Todmorden Police Constable Sighting

In the early morning hours of November 28, 1980, Police Constable Alan Godfrey of the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police was on routine patrol in Todmorden when he encountered an object on Burnley Road that brought his patrol car to a stop. The object was a diamond-shaped craft, approximately six meters in width, rotating slowly and hovering approximately four feet above the road surface. The bushes on the roadside beneath it were agitated as though by a strong downward force.

Godfrey, a trained police officer whose professional function required him to assess unusual situations accurately, stopped his vehicle and made a sketch of the object in his official notebook — a routine police documentation procedure. He then reported the observation over his radio and attempted to drive toward the object. At that point, his next conscious memory was of being approximately 30 meters further down the road with no recollection of the intervening time. His watch showed a discrepancy. He found that his boot was split across the sole in a way that suggested considerable force.

An official police report was filed. Godfrey was subsequently interviewed using hypnotic regression techniques, a controversial methodology, during which he described an apparent extended encounter with non-human figures aboard the craft. Godfrey's willingness to make the sighting public, knowing the professional risk it carried, lent his account particular weight among researchers. He remained consistent in his account over decades and suffered the career consequences he had feared — ridicule and professional marginalization — without retracting his statement.

The Todmorden area had already been the site of a deeply disturbing anomalous case earlier in 1980. On June 11, a retired miner named Zigmund Adamski was found dead on top of a coal tip in Todmorden. He had disappeared from his home in Tingley, 10 miles away, five days earlier. His body showed unusual burn marks on his neck and head that were applied after death, and an unidentified gelatinous substance was found sealing the wounds — a substance that could not be chemically identified by laboratory analysis. No cause of death was established beyond a disputed cardiac event. The coroner, James Turnbull, explicitly noted that the case had 'no rational explanation.' PC Godfrey attended the Adamski scene. The juxtaposition of the two Todmorden incidents — an unexplained death with anomalous physical evidence and a credible police officer's encounter with an unidentified craft — in the same town and the same year has led researchers to regard Todmorden as one of the most anomalously dense UAP zones in British history.