Todmorden is a former mill town in the upper Calder Valley, where West Yorkshire meets Lancashire in the South Pennines. In 1980 it found itself in the papers twice for reasons it would rather have avoided: first an unexplained death, then a police officer’s report of a flying object. The same officer was involved in both, and that link turned two separate puzzles into one of Britain’s best-known UFO stories.
The body on the coal heap
On June 6, 1980 Zigmund Adamski, a 56-year-old Polish-born miner from Tingley near Wakefield who worked at Lofthouse Colliery, left home on a shopping errand and did not come back. On June 11 workers found him dead, lying on top of a heap of coal in J. W. Parker’s coal yard in Todmorden, around twenty miles from his home. He was dressed in a suit but had no shirt, and his wallet and watch were missing. A post-mortem put the cause of death as a heart attack earlier that day. It also found burns on the back of his head, neck and shoulders that seemed to have been treated with an ointment the laboratory could not identify.
No one could say how he got to Todmorden, where he had been for five days, or how he came to be on the coal. The coroner, James Turnbull, recorded an open verdict and later called it one of the most puzzling cases of his career. No one was ever charged. Among the first police officers to reach the yard was a young constable named Alan Godfrey.
Burnley Road
Before dawn on November 28, 1980, by Godfrey’s account, he was driving along Burnley Road on the edge of town looking for cattle reported loose on a housing estate. Ahead he saw what he first took for a bus slewed across the road. Closer, it was an object about twenty feet across and fourteen high, hovering a few feet above the tarmac, with a row of windows and a lower half that spun fast enough to shake the roadside bushes. His radio would not work, so he sketched the thing on his notepad. Then came a flash, and he found himself farther down the road with the object gone. Going back, he found a dry, swirled patch on the otherwise rain-soaked road. Back at the station, he was later than he expected; estimates of the missing time have ranged from about fifteen to thirty minutes. One of his boots was split.
Godfrey hesitated to report it until he heard that others had seen lights that morning: officers from Halifax watching the moors for stolen motorbikes saw a bright blue-white glow drop toward the valley, and a driver at Cliviger, farther along the same road, reported a brilliant white object. He filed a report, the story reached the local paper, and UFO investigators took up the case.
The hypnosis
About eight months after the sighting Godfrey was hypnotically regressed by a Manchester psychiatrist, followed by further sessions with other therapists. Under hypnosis he described his engine dying, blinding light, and then a room more like a house than a spacecraft, with a large black dog, a bearded man in robes who called himself Yosef, and several small, robot-like attendants. The ufologist Jenny Randles, who first wrote up the case and later made it the core of her 1983 book The Pennine UFO Mystery, has said Godfrey was sure of the sighting but could not tell whether the hypnotic story was a dream, a fantasy, real, or a mix.
Once a tabloid ran his name, Godfrey was questioned by his superiors and assessed medically; he was found fit, but he was transferred to Wakefield and believes he was pushed into early retirement. In October 2014 he told a sell-out audience at the Todmorden Hippodrome that what he saw was a solid craft and not a trick of the mind.
Where it stands
The two events share a town, an officer and a year, and nothing else that can be shown. Adamski’s death remains unsolved, with burns and a missing five days that no theory, terrestrial or otherwise, has explained; the alien link was supplied afterward by newspapers, not by evidence. Godfrey’s sighting is well documented as a report, made promptly and with some corroboration of lights in the area, but no physical trace beyond a dry patch of road survives. The abduction is a hypnotic recollection that even its subject would not vouch for.