PC Alan Godfrey and the Todmorden encounter

Todmorden sits in the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire. Locals call the stretch of Burnley Road out of town "UFO Alley". In June 1980 the town was already in the news. Zigmund Adamski, a miner from Tingley, had been found dead on a coal heap at Parker's coal yard, with unexplained burns. The verdict was open.

One officer at the scene was PC Alan Godfrey. He told reporters, "I can't rule it out."

Five months later. The early hours of 28 November 1980, around 5 am, though some accounts give the 29th. It had rained heavily, and Godfrey was out looking for cattle reported straying. On Burnley Road he saw a large mass ahead and took it for a bus. Then he realised it was floating five feet in the air.

Accounts of its shape differ. Jenny Randles describes "a fuzzy oval that rotated at such speed and hovered so low over the otherwise deserted highway that it was causing the bushes by the side to shake." Other versions give a silent, rotating diamond about 20 feet high and 14 feet wide, or a dome topped with a row of windows. There was no sound, and his car radio and personal handset were dead. He stayed in the car and sketched the object on a pad propped against the windscreen.

Then a burst of light. Godfrey was driving further along Burnley Road, 20 to 30 yards on. The object was gone. So was a stretch of time, estimated at anything from 15 minutes to half an hour or more.

His police-issue boot was split across the sole, and his foot bore an itchy mark. A circular patch of road was dry, in a swirled pattern. He was not the only one to see something. A motorist at Cliviger, three miles further out, reported a "brilliant white object" at a matching time. A Halifax police patrol on the moors had seen a "brilliant blue-white glow" descending into the valley towards Todmorden.

About eight months later Godfrey underwent hypnotic regression, first with a Manchester psychiatrist. He recalled the light stopping his engine, then blindness and unconsciousness, then a room more like an ordinary house than a spacecraft. A tall, bearded man called Yosef communicated telepathically.

"He has told me not to be frightened." Small beings, which Randles described as "the size of a five-year-old lad", were there too. "They are robots! They're not human!" There was a large black dog. Godfrey could not say whether this was dream, fantasy, reality or a mixture.

His report leaked within about a week and reached a Sunday tabloid's front page. He was given a medical assessment and found psychologically fit. In later accounts he says he was hounded out of the force, and made to swear under the Official Secrets Act by a man in a dark suit. Randles wrote the case up in Flying Saucer Review in 1981, then in The Pennine UFO Mystery in 1983.

Sceptics have suggested a bus, a meteor followed by a blackout, a hallucination, or fatigue mixed with the town's flying-saucer-shaped Futuro House. Peter Brookesmith argued the case "makes most sense" in light of Godfrey's personal history. There is no verification beyond his own testimony. On BBC Breakfast Time in 1984, David Icke compared it with Betty and Barney Hill, and in 2021 BBC Radio 4's Uncanny brought it to a new audience. Godfrey has not wavered. "This was a nuts and bolts craft, not a trick of the mind."