Alan Godfrey, Todmorden
A West Yorkshire police constable met a diamond-shaped object hovering over the road, then found he had lost time.
1980 CE · 53.71, -2.10 · status: account
The account
In late November 1980 PC Alan Godfrey saw the object hovering about five feet up, blocking the road in Todmorden; under later hypnosis he described being taken aboard. Other officers reported a luminous object at the time, and ufologists linked the case to the death of Zigmund Adamski, whose body was found on a Todmorden coal heap that year.
The sceptical view
The hypnotic recall is unreliable; it has been noted that a Futuro house, a saucer-shaped prefab, was being moved through the town at the time.
The researched reading
A police officer’s sighting is credible as a sighting, but the abduction came from hypnosis, which reliably creates false memories. Something odd may have been seen; the rest is likely memory.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Perception, memory or mind | 40% | The abduction, beings and examination emerged only under hypnosis, which produces confident confabulation; Godfrey himself later doubted parts of it. Night-shift fatigue explains the lost minutes. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 20% | A police witness, an unexplained dry patch and other reports of lights in Todmorden that night keep some room. |
| Something known, misidentified | 15% | A brightly lit bus or vehicle seen through rain at dawn could look like a hovering diamond to a tired night-shift officer. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 12% | A dry, swirled patch of road in heavy rain, if real, hints at a local heat or electrical effect. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 8% | He suffered professionally, which weighs against invention. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 3% | Wet weather was ordinary. |
| Secret human technology | 2% | Nothing fits. |
Official position: No official finding; West Yorkshire Police did not investigate it as a crime.