IncidentThe Alan Godfrey / Todmorden Case

Shortly after 5 a.m. on 28 November 1980, PC Alan Godfrey, on early patrol on Burnley Road in Todmorden searching for stray cattle, reported a large rotating diamond/spinning-top object hovering over the road; he sketched it, said his car and station radios failed, experienced a memory gap (‘missing time’), and found himself further down the road, later noting a split boot and a skin mark. The case belongs to the same intense late-1980 British UFO wave that produced Rendlesham a month later. The DRAMATIC content — an abduction with beings, a large dog, and a figure named ‘Joseph’ — emerged only later under HYPNOTIC REGRESSION, which is not reliable evidence and is prone to confabulation and suggestion; Godfrey himself said he could not tell whether the experience was real or dreamt. UFO lore also links the case to Zigmund Adamski, a miner found dead on a Todmorden coal tip five months earlier with unexplained burns (a case Godfrey had worked) — but the coroner ruled heart attack and no connection to the sighting is established; treat the link as speculative. Documented by Jenny Randles in ‘The Pennine UFO Mystery’ (1983). A single-witness case whose sober core (a reported sighting, radio trouble) is credible-but-uncorroborated and whose extraordinary content is hypnosis-derived.