of Defence chose to do with that information. It is a rare instance of an unexplained aerial event entering the machinery of a national defence organisation through official means, and because it entered that system, the traces that survive reveal far more than a basic sighting. They show the moment when a real event met a government apparatus that did not want to examine it closely.