Jenny Randles

Jenny Randles is a British author and researcher who studied physics and geology before becoming, from the 1970s onward, one of the United Kingdom's most prolific and influential UFO writers, ultimately publishing around 50 books across UFO research and adjacent anomalous-phenomena subjects that have together sold more than 1.5 million copies. She helped form the Northern UFO Network in 1973 and edited Northern UFO News from 1974, and served as director of investigations for the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA), the UK's leading civilian UFO organization, from 1982 to 1994, overseeing case investigation standards during a formative period for British ufology. Randles is credited with coining the term 'Oz Factor' in 1983 to describe a recurring witness report of an altered, isolated perceptual state, silence, stillness, a sense of time distortion, accompanying close UFO encounters, a concept that became a standard analytical term within the field for describing the subjective phenomenology of sightings independent of any claim about their physical cause. She was among the most active early investigators of the 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident, Britain's most famous case, helping establish much of its early witness record. A co-founder of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, Randles has maintained a research output spanning crop circles, time-slip claims, and UFO history across five decades.