1980 was the year. Margaret Thatcher was at No. 10 Jimmy Carter was also in the White House. Cold War was raging and the Iron Curtain had been closed. Cinemas were packed with Empire Strikes Back.
A policeman was driving along a damp road in West Yorkshire when he received an early morning report from Todmorden. This small town is located in the Calder Valley. It stated that some people had reported that their garden had been invaded by a group of cows.
The officer in question was PC Alan Godfrey, then a 33-year-old married father of two, based at ‘Tod nick’. He began to look. He saw what looked like a bus blocking Burnley Road as he drove his Ford Escort panda vehicle into the street at 5.15 AM. Only, it wasn’t a bus. ‘As I inched closer, driving at a crawl, I saw a diamond-shaped object, about 20ft wide and 14ft high, literally hanging in the air about 5ft off the road.
‘It was spinning slowly, and the leaves on the road underneath were spinning in the opposite direction. It looked very real; real enough that if I’d got out of my car and thrown a brick at it, it would have made a clang,’ Alan recalls now.
An officer was on a West Yorkshire wet road, just before dawn, November 28th, when Todmorden reported that he had received his report.
Alan decided to stay in his car and turned on the blue light. He tried calling the police. Strangely enough, neither the car radio nor his personal set worked.
‘Then my policeman’s instincts kicked in and I decided to make a sketch, just as I would if I’d come across a road traffic accident, to show the positions of the vehicles involved.’ There was then a ‘brilliant, white, blinding flash — a bit like having your photograph taken with the flash gun in your face’, and the next thing he remembers he was driving, stunned, in the opposite direction, back towards the police station, having lost several minutes of time.
The object vanished, but the area of road was dry.
These claims are far-fetched indeed. Perhaps Alan had become tired. Perhaps he was a fantasyist.
When you meet Alan Godfrey, a plain-speaking, affable Yorkshireman with two police commendations, he’s not the swivel-eyed oddball one normally associates with kooky UFO stories. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool beat bobby who has ‘no time for daft buggers’.
‘It was a factual event. It was real,’ he says today, as we revisit the spot — a non-descript, busy main road, with a stream and a park on one side — on a comparable cold, blustery day, 41 years later.
‘Was it an alien craft I saw, or was it of this earth? I don’t know. To be honest, it’s such a long time ago that it doesn’t matter to me whether people believe me or not. It happened.’
The officer in question was PC Alan Godfrey, then a 33-year-old married father of two, based at ‘Tod nick’. The officer set out to look.
Whatever ‘it’ was nearly ruined Alan’s life. After being hounded from the job that he was passionate about, he began to drink and his marriage fell apart.
He was able to lift his head and stand tall again because of Kathryn, his second wife.
Alan has been a well-known local celebrity for his years of after-dinner talks. Selina Scott, Frank Bough, and Alan have sat down on television sofas and their stories were broadcast by various TV stations around the globe. In 2017, his book Who Or What Were They? was published.
This is an amazing story, no matter what your opinion. This is the reason it will be made into a Hollywood movie.
Alan signed a deal to screenwriter and producer Michael Grais. Grais is best-known as co-writer for the 1982 movie Poltergeist.
Michael is a big Alan fan. ‘I met Alan and I totally believed him, 110 per cent. I did not feel there was a dishonest word coming out of his mouth,’ he says, speaking from California. ‘I’m not a UFO guy who sees conspiracies everywhere — I’m not part of that crew.
‘I’ll start writing the script in the summer and approach film companies. UFO stuff is very popular in the U.S. because, for the first time, the government has just admitted that they exist.’
Michael refers to the June UFO report by the U.S. government. Although the report did not admit to the existence of little green men, it did reveal that there were objects appearing in the sky that the Pentagon — which controls the U.S. military — could not explain, and the existence of extraterrestrials couldn’t be ruled out.
He saw what looked like a bus blocking Burnley Road as he drove his Ford Escort panda into Burnley Road around 5.15am. Only, it wasn’t a bus
Todmorden is a unique place with a history of other-worldly affairs. The Pennine region between Yorkshire and Lancashire has been dubbed ‘UFO valley’, as its unique geology and geography have led to thousands of what investigators term UAPs, or ‘Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomena’.
For example, just a week before Alan’s ‘encounter’, three Halifax policemen looking for a stolen motorbike saw bright lights moving around in the sky, something Alan learned about only years later.
But there was another, truly horrific, incident five months before Alan’s UFO sighting — again in Todmorden — that captured the world’s attention. Curiously though, PC Alan Godfrey is one of two officers that investigated this case.
Zigmund ‘Ziggy’ Adamski, a 56-year-old miner of Polish descent, had gone missing from his home near Wakefield in June 1980 after he’d nipped out to the local shop to buy some potatoes.
He was found dead at Todmorden’s coal yard five days later. His body was discovered on top of a 15ft pile of coal. He was wearing only a shirt and a suit. The crown of his severely shorn head had burn marks, and there was another injury at the back.
‘The oddest thing was that there was no coal dust or dirt on his body — he looked as though he’d simply lain down and died, on top of that pile of coal, having left no sign of how he got up there,’ says Alan.
‘His clothes, to me, suggested he’d been hastily redressed after death. But it was the look on his face that shocked me the most — I’ll never forget it. He looked like he’d been scared to death.’
Alan decided to stay in his car and instead of getting out, he turned on the blue light and attempted to report the accident. Strangely enough, neither the car radio nor the personal one worked.
James Turnbull, the coroner who dealt with Zigmund’s death, commented later that it was the biggest mystery of his career. Why, for example, had he been missing for five days and yet had only one day’s growth of beard? And a corrosive liquid, found around the site of the neck wound couldn’t be identified.
A post-mortem examination concluded that Zigmund had died of heart failure due to ‘ischaemic heart disease’ and emphysema. An open verdict was recorded by the coroner.
His death was never investigated or prosecuted. Although most people believe he was murdered, there are many who speculate on the identity of his killers.
But back to that November incident which, predictably, made Alan the butt of his hard-bitten colleagues’ jokes. ‘When I walked into the station later that evening to begin my next shift, I was greeted with “ey up, it’s Captain Kirk”.’ But things were soon to turn very nasty. Three months prior to Peter Sutcliffe’s capture, this was 1980.
West Yorkshire Police was under huge scrutiny because they failed to stop the five-year-old killing spree. The last thing that their public image required was for a local officer in the news discussing aliens. But, inevitably, the story leaked to the local newspaper, under the jokey headline ‘May The Force Be With You’.
But soon it wasn’t so funny. After the story went national, Alan was stunned to receive a letter from a professor at Moscow University, asking for more information about his ‘encounter’. The USSR, in the middle of Cold War, would have been interested in unexplained planes, searching for military secrets. Alan gave everything to his supervisors.
‘Then one day I was called into the inspector’s office and sitting there was a man in civilian clothing, who simply introduced himself as “the Man from the Ministry”.
‘He had a file on his lap which, when it flipped open, I could see contained my drawing from the night and my sudden-death report on Zigmund Adamski.
When you meet Alan Godfrey, a plain-speaking, affable Yorkshireman with two police commendations, he’s not the swivel-eyed oddball one normally associates with kooky UFO stories
‘They cited the Official Secrets Act and ordered me, in no uncertain terms, not to speak of it to the Press. Then, they tried to take me out. I left the job four years later.’
Alan talks about being persecuted, of seeing the ‘Man from the Ministry’ everywhere. His phone may have been tapped, he suspects.
He was unable to work because of an injury he sustained in 1984. With an impeccable record, he left the force.
He worked as a butcher, then for a security agency, but had started drinking heavily — a bottle of whisky a day. In 1988, his marriage ended. His ex-wife, and his family are so protective that he won’t allow them to be part of the story.
In the late 1990s, he had reached rock bottom. ‘I ended up living in a friend’s bedroom; I’d lost everything. I had no money, I’d parted from my first wife. It was Christmas and I couldn’t buy the kids anything. It was Christmas Eve and I was lying on my stomach, convinced that there wasn’t any point to continuing.
‘Then, suddenly, I thought: “Right, enough is enough. Get a grip, you daft bugger!” And that’s what I did. I got myself a flat, met Kath and she sorted me out.’
‘Sorted’ is exactly how you’d describe Alan today. He is happily married with three children and has retired. He drives a car with ‘UFO’ on the number plate.
Yet, the skeptical still laugh at his claims. The most skeptical person is Dr Alan Clarke. Clarke is associate professor at Sheffield Hallam University. Clarke is also co-founder and author of The UFO Files.
He’s been following Alan’s story — and that of Zigmund Adamski — since he worked as a reporter on The Yorkshire Post.
Whatever ‘it’ was nearly ruined Alan’s life. After being hounded from the job that he was passionate about, he began to drink and his marriage fell apart.
His take on what happened in June and November of 1980 is very different from the former police officer’s.
‘I don’t dispute Alan saw something that night, but what it was I wouldn’t want to say,’ he says.
‘When people speak of hallucinations, there are bad connotations as they are associated with mental illness, but completely sane people have hallucinations all the time.’
Dr Clarke cites the work of the late groundbreaking neurological anthropologist Oliver Sacks, who described a hallucination as ‘seeing with the brain — something that isn’t under our control, that seems to come from the outside and to mimic perception’, and for which there is always a physical, medical explanation.
‘Alan describes sitting, looking at this thing and then a blast of white light, after which he couldn’t remember anything, until he found himself driving along the road. It sounds like someone is describing an epileptic fit.
‘As for Adamski, he was most certainly abducted, tortured and murdered — but not by aliens. Human beings caused his death. What better way to wash away any evidence left on a corpse than to throw it onto a pile of coal in the rain?
‘The case should have been investigated properly, and it wasn’t because of this alien connection.’
When the Ministry of Defence released all its files on UFO sightings to the National Archives back in 2014, Alan’s report was not in there.
Alan signed a deal to screenwriter and producer Michael Grais. Grais is best-known as co-writer for the 1982 movie Poltergeist.
‘Alan sees this as a cover-up by the MoD, but I think it wasn’t there because West Yorkshire Police didn’t send it to them,’ says Dr Clarke. ‘They never received it; they were embarrassed.
‘As for the “Man from the Ministry” . . . This was evidently a Yorkshire Police man trying to intimidate him.
‘What Alan does make clear is that it was real to him. But what if you’d been driving along the same road, at the same time. Would you have seen what Alan saw, or would you have seen some copper sitting in his car, staring straight ahead?’
Alan bats Dr Clarke’s comments away with affable good humour. No, he isn’t epileptic, and no he hasn’t had any ‘hallucinations’ before or since that episode.
‘But I do often think about that night, and what would have happened if I’d turned right up into the estate, and not carried along Burnley Road. It would have made a huge difference in my life.
‘Would I have reported the incident, if I’d known what would happen? Probably not.’