Danny Robins' paranormal cold cases: UFO encounter
In 1980, a police constable hit the headlines after a close encounter with a ‘UFO’. But is there a logical explanation for what he saw? BBC Radio’s Danny Robins investigates...
It’s the night of 28 November 1980. Margaret Thatcher is prime minister, the Cold War’s in full effect, and police constable Alan Godfrey is out on patrol in his hometown, Todmorden, in West Yorkshire, on the trail of some cows spotted roaming a local housing estate. Various sightings have been reported, but the rogue herd eludes Alan. Then, at 5am, as he’s about to finish his shift, he spots something strange... “My first thought was it was a double decker bus that had gone sideways,” says Alan in his broad Yorkshire accent when I talk to him for my BBC Sounds podcast Uncanny. As he drives towards it, though, he realises he’s looking at something unfamiliar. It appears to be a large flying object, hovering silently about five feet above the ground.
“It was approximately 20 feet wide,” says Alan, “and 14 feet high, diamond in shape, spinning slowly anticlockwise, but the leaves and twigs on the ground were all swirling clockwise! Right weird!”
Right weird indeed... So begins one of the great British UFO mysteries. Alan reports his sighting to his superiors but word leaks out to a local newspaper, and it isn’t long before the nation’s press is writing about the ‘Todmorden UFO’. It turns out there have been other sightings of flying objects in the area, and some of the newspapers draw links with another case Alan has investigated.
Earlier that year, he and a colleague had been called out to a body found on top of a coal heap at the local train station. It was a man named Zigmund Adamski, a 52-year-old coal miner, who’d died in bizarre circumstances. His hair had been cropped, he had burns on his scalp, a wound on his neck smeared in green gel, and he’d been dressed after death. Oddest of all, his body didn’t have a single smudge of coal on it. It was almost as if he had been dropped from above. The look on Adamski’s face has stuck with Alan to this day: “Have you ever heard the saying, ‘he was frightened to death?’”
Now people join the dots. As fantastical as it seems, had Adamski been abducted by aliens, killed, and dropped onto the heap? Others wonder if the two incidents are linked by Cold War intrigue. Perhaps what Alan saw was a secret military prototype? Was Adamski a spy killed by the KGB? The rumour mill goes into overload, fuelled when a Russian UFO expert makes contact with Alan. Alan reports it to his bosses and pretty soon he’s summoned by a “Man from the Ministry”, who warns Alan not to talk about Adamski or his UFO encounter!
My investigation for Uncanny sparked a huge response from listeners. Many people contacted me to say they’d witnessed objects similar to what Alan saw, and, for some reason, the area around Todmorden appears to be a ‘hot spot’. There are various theories as to why certain places attract these sightings, but so many questions remain. One thing we know for sure, though, was that the cows Alan was chasing did eventually turn up, inside a park with a firmly closed gate – almost as if they’d been dropped there...
Find out more
From ghostly phantoms to UFOs, The Battersea Poltergeist's Danny Robins investigates real-life stories of paranormal encounters on his BBC Radio 4 podcast Uncanny. Episodes available now on BBC Sounds
This article was first published in the January 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
Authors
Danny Robins is a writer, broadcaster and journalist. He has presented podcasts including 'The Witch Farm'.
Get exclusive access to Ruth Goodman’s six-week Academy course on Victorian Life, featuring two live Q&As + a book of your choice when you subscribe to BBC History Magazine
