PC Alan Godfrey was doing nothing more unusual than chasing up a report of stray cows when his shift took an extraordinary turn. In November 1980, on duty as a West Yorkshire police officer investigating cattle that had wandered from a nearby farm, Godfrey reported seeing a brightly lit, diamond-shaped craft hovering and spinning above the road near Todmorden Moor, a machine he estimated at around twenty feet wide and fourteen feet high. What set the report apart from the huge number of UFO sightings made across Britain every year was not the description itself but the witness behind it: a serving, on-duty police officer, filing an official report in the course of his own working shift, rather than an anonymous member of the public recounting something seen from a back garden.
The case grew stranger still after the sighting itself. Godfrey later underwent hypnotic regression, during which he described a period of missing time connected to the encounter, and recounted being taken aboard the craft and medically examined by small, bearded beings. Researchers have treated that part of the account with considerable caution, hypnotic regression is widely regarded as an unreliable method for recovering accurate memory rather than confirming it, but the abduction narrative nonetheless became the part of the case most often repeated in its popular retelling, somewhat overshadowing the more sober, corroborated sighting that started it.
Godfrey's encounter did not happen in isolation. Only months earlier, in June 1980, the unexplained death of Zigmund Adamski had been discovered on a coal heap in the same town, and the two cases have been persistently linked in media coverage ever since, whether or not any genuine connection exists between them. Between an on-duty officer's official report and its entanglement with Todmorden's other great unsolved mystery, this remains one of the best-documented and most discussed UFO cases associated with England, recorded here honestly as officially unresolved rather than either confirmed or debunked.
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