The Todmorden Encounter: PC Alan Godfrey

PC Alan Godfrey was a West Yorkshire Police constable, patrolling alone in a panda car. It was the early hours of 28 November 1980. He had been called out over cattle roaming loose near Ashenhurst in Todmorden. About 5 a.m., near the end of his shift, he was on Burnley Road.

Something straddled the road ahead. He thought a double-decker bus had skewed across it. He looked closer. It was not a bus.

He described a diamond-shaped craft hovering just above the road, about twenty feet wide and fourteen feet high. Accounts mention a dome, a row of windows and bright lights along its edges. Its lower half rotated. His car's VHF radio and his personal UHF radio both failed. Godfrey took out his police notebook and sketched it.

Then a brilliant white flash. Godfrey found himself further down the road, about 100 yards on by most accounts. The object was gone. Estimates of the missing time run from 15 to 30 minutes. The patch of road beneath the object was reportedly dry, although heavy rain had fallen earlier that night. One of his boots was split open.

Fearing ridicule, Godfrey held back at first. He filed an official report only after hearing that other officers had seen a strange light apparently landing in Todmorden.

In August 1981 a stranger story surfaced, in sessions arranged by solicitor Harry Harris and conducted by Manchester psychiatrist Dr Joseph Jaffe. Godfrey described being struck by a beam of light and floating into the craft. He lay on a table while small, robot-like figures examined him. A tall humanoid man with a beard was there. Godfrey called him Yosef. A large black dog was in the room. He reportedly stayed doubtful about these hypnotic memories.

The story leaked to the press. Godfrey later said a man in a dark suit made him swear an oath under the Official Secrets Act. He said he was followed for days and transferred to Wakefield, and that someone tried to have him sectioned. He lost his job, his family and his home. He never stopped insisting the encounter was real.

Five months earlier, Godfrey had been among the first officers to attend the death of miner Zigmund Adamski, whose body was found on a coal pile in Todmorden. Some tied the two cases together. No evidence links them beyond the officer and the town.

Sceptics generally accept that Godfrey experienced something. One theory suggests a tired officer saw a real bus and blended it with the UFO-shaped Futuro house that stood in Todmorden. Others proposed a hallucination brought on by stress, tiredness or a mild epileptic fit. Peter Brookesmith argued the experience makes most sense in light of Godfrey's personal history. With David Clarke and Andy Roberts, he revisited the case in Fortean Times in 2011. Jenny Randles, author of The Pennine UFO Mystery, holds that there is a strong case Godfrey saw a real unidentified atmospheric phenomenon rather than an alien craft.

Todmorden is nicknamed Britain's answer to Roswell. Godfrey told his story on BBC Breakfast Time in 1984, and in 2017 he published his own book, WHO or WHAT were THEY? The case has returned in documentaries and even in Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley. The sketch, the dry road and the missing minutes still sit at the heart of the debate.