What happened
Before dawn in late November 1980, West Yorkshire police constable Alan Godfrey was driving round Todmorden looking for a herd of cattle reported loose on a housing estate. Ahead on the road he saw what he first took for a double-decker bus. It was a rotating, diamond- or dome-shaped object hovering just above the road, he said, perhaps 20 feet high and 14 feet wide. He sketched it in his notebook and tried his radio, which was dead. Then came a flash of light, and he found himself further down the road with the object gone and, by his watch, a stretch of time he could not account for. The road under the object's position appeared dry though it had been raining, one of his boots was split, and the missing cows turned up in a park beside the road. Under hypnotic regression he later described a room, a tall bearded man and small robot-like beings. Five months earlier Godfrey had attended the unexplained death of miner Zigmund Adamski, found on a Todmorden coal heap.
The official explanation
Critics suggest a tired officer on a night shift may have slipped into a semi-waking state and misperceived a real bus or other lights, perhaps primed by a flying-saucer-shaped Futuro house that had stood in Todmorden since the 1970s and by the heavy local talk of UFOs after the Adamski death. Memories recovered under hypnosis are widely regarded as unreliable because of the risk of confabulation; Godfrey himself has said he was skeptical about the hypnosis material while maintaining the sighting was real.
The anomalous case
Godfrey was a serving officer who had a career to lose, and he said he was initially reluctant to file a report, doing so only after learning that others had seen strange lights that morning; several officers and a bus driver reportedly saw unusual lights. He made a sketch on the spot. The physical oddities he reported, a dry patch of road in the rain, a split boot and a mark on his foot, are concrete rather than dreamlike. He also described being visited by a man presenting himself as from the Ministry, sworn to the Official Secrets Act and then followed, and said he was moved out of Todmorden and eventually left the force for refusing to drop his account. The unexplained Adamski death in the same town, with burns treated by an ointment forensic scientists could not identify, keeps the area in the case files.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- The Todmorden UFO mystery: a close encounter in West Yorkshire HISTORY UK
- The Alan Godfrey Abduction Case, 1980 We Are the Mutants
- Todmorden (history section on Adamski and Godfrey) Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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