The Bacup Police Station Cigar

October 1967 was a restless month in British skies. Reports of strange objects came in from across the country. In Devon, PCs Roger Willey and Clifford Waycott reported chasing a "flying cross" in the Okehampton area. Weeks earlier, on 4 September, apprentices at RAE Farnborough had staged a hoax with six saucer props scattered across southern England.

Bacup, then a municipal borough in Lancashire, was far from all of it.

It was 05:30. PC Brian Earnshaw was on duty at Bacup police station when the station's short-wave radio began to crackle. Something was interfering with it. Curious, he went outside to see what might be causing it.

He looked up. A cigar-shaped object was hovering about 250 feet above the station.

Earnshaw described it in plain terms. "It was approximately 50 feet in length. There were portholes on the side but there were no visible signs of propulsion. The ship appeared to be metallic and gave off a bright glow. There was a low whirring sound coming from it."

He was not the only one watching. PC Colin Donahoe and PC Malcolm Reader, uniformed officers, saw the same object from a different location in Lancashire. The accounts do not say where. They watched it for several minutes. Then it rose vertically into the sky and disappeared.

Three serving officers. One object. A statement attributed to Lancashire Police captured the mood: "We have had UFO reports before, but nothing like this. There has been no reasonable explanation but it was something definitely seen."

The whole story survives through a single printed book. Robert Chapman told it in UFO: Flying Saucers over Britain, a Mayflower paperback from 1969. Decades later, Gary Heseltine's PRUFOS Police Database, launched in 2002, filed it as an on duty sighting and classed it CE1/EM, a close encounter with electromagnetic effects. Some online reposts date the case to 1969, most likely confusing it with the year Chapman's book appeared.

No police, Ministry of Defence or Air Ministry file on the case has surfaced. No photographs, no radar data and no physical traces were reported. The radio interference rests on testimony alone. No contemporary newspaper report has yet been found, and no exact day is given anywhere.

No conventional explanation has ever been published for the Bacup object. An airship, a lit aircraft seen at an odd angle in the dark before dawn, or Venus as a morning star might all be tested. None sits easily with a 50 foot hull, portholes, a low whirring sound and a crackling radio, as the officers reported them.

Bacup sits in Rossendale, a corner of the Pennines that later earned a reputation as a UFO window. Mike Sacks reported sightings at neighbouring Stacksteads in 1978 and 1979. In 1980, PC Alan Godfrey reported an encounter at Todmorden, about 6 miles away.

The old police station on Bank Street, probably where Earnshaw heard the crackle, later played Hartley Police Station in the BBC's Juliet Bravo. Today it is housing. The question the force could not answer remains open.