Hello and welcome to the program UFO Warning.
In this episode we're talking about the alien abduction of
Alan Godfrey. That's correct, the alien
abduction of Alan Godfrey. Now this was a ex police
constable over in the UK. Kind of a cool story I really
hadn't heard of before. I found this article at
umbrellamagazine.co.uk. The title says Chance encounters
alien abduction in the Pennines and this is dated December 12th,
2021. Got a picture of this house?
Here? Photographer Rick Moran's new
book looks at the strange case of PC Alan Godfrey and Todd
Morden 1980 goes on here and says Borderlands are often other
worldly places. And that's is true for
Lancashire, Yorkshire frontier as it is for the US Mexico
border. Take Todd Morden for example, a
town that straddled the boundary between red and white roses.
The hills surrounding it have long been noted for mysterious
goings on, especially those of an extraterrestrial nature.
Most notorious is the alleged alien abduction of PC.
That's Constable Alan Godfrey on November 28th, 1980.
Godfrey was already investigating another bizarre
case, the death of miner Sigma Adamski on June 11th.
He'd been found dead on a pile of coal with no visible signs of
injury except for a mark, perhaps a burn on the back of
his neck and head. I talked about that case in the
podcast before, but I should revisit.
It goes on and says Six months after Adamski's death, PC
Godfrey revealed an even stranger tale.
While investigating cattle roaming, he saw a white Dome
shaped object appear in front of him before being blinded by a
flash of light. He blacked out and came to his
senses 20 minutes later and 100 yards away.
So there we have some missing time with no memory of what had
happened to him. Soon his story became national
news. Had he been abducted by aliens?
Were UF OS making forays to the Pennines?
Why did PC Godfrey's body, like Sigma Adamski's, have an
unexplained burn? 40 years after footage?
Journalist and regular Umbrella contributor Rick Moran has
written a book, Chance Encounters in the Valley of
Lights, telling the story of the case through words, original
photography and never before seen archival material.
It is an arresting synthesis of psychogeography, investigative
journalism and art. Here we speak to Rick, now
living in New York about this most bizarre case.
And it's got a picture of this Alan Godfrey here from back when
it happened. And also a letter from the
Ministry of Defense design that they're sorry they can't help
him as far as office says hi Rick, Give us a brief rundown of
what happened. He says well I was a young lad
when my dad brought home a newspaper with the story of a
local policeman who claimed he'd been abducted by a UFO.
The story goes like this. November 28th, 1985 AM PC Alan
Godfrey was on duty when he was called to report of cattle
roaming loose around a local housing estate.
Driving down to Burnley Rd. he saw what he thought was a bus
that had skewed across the road. On getting closer, he
encountered a spinning object 20 feet wide hovering above the
ground. He tried to radio his station
and the radio was dead. His car wouldn't start either,
so he sketched out what he saw in his notebook.
There was a flash of green light and he was 100 yards down the
road. The next year, Godfrey underwent
3 hypnosis sessions where he recalled being taken on board
the craft and examined. This correlated with 20 minutes
of lost time he had, and the strange marks on his foot and
split boot also backed up his recollection of having bracelets
attached to his legs during the examination.
It sounds like they had this guy strapped down.
Wow. It says.
Why did you decide to document it?
He says. It's such a crazy, complex and
layered story. I wanted to bring it to a wider
audience. As I researched it, I found so
many interesting threads and stories.
Take Sigmund Adamski, the Polish miner found dead on a coal pile
with mysterious burns. PC Alan Godfrey was the first
one on the scene. Another strange event.
Godfrey had also been unable to father any more children after a
fight where he was kicked in the groin.
But following his alleged alien encounter, his wife saw a bright
flash of light before going to bed.
In the morning, they made love and shortly after she fell
pregnant. Then when he went public with
his story, other sightings that night and related tales
appeared. It's almost like maybe there was
this wave of UFO sightings in that general area.
There were countless reconstructions, all with
slightly different elements, and one he was driving a Mini and
had a Southern accent, another a Cortina and a northern accent.
It played to the idea of storytelling to me.
Stories change, evolve and grow as we tell them.
A lot of the reconstruction features in the book with a
variety of archive material, he says.
What was your approach to the project's photography?
He says Much like any story, I had pictures in my mind already
about what the locations look like.
I started with the actual places, but also looked around
for photos that matched what was in my head.
I shot some images on Acro Chrome film, infrared film that
was used by the military for aerial surveillance.
It basically captures a broadband of light spectrum
including UV light, visible light and infrared light.
It felt like a good medium for the project.
I also gathered a lot of archive material combined through micro
fitches at the local library, visiting the British archives to
go through their UFO file and sourcing UFO magazines from the
time these feature in the special edition as an extra
publication. I contacted many UFO experts as
well and gained access to unpublished images and notes.
A lot of neat pictures here. You know, I would describe this
as kind of rolling hill type country.
It looks like a very rural area. This would have happened.
The apartments these people live in are a little drab, I would
say, mostly kind of on the, I don't know, kind of a almost
like a postmodern socialist look to them.
They're made out of concrete. They kind of have these angled
roofs, goes on down and says, I'm getting closer.
PC Godfrey saw a spinning object 20 feet wide hovering above the
ground and talking a little bit more about his actual encounter
here. It says, how would you describe
the area? Todd?
Todd Morton has been described as the UFO capital of the UK.
Even growing up it was an interesting place full of
characters. I remember my dad saying he knew
when someone was from Todd as soon as he saw them.
As I researched the area, I found more and more supernatural
tales, from witches to UFO sightings to a 1960s BFI film
shot locally that's eerily prescient about Godfrey's
encounter. Now that's interesting because
you see this notion of paranormal Cryptid type stuff
overlapping with these UFO sightings and that seems to be
what's going on here. It says after attending the
local UFO club, yes, it's a thing, and meeting the local
bookstore owner. He told me of a guy who's seen a
UFO earlier the same year with Godfrey's son.
I found out about other witnesses the same night and
heard tales of the tarmac being replaced under the site.
Godfrey also published a book where he claims he was pushed
out of the police force by men in black who tried to keep him
from talking to the media. Well, you know, we do hear that.
I mean, sometimes these things, people are trying to keep him
quiet. He finishes up.
He says, Well, the interesting thing is Todd Morden was once in
both Lancashire and Yorkshire. It's now in Westworkshire.
The county boundary followed the River Calder directly under the
town hall where you could ballroom dance across counties.
For me, it's never been about solving the story, more about
sharing the many threads so people can make their own minds
up. I'll leave the answer to that
one up to them when they see the book.
It's got a lot of cool pictures here of where this happened at,
you know, some of the the headlines that happened at the
time. Yeah, really cool.
So I want to get a little bit deeper into this with this next
article. I found this article on
themirror.co.uk. It's dated April 17th, 2025 S
fairly recently actually. Talking about this case.
Title says I was abducted by aliens in Yorkshire and probed
by a bearded humanoid. Retired police officer Alan
Godfrey says the encounter occurred while he was on patrol
in Todd Morden W Yorks in the early hours of November 28th,
1980. That's been a while, almost 45
years, I guess. The article starts off as says,
well, the articles written by Sarah Toluk and Fran Bowden.
It says astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery that
could be the clearest sign yet of life beyond our solar system.
Researchers now say they are 99.7% certain that signs of life
have been detected on a distant exoplanet located 124 light
years from Earth, more than 3 billion times further than the
distance between Earth and the moon.
The planet, known as K2 ATB, orbits with the within the
habitable zone, often referred to as a Goldilocks zone, a
region where conditions may be just right to support liquid
water and potentially life. Couple of big ifs there.
Scientists are spatially excited about two specific chemical
signatures found in the planet's atmosphere.
And it talks about that a little bit, and then it goes on down
here, it says. Meanwhile, back on Earth's,
sightings of UFOs are regularly reported, especially from alien
corridors or areas with frequent reports of unexplained
phenomena. Some people even claim to have
been abducted by aliens. And while most of us associate
extraterrestrial activity with places like Roswell and New
Mexico, one of the world's UFO hotspots is Scotland.
Falkirk Triangle. Here, Malcolm Robertson, founder
of Strange Phenomena Investigation Scotland, the
country's oldest UFO society, which celebrates his 45th
anniversary this month, shares ten of the most hair raising
reported UFO encounters, including the first Brit on
record to claim he was abducted by aliens.
It starts off with the Rendlesham incident here says in
December of 1980, a series of unexplained lights near Suffolk
Forest led to speculation that UFOs had landed on British soil.
The events occurred just outside RFA Woolbridge, which was being
used at the time by the United States Air Force.
So this would have been about a month after this Godfrey claims
that he was abducted. It goes on down talks about that
a little bit, talks about the Deschmont wood siding.
That was in 1979. And remember that would have
been just about a year before the sighting.
We've talked about this. This is about a forestry worker
which ended up with his clothes all torn up with these strange
wounds and account of this flying Dome over the forest
floor. They bring up about the a 70
alien abductions. This is a Gary Wood Colin right?
They claimed they were abducted. That was in 1992.
Goes on down the Bunny bridge sightings.
We talked about those Broad Haven Triangle.
Yeah, we've covered that before. Somebody's little children saw
this thing, The Lakenhoff and Bentwater's UFO sightings, the
Calvine incident that's been in the news lately, this really
spectacular UFO photo. And then it brings up the Alan
Godfrey incident. It says in November 1980, police
officer Alan Godfrey claimed to have been abducted by an alien
spacecraft in Todd Morden, West Yorkshire.
PC Godfrey had been sent out at 5:00 AM to deal with a call
about escape cattle on a housing estate, but he was stopped dead
in his tracks by what he claimed was an unidentified flying
object, a rotating diamond shaped vessel 20 feet high and
14 feet wide. He quickly sketched the craft in
his notebook and grabbed his radio to call the incident in,
but the line went dead and the craft disappeared in a flash,
with Godfrey finding himself sitting in his car 30 yards
further down the road. It's a classic missing time
case. Got a picture of the guy here as
a young cop Alan Godfrey. Looking at his watch, the
policeman was surprised to see it was 25 minutes later, when it
had been just moments before. Weird or still, his boot was
split open and an itchy burn mark had appeared on his left
foot. In an interview at the time, he
said. I was driving the Panda car and
I came across this strange craft blocking the road.
It was about 20 feet high, 14 feet wide.
It was a diamond shaped object hovering about 5 feet off the
ground. I got within about 20 feet of
it, but I didn't get out of the car.
I didn't want to get out of the car.
I got on the radio, but there was no response.
The next saying I remember I was at the other side where the
object had been driving the car away.
Wow, got a picture of him here. He's he's at the time he's doing
this chalk drawing showing this alien that apparently was one of
the abductors. Alan was searching for a herd of
calm missing when he was in when he encounter strange craft and
Todd Morden Westworks on November 20th, 1980.
Then it says desperate to understand what had happened.
He ended with hypnotic regression and had his sessions
filmed. When I was allowed to see them
at the end, they were quite frightening.
He said. Yeah, I can see that.
Under hypnosis, I find myself getting out of the car and a
very strange, powerful beam of light is shown toward me, which
blinds me. I jump back in the car in a
panic, and then there is some sort of blackout.
After the blackout, I wake up in some sort of examination room.
Describing the alien. He said he was humanoid, a human
appearance 6 feet high. He had a beard and wore some
sort of skullcap. He wore a white gown.
He was really very pleasant. He wasn't at all frightening to
look at. There were eight small 3 foot
high creatures that transpired during the regression to be
robots. My left foot was examined.
When the doctor woke me up, I was wired up to some heart
machines. They went completely off the
scales. I was in such extreme stress.
When he reported to his close encounters, he was met with
ridicule and disbelief. He underwent hypnosis, claimed
he had been in a strange room being examined by several
creatures and a tall humanoid figure with a beard.
That's a different one for me. I don't normally hear about
these things having beards. Again, his claims were denied,
were derided, and he later said he had been hounded out of the
police for refusing to give up his story.
Wow. Well, you know, it seems to me
like the guy really seems solid in his belief about things.
If he's refusing to give up, if he if he won't deny the story
and it gets to the point where he actually loses his job over
is forced out of the Police Department, that is really
something. Let's take a look at this next
article. I want to finish up with this
article I found from a site called thinkaboutitdocs.com.
Thinkaboutitdocs.com the title of this article says 1980 police
constable Alan godfrey's abduction got another picture of
a much younger Alan Godfrey here drawing an illustration of this
spaceship that he saw back in November 1980.
The charts office says think about an abduction.
Report date November 20th, 1980 Sighting time 5:00 AM, dark
outside Location Todd Morden, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
and this was encountered as a close encounter for abduction of
witness or other direct contact. Summary Police officer Alan
Godfrey was on a routine patrol when he encountered A metallic
disc with a Dome and a row windows.
Suddenly there was a burst of light and he found himself 100
yards further down the road and the UFO was gone.
Under hypnosis later Godfrey recall it being struck by a beam
of light which floated him into the craft and meeting a human
like being named Joseph whose clothing was very biblical in
nature. Aboard the craft he was
physically examined and asked questions.
And then here it says for report police constable Anna Goffer's
drawing of a UFO and UFO, not Todd Moore in England 1980.
In November and December 1980, the eastern side of Britain was
experiencing a major UFO sighting wave.
There were chases of UFOs by police cars near the coast by
UFO that overflew an oil rig in the North Sea, and the wave
culminated in the famous events on the East Angling coast at
Reynolds from Forest just a month before these landings.
Beside those NATO air bases, one of the most impressive alien
abduction cases took place in a small Pennine milltown of Todd
Morden, West Yorkshire, right in the center of Britain's most
active window area, known locally as UFO Alley.
Police Constable Alan Godfrey was on patrol on the night of
November 28th, 1980. Just before dawn, he drove along
Burnley Rd. on the edge of Todd Morden looking for some cows
that had been reported missing. They were only found after a
sunup, mysteriously relocated in a rain soaked field without hoof
marks to indicate their passage. Now that's strange.
Normally you know when we find these cattle turning up, they're
mutilated, if they turn up at all.
But here we go. They found these things in the
middle of this passage. No tracks in or out.
It's like they were just dropped there, but they were dropped
there alive. That's the weird thing.
Giving up his nocturnal hunt, Godfrey was about to go back to
base to sign off duty when he saw a large mass a few 100 yards
ahead. At first he thought it was a bus
coming toward him that took workers to their jobs in town
and that he knew, passed about 5:00 AM.
But as he approached, he realized that it was something
very strange. It was a fuzzy Oval that rotated
at such speed and hovered so low over the otherwise degruded Hwy.
that it was causing the bushes by the side to shake.
The police officer stopped, propped onto his windscreen a
pad that was in the patrol car to make sketches of any road
accidents, and drew the UFO. Then there was a burst of light
and the next thing he knew he was driving his car again
further along Burnley Rd. with no sign of the UFO.
Godfrey turned around and examined the spot where the UFO
had hovered. The road was very wet as it had
rained heavily earlier in the night, but just at this one
location was a circular patch where the roadway had been dried
in a scroll pattern. Only went back at the police
station that he realized that it was a little later than he had
expected, although any missing time was probably no greater
than 15 minutes from estimates later taken on site.
Concerned as to possible ridicule, Godfrey at first chose
not to make an official report, but changed his mind later that
day when he discovered he was not alone.
After breakfast that morning, a driver who had been on Burnley
Road, 3 miles further out at Clevenger, reported seeing a
brilliant white object and contacted Toddborn police.
The time matched that of Alan Godfrey's.
Furthermore, a police patrol from an adjacent force, Halifax,
had been engaged in a stakeout for stolen motorcycles on the
Moors of Calder Valley and a witness of brilliant blue white
glow descending into the valley toward Todd Morden shortly
before Godfrey experienced his close encounter.
Their story when it reached Todd Morden police station.
Encouraged by this news, Godfrey followed an official report but
was surprised when police chose to release the story to the
local newspaper the following week.
From here UFO ologists discovered the case and a
lengthy investigation was mounted by a Manchester based
UFO group. Although Alan Godfrey had no
further conscious recall of missing time, he did have
increasingly confused memory of a sequence of events surrounding
the sighting, with an unexplained image of himself
outside the car during the sighting.
There was also a puzzling and physical evidence his police
issue boots were split on the side, as if he had been dragged
along the floor and they had caught on something.
He also reported a previous history of seeing other strange
things and having experienced at least one earlier time lapse as
a youth factors of ufologists have come to recognize as a
pattern with abduction cases. When sure that all conscious
testimony had been recorded, Godfrey agreed to be
hypnotically regressed by a Manchester psychiatrist eight
months after the incident. He eventually had several other
sessions with a different therapist, and his recall and
later sessions was videotaped. The doctor refused permission to
the UFO group for the first session to be recorded.
The hypnotic testimony is very odd, and Godfrey was never to be
sure what really happened. Under regression he told of the
bright light stopping the car engine, causing his radio and
police handset both to be filled with static and then to be
swamped by blinding light as he lost consciousness.
His next recall was of being inside a strange room, more like
a house and a spaceship, complete with the most
unexpected large black dog. He was studied by a heavily
bearded man who telepathically conveyed that his name was Yosef
and whose clothing was very biblical in nature, assisting
Yosef for several small robot like creatures the size of five
year of a 5 year old lad with a head shaped like a lamp.
They were reminiscent of the Greys of UFO lore, although with
major differences. Godfrey was supposedly asked
questions, told that he knew Joseph, and was promised a later
encounter, but apparently he was not subjected to the more
familiar indicative these abduction stories, especially
from the US, such as bodily fluid samples and rectal probes.
Although there were periods of missing memory, the hypnotic
recall that did emerge was a curious hybrid of mythic images,
UFO case elements, and dreamlike sequences.
When asked his opinion as to the reality status of his hypnotic
testimony, Alan Godfrey was refreshingly honest.
He told me he was certain that the UFO encounter was real, but
he could not determine whether the story offered by hypnosis
was a dream, a fantasy, a reality, or a mixture of all
three. Unhappily, Alan Godfrey suffered
terribly after this encounter. When I first wrote up the
investigation just before the regression hypnosis began for
Flying Saucer Review magazine in 1981, I deliberately changed his
identity to help protect him, although this was probably
futile because the story had already been featured in the
local press under Godfrey's real name.
However, despite my refusal to assist him, a tabloid reporter
traced the witness and devoted a front page banner headline
article to the story read by millions over the Sunday lunch,
which led to the officer being called to explain himself before
his superiors. He was forced to undergo medical
investigation to determine his status, but was pronounced
psychologically fit and healthy. Yet after some years, feeling
that he would never be allowed to forget his sighting, he took
advice to honorably resign over unrelated physical injury
incurred during an incident in which he bravely intervened to
avert a crime. Todd Morden, both before 1980
and in the years since, has been a hotbed of alien contact
activity, with several other major encounters having been
investigated, including another abduction of truck driver from
Burnley Rd. only a little further out of Todd Warden and
on the same highway. So definitely a hotspot for this
multiple sightings around there. I mean, this is it's so strange
to me that the same fellow who came upon the body of a guy just
the year before on this coal pile, this unexplained missing
person who a lot of people think was abducted and just dumped
there was out looking for these cattle.
You know, a year later, nobody could find.
When they find the cattle, they are inexplicably just placed in
this pipe in this pasture with no tracks going in or out.
And then at the same time, he tells us the seduction story
about having come upon this spacecraft being taken aboard
and having this experiments went on him.
Very strange story indeed. Alan Godfrey.
Until next time, this is UFO warning over and out.