The Cononley A629 Police Sighting: Sgt Tony Dodd and PC Alan Dale

The Aire valley near Skipton, North Yorkshire. The A629 runs along the valley floor past the village of Cononley, with Cononley Moor rising to the west. Tony Dodd was the sergeant supervising the night patrol, part of a 25 year career with the West and North Yorkshire Police. Beside him in the passenger seat sat the beat officer, PC Alan Dale. One account, based on Dodd's own book, says they were taking a shortcut toward Cononley to deal with a missing-person report.

12 December 1978. About 4:30 a.m. A glowing object appeared ahead of the car. It lit the area 100 feet in front of them. It was 100 feet wide.

Dodd later described it to Michael Hesemann in a 1991 interview. "It had a dome with ports all around it. The bottom was surrounded by colored lights like neon lights in blue, red, green and white which blinked in a sequence as if they were rotating, and in the middle there were three spheres or hemispheres. It was a huge thing, about 100 feet in diameter, and it made no noise whatsoever."

Other retellings add small, round, dark portholes along the side and a skirting at the bottom. The two officers called the sight awe-inspiring. Beautiful.

The disc flew slowly over their heads. Colin Andrews put its speed at about 40 mph, at roughly 100 feet altitude. The version drawn from Dodd's book gives around twenty miles per hour.

It headed for a wooded area. It appeared, in Dodd's words, "to land at a place behind a group of trees." It descended until only a glow of light was visible. Then that was gone too.

Afterwards, according to UFO Insight, Dodd contacted Leeds/Bradford and Manchester airports. Neither had any record of unknown aircraft. No photographs, radar data or physical traces are known. No police inquiry or Ministry of Defence file has surfaced, and no conventional explanation appears in the accounts. The puzzle was simply never formally examined.

The record has its own wrinkles. Most sources give 12 December 1978 at 4:30 a.m. The retelling of Dodd's book and Project Camelot's tribute say a cold night in January 1978, at about 2:30 a.m. One later article mentions a third officer arriving separately, unnamed and unconfirmed. The story reached print in the Yorkshire Evening Post in 1983 and the Ripon Gazette in 1989.

The sighting launched Dodd's career in ufology. He kept watching the moors. He reported a black triangle in December 1982 that seemed to answer his torch signals, and took a photograph in November 1983. He joined the Yorkshire UFO Society in 1982. It later became Quest International, publisher of UFO Magazine, and Dodd served as its Director of Investigations. He retired from the police in 1988 to investigate full time, and told his story in Alien Investigator in 1999. He died in March 2009.

Two years after the night near Cononley, another Yorkshire officer, Alan Godfrey, reported his own close encounter while on patrol in Todmorden. It is the obvious companion to this case. Two police officers, a quiet road, and a light that would not be explained.