The Night the Lights Went Out in Todmorden: The Alan Godfrey Files
It was a Tuesday. November 28, 1980. The kind of bitter, damp morning that seeps right through your uniform and settles in your bones. In the small, sleepy market town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire, the streets were empty. Silence ruled.
Or at least, it should have.
Police Constable Alan Godfrey was near the end of his shift. He was a good cop. No nonsense. A family man. He wasn’t looking for fame, and he certainly wasn’t looking for little green men. He was looking for cows.
Reports had come in about cattle wandering loose in the upscale Ferrand Road estate. It’s the kind of mundane police work that doesn’t make the papers. You drive around, you shine your torch, you herd some animals back into a field. Simple.
But Godfrey didn’t find the cows. What he found on Burnley Road would end his career, destroy his reputation, and spark one of the most baffling, high-evidence UFO mysteries in British history. This wasn’t a fuzzy light in the distance. This was up close. Personal. And terrifying.
The “Bus” That Wasn’t a Bus
Godfrey turned his patrol car onto Burnley Road. It was roughly 5:00 AM. Rain had been spitting on the windshield all night, leaving the tarmac slick and reflective.
Up ahead, something massive loomed.
His first instinct? A bus. It had to be. A double-decker bus meant for the workers, maybe. But as he squinted through the gloom, his brain tried to reject what his eyes were seeing. It was too bright. Too wide. And it was on the wrong side of the road.
He got closer. The radio static buzzed in the background. The object wasn’t driving. It was hovering.
Godfrey slammed on the brakes. He was about 20 yards away now. This was no bus. It was a diamond-shaped mass, spinning silently. It was huge—about 20 feet wide and 14 feet high. The bottom section was rotating, causing the bushes on the side of the road to thrash violently, shaking as if caught in a hurricane.
But here is the detail that keeps researchers up at night: There was no sound.
The leaves were whipping back and forth. The object was spinning. Yet, inside the car, Godfrey heard nothing but his own breath catching in his throat. No engine hum. No wind roar. Just a heavy, oppressive silence.
The Sketch That Changed Everything
Godfrey was a trained observer. Police officers are taught to record details immediately. He grabbed his notepad. He picked up his pen. He started to draw the diamond object hovering over the wet road.
He looked down at the pad.
He looked up.
The road was empty.
The Missing 15 Minutes
The object was gone. Just blinked out of existence. But that wasn’t the weirdest part. Godfrey was confused. He felt groggy. Disoriented. He looked out the window and realized he was no longer where he had stopped.
He was driving.
Specifically, he was 30 yards further down the road, past the point where the object had been hovering. The patrol car was moving. He was alone.
He checked his watch. It was later than it should have been. Approximately 15 minutes had vanished. Gone. Snapped out of his life with zero memory of where they went. He turned the car around, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He went back to the spot.
The road was wet from the night’s rain. Except for one spot.
Right where the object had hovered, the asphalt was bone dry. A perfect, circular patch of dry road in the middle of the rain-slicked street. And inside that circle? A swirled pattern. The leaves and debris had been blown into a spiral, like a miniature crop circle right there on the pavement.
He got out to inspect. That’s when he noticed his boots.
Godfrey was wearing standard-issue police boots. Tough leather. But the toe of one boot was split across the top. There were drag marks on the soles. It looked as if he had been dragged across a rough surface while unconscious. But he had been in the car… hadn’t he?
Corroboration: He Wasn’t Alone
Skeptics love to say, “It was a hallucination.” Or, “He fell asleep at the wheel.”
But hallucinations don’t leave physical traces on the road. And they certainly don’t get seen by other people miles away.
While Godfrey was sitting in his car, confused and missing time, other reports were flooding in. Three miles away, a lorry driver (truck driver) frantically reported seeing a “brilliant white object” shooting off into the sky at an impossible speed.
But it gets better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it.
A neighboring police force in Halifax contacted Todmorden. Their officers had been out on patrol that same morning. They reported a “brilliant blue-white glow” descending toward the local valley—right toward the spot where Godfrey was sitting. The timing matched perfectly.
We are talking about multiple witnesses, independent of each other, spotting a high-luminosity object in the same quiet corner of Yorkshire at the exact same time.
The Hypnosis: Enter “Yosef”
For months, Godfrey tried to make sense of the missing time. It ate away at him. What happened in those 15 minutes? Why were his boots ruined? Why did he have an itchy, red mark on his body that hadn’t been there before?
Eventually, he agreed to undergo hypnotic regression. This is where the story shifts from a “nuts and bolts” UFO sighting to something far stranger. Something high-strangeness.
Under hypnosis, Godfrey recalled a bright light engulfing the car. The engine died. The radio went dead. Then, the sensation of floating.
He remembered being inside a room. It looked like a medical bay. He wasn’t alone. There was a tall man there. He had a beard and was dressed in what looked like Biblical robes. He called himself “Yosef.”
Alongside Yosef were small, robot-like creatures. They were the size of children, with heads shaped like lightbulbs. They moved stiffly, scanning him. There was a large, black dog in the room, too—a detail that confuses researchers to this day. Why a dog?
Yosef spoke to him telepathically. No mouth movement. Just thoughts appearing in Godfrey’s head. He was told they knew him. They told him not to worry. They performed what seemed to be a medical examination.
Then, darkness. And waking up driving the car.
Screen Memories?
Many modern UFO researchers believe the “Yosef” figure might not be real in the literal sense. The theory is that advanced intelligence—aliens, interdimensional beings, whatever you want to call them—can project “screen memories” to mask their true appearance. A police officer might be terrified of a Grey alien, but a bearded man in robes? That’s calming. That’s authority. It’s a psychological trick.
The Deep Dive: The Adamski Connection
If you think this story is wild, buckle up. Because we haven’t even touched on the darkest part of the mystery. The part that most short articles skip.
Six months before his abduction, in June 1980, Alan Godfrey was the officer dispatched to a coal yard in Todmorden. A body had been found.
The victim was Zigmund Adamski, a 56-year-old coal miner who had gone missing days earlier. Adamski had stepped out to buy potatoes and vanished off the face of the earth.
When Godfrey found the body, it was lying on top of a pile of coal. But here is the kicker: Adamski was clean.
He had been missing for five days, yet he had only one day’s growth of beard. He was well-fed. And despite lying on a dirty coal heap, his clothes were pristine. His shoes were tied strangely—as if by someone who didn’t know how to tie shoes.
But the horror was on his neck.
Adamski had strange burn marks on the back of his head and neck and shoulders. They were covered in a weird, green, gel-like ointment that baffled the coroner. Scientists couldn’t identify it. The coroner eventually ruled the death a heart attack but stated it was the biggest mystery of his career.
Alan Godfrey was the man who found that body. He was the one who investigated it.
Did the “visitors” come back for Godfrey because he had seen their handiwork on Adamski? Was the abduction in November a follow-up? A warning? Or was Godfrey targeted because he was getting too close to a truth that humanity wasn’t ready for?
The Price of Truth
You might think proving you were abducted by aliens would make you famous. In 1980s England, it just made you a target.
Godfrey didn’t want to talk about it initially. He filed an official police report, assuming his superiors would take the physical evidence (the boot, the road markings) seriously. Instead, the wall of silence went up.
The ridicule began. The press had a field day. “PC PLOD AND THE ALIENS.”
His superiors tried to force him out. They demanded he see psychiatrists. They wanted to declare him mentally unfit for duty. But here is the thing: Godfrey passed every single test. He was sane. He was stable. He was telling the truth as he saw it.
They couldn’t fire him for being crazy, so they made his life hell until he resigned. A decorated officer, forced out because he refused to lie about what he saw on a rainy Tuesday morning.
What Really Happened?
Decades later, Alan Godfrey stands by his story. He admits the hypnosis part is fuzzy—he knows the mind can play tricks under regression. He doesn’t claim to know for a fact that he met a guy named Yosef.
But the encounter on the road? The diamond object? The spinning mass? The missing time? The split boot?
That, he says, was 100% real.
Was it a secret military craft? Todmorden is not far from sensitive defense sites. Could it have been an experimental vehicle that malfunctioned, and Godfrey was just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Maybe the “hypnosis” memories were implanted to cover up a black-ops retrieval mission.
Or maybe, just maybe, something looked down at the lonely road in West Yorkshire, saw a man looking for cows, and decided to take a closer look.
The Legacy
Today, the Todmorden abduction remains one of the few “solid” cases in Ufology. You have a credible witness (police). You have physical trace evidence (road markings). You have corroboration (other police/drivers). And you have a darker context (the Adamski death).
It’s a puzzle with pieces that don’t fit, a mystery that refuses to die. Alan Godfrey lost his career, but he kept his integrity. He saw what he saw.
So, the next time you’re driving down a dark country road at 5 AM and you see a light that looks a bit too bright, or a bus that looks a bit too wide…
Don’t stop. Just keep driving.
Originally posted 2016-01-03 15:34:26. Updated and Expanded for the Modern Era.
