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Dec. 6, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
51:26
Edition 322 - Alan Godfrey

UK policeman Alan Godfrey who had two astonishing ultra-strange "UFO/ET encounters"...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Many thanks for all of your emails.
I'm not going to do any shout-outs for the next couple of shows, but please keep your emails coming.
You know that I see them all and I react to them and act upon them.
I'll do a big mega shout-out and also go through a lot of your points towards the back end of 2017, which is racing towards us incredibly quickly, don't you think?
You know, this is one of those years.
And I know Art Bell wrote about the quickening, saying that time is getting shorter, but this year seems to definitely prove that because it's been incredibly quick, don't you think?
We have a very special two editions of The Unexplained coming up for you.
The show that we're about to do is with a man who experienced, he says, something truly unexplainable, chilling, frightening, any word that you want to use to describe it.
P.C. Alan Godfrey, British policeman, on duty in a place called Todmodon on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, way up in the Pennines.
He experienced in 1980, first of all, the discovery of a body on the top of a coal storage heap in very mysterious circumstances.
How did it get there?
What were the marks on the back of this man's head?
What was the ointment or cream used on those marks?
Nobody was able to identify it.
A total, total mystery that got into the newspapers and also connected PC Alan Godfrey, the man who experienced this, with veteran UFO researcher Jenny Randalls, who we will talk to in the next edition.
Alan Godfrey has been quiet about a lot of these things for years and about the subsequent UFO encounter that he had, he says, where a huge craft hovered above his police patrol car.
That's a terrifying story that you will hear.
These things have stayed with Alan Godfrey.
He hasn't talked about them very much for 37 years.
He talks about them on this show here and has now written a book, which is being made available through eBay that Alan's put out with the help of Jenny Randalls, veteran UFO researcher in the Northwest.
So the plan for the next two shows, this show we talk with Alan Godfrey himself.
A real pleasure to speak with this man who I've talked about for years on the radio.
Never thought that I would get to talk to him.
So we'll speak with him.
And then in the second of the two shows, we'll talk with Jenny Randalls, who worked with him, veteran UFO researcher, about all of this and about her work over the years and the fact that she had a bit of a break from it for a period and is now back.
I first spoke to her when I was a student years and years ago.
So part one of this show, which I think is a must-hear, is with PC Alan Godfrey.
Here he is.
It all starts with the discovery of a body on the top of a coal tip, or rather a coal pile, in the days when, and this is until very recently, there were big stacks of coal in different parts of this country.
I remember one in Buchle, near where I was brought up.
There was one near a big industrial chimney there.
You know, I used to go and play near there.
Everywhere had a coal pile, a stock of coal, and a body was found there in 1980.
And then the policeman who was involved in that investigation had another experience that is truly unexplained to do with a strange craft in the sky.
Thank you very much for coming on, Alan.
I know that you don't do a lot of radio interviews, so it's very, very good to have you on here.
Tell me about what happened to you in 1980 in Talmud and where you were working as a policeman.
Thank you for inviting me onto your show.
You want to talk about a Damsky case first, dear?
Well, first of all, I want to talk, yes, about, because the two are linked, aren't they?
There was the body of a man found on the top of a coal storage pile.
Yes.
And then not long after that, you had another experience.
So talk about the first case, this man called Adamski, who was found at the top of this.
It was a coal miner, I believe, from Tingley, near Wakefield.
So at the time you were a constable, and in those days, of course, my dad was a policeman in that era.
It was all about panda cars, wasn't it?
It was all about patrol cars.
Panda cars and obviously beat bobbies, which I was, at that particular day, I was a beat bobby in the town centre of Tommedon.
And I got a call on the radio.
Would I go attend Tomden railway station and go along to the coal yard there?
The ambulance service and the owner of the coal yard had discovered a body.
On the way there, BC Malcolm Agley, who was in the panda car, picked me up and we both went up there.
It had been raining very heavily as well.
As we entered the coal yard, it was like a horseshoe shape with all the sleepers up, you know, different corrals if you like, with different types of calling.
And one of the ambulance drivers said, I think you better go and have a look at it.
So Malcolm, being a senior officer, he went up the climbed the sleepers first.
And there lying on the top was a dead body.
He looked at it, came down, he says, you better go and have a look yourself.
So I climbed up and instantly, as you looked at it, the eyes were open.
His arms were down by the side, but across the stomach, if you know what I mean.
He was lying as though he just got into bed and he was fast asleep.
And you have to say that police, you know, like I say, my dad was a copper for 30 years.
Yeah.
It's part of your job that you deal with death.
It becomes, it never becomes routine to you, but it becomes part of your job.
It's something that you have to, most weeks of the year, you have to deal with somebody dying either in an accident or natural causes.
You have to go there when somebody's died at home.
You find people who have died in all sorts of circumstances.
But this one struck you as very strange, not only because of where the body was found.
Yeah, because as I looked at the body, it was obvious that on the skull, if you like, the hair was cut right short.
And there were individual burn marks around the crown of the skull.
Burn marks.
Yeah, black Individual burn marks.
And as I move the head over to the left, on the nape of the neck, there was a bigger type of burn mark, but it was weeping.
You know, like it was weeping.
And there was this ointment that had been a green, yellowy substance had been smeared over it for some reason.
Okay, now this is quite macabre stuff, so if you are of a squeamish disposition, it's maybe not for you.
But I think we have to talk about some of the detail of this.
So here is a body with burn marks at the nape of the neck.
Something had been applied to them.
The body itself has open eyes staring upwards.
Oh, I'll never forget the look of those eyes.
As you quite rightly said, I've seen loads of dead bodies and been on auto post-mortems.
Well, it's part of your training, isn't it?
You talk in the book about how they take you.
My dad always talked to me about this when I was younger.
He used to say one of the first things they make you do, I don't know if they still do it, but you've got to see somebody dead and you've got to go to a post-mortem.
And, you know, you because that would prepare you.
First one, but it was a set-up because as I went into the mortar at Hebden Bridge, the body was under a sheet.
And the senior officer I was with, a PC, senior PC, if you like, he said, look, Alan, the best way to deal with the dead body is to go and shake hands with it.
Really?
Which is actually, it's true, actually.
It is a good way to know how to deal with dead body.
We have to say this is like 40 years ago, so it's a long time.
Maybe they don't do that type of thing to say.
We're talking silent witness here, you know, we're talking, you know, PC plod.
So I walked over to the body, and as I very hesitantly got all of the to shake hands with it, it suddenly gripped me.
Oh my God.
It was another copper, weren't it?
Now that is something else that we have to talk about.
Because police.
There is a sense of humor.
There is a dark sense of humour in the police force.
Yeah, no, no.
My father told me about that as well.
Okay, back to this man, Adamski.
Now, it's a 56-year-old.
I'm used to seeing dead bodies, and it's quite obvious to me and to Malcolm that this guy didn't die where he was found.
It didn't look right.
He appeared to have been dressed after death.
You know, like you go into a shop where they have dummies, and you can tell they're not human, you know, the way they dress them.
They can't see.
And what wasn't he wearing just a jacket and a string vest?
There was no shirt?
An outer jacket, and underneath that was a white string vest.
The trousers were the jacket was kind of half fastened and half knot, but they're in the wrong buttonholes.
Do you know what I mean?
And the trousers didn't look as though he'd put them on.
very strange, very, very, very strange.
And did you think at that point, and it's not in the book that you reflected that, but did the thought that this is a bizarre murder that I'm looking at here...
Obviously, as the years went by, and me and Malcolm did a lot of research into it and investigation, what have you, and we both came to the conclusion that this guy didn't die where he was found.
Although at the inquest, which you've obviously read in the book, the officer gave it, I never attended the inquest, neither did Malcolm, neither did Peter Sutcliffe, who was the leading fireman who'd been in the courtyard.
He had a part-time job there.
None of the three main witnesses, all the ambulance people, were ever called to the inquest.
In fact, an inspector gave evidence, and he was asked specifically by James Turnbull, the coroner, did he die where he was found?
Yes, sir, yes, in my opinion, sir, he died where he was found.
Well, coming from a guy that never even visited the scene, the fact that none of us were called as witnesses, it just didn't sound right.
And wasn't there another real anomaly about this?
Because if you had a body, or even if you were still alive at that point and had climbed to that point, but if you were taking a body to the top of a coal tip, you would be covered as I used to be when I used to go and play around one in Liverpool when I was a business.
be covered in coal dust.
It had been raining.
Well, you've got to ask yourself a question.
The guy had never been to Tomlin, as far as we know it, in all his life.
He went into an area of Tomlin probably a lot of Tomlin people have never been in.
But the thing is, why would a man at his age climb a stack of coal in the rain, lie on his back, and die?
This was a man who had a loving wife.
He lived a perfectly ordinary life.
He disappeared, I think, five or six days before that.
You know, people didn't know where he'd gone.
Well, of course, you found him.
But there was nothing unusual about this man's life.
He was not somebody who was, as far as we know, connected with any crime.
He didn't have any particular enemies.
So why did this happen?
The big question.
I don't know, because he had a, you know, as inquiries were done at the time, he had a loving wife.
He had a loving family.
He was a nice guy.
He was well liked in the area.
He was giving his, I believe it was his goddaughter away to follow.
No, the day after he disappeared, he should have been giving his goddaughter away at a wedding.
So he had no reason to go anywhere.
And yet he went out to the shop, which, the local shop, to get some groceries and never returned.
He went missing for five days.
So initially, what was your thought about how this had happened?
What was your best guess?
Well, my opinion is that whether deliberately or on delivery, he died somewhere else.
And how he got onto the top of the core heap is like you said earlier, you know, it's quite steep.
I can't imagine anybody carrying a body up there.
Why would they?
And how that body got up there without being covered in coal dust.
If the guy died in somebody's company, well, we'll just suppose that he was, I don't know, something happened here, he was taken away.
And If he died, you'd either hide the body, if he didn't want it to be found, or you'd leave it where it was.
It doesn't make sense why it was on top of this pack of coal.
It just doesn't make sense.
Now, we've only got a minute or so before we get to news here at Talk Radio, so I want to save the rest of this story for after the news if that's okay with you.
That's okay, yeah, no worries.
But were you a sci-fi fan?
Did you watch UFO programmes on TV?
No, no.
Not really, no.
I mean, I can remember as a kid, you know, and things like that.
Dan Dare and Flash Gordon and things like that.
But no, never.
It weren't an interest at all.
Not really.
PC Alan Godfrey is here.
The man behind the book, who or what were they?
Alan was a policeman in 1980 in a place called Todmoden, near Manchester on the border of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
It's where the Red Rose and the White Rose meet something different.
First of all, we have a death, unexplained, a body found on a coal storage pile, like a little mini mountain, a little hill full of coal, in Todmoden.
This man, 56 years of age, his name, Adamski, that was his second name, Zygmund his first name.
A man who it seemed had never visited Todmoden.
He lived 20 miles or so away.
He'd never been to Todmoden, had no reason to be there.
A man who lived a perfectly ordinary life and suddenly disappeared.
To be found with burn marks on his neck, not covered in coal dust, at the top of a coal pile.
To arrive there and not get covered in coal dust, whether you're carried there, whether you get there yourself, it stretches credulity.
So how did this body get there?
Alan Godfrey, take me back to that night then when you made this discovery.
How did you feel about it all?
It was in the afternoon, actually, Howard.
Okay, well, how did you feel about it?
Uneasy.
It was obvious to me and everybody else that was there that it was very, very strange.
You know, two and two were making five, if you know where I'm coming from.
The main burn marks were actually on the skull, Howard.
Round the crown.
There was just one, as I recall, on the nape of the neck, which was bigger than the ones on the skull.
And as I said, an ointment that had been applied to that one on the nape of the neck, like a yellowy-greeny smear light, had been smeared across it, which eventually was sent for tests to the home office laboratories at Weatherbay.
And surprise, surprise, it came back from them.
They couldn't identify what it was.
Which starts to make this case look even more strange.
So here is a man who has no reason to be there, who is found in a state that you wouldn't expect.
Exactly, yeah.
He's got these weird burn marks, and something has been used on the burn marks, which the inquest and forensic tests were not able to properly identify.
That's correct.
Did you think that he might have been the victim of some kind of ritual?
No, I didn't.
No, I knew something wasn't right, but I couldn't explain how he got there, why he was there.
If he didn't get there under his own steam, which I don't think he did, why would anybody put him there?
You know, the two just don't add up.
But then the story started to creep out, and eventually it got into the press, didn't it?
That this man might have been dropped there, perhaps by some intelligence that we didn't understand.
Yeah, that went into the local press.
In fact, I think it went into the nationals as well.
I can't just be damn certain about that.
But it certainly went into the local courier, you know, the Halifax Courier, and I believe it went in.
The Yorkshire Evening Post was another that took it up, and they were making a big story of it at the time.
And who was it who suggested that first, Alan?
What?
That the body might have been put there by something we don't understand.
To be honest with you, I don't know where it started.
I know it was in the papers.
Apparently, there have been lots of UFO sightings, apparently, in the areas during that time.
And it had been suggested, I understand, that people were pointing the finger at those.
There were a rash of UFO sightings, I think, both before and after this event in 1980.
Apparently so, yeah.
And the headline in one of the papers was, UFO death riddle.
Well, I understand that was the Yorkshire Evening Post, was it?
I don't know.
And so UFO investigators began to get a hold of this.
But the inquest returned an open verdict, which basically means we're not entirely sure what happened here.
And you were encouraged, I think, from what your book says, reading it through today, to get on with your life and your duty.
Yeah, but it became an itch that I had to keep scratching.
And you went and talked to this man's widow, didn't you?
I was present when a stamina was taken off her.
She was a lovely lady.
And did she shed any light on this man and what he might have been involved in?
There was a photograph of him, I seem to recall, in the front room.
And he had thick, wavy hair.
Very thick wavy hair.
He was of Polish descent.
You know, right?
Thick hair.
But when we found him, it was very shortly cropped.
Not very good neither.
So it was a mystery.
The whole thing, an absolute mystery, one of those things, and like I told you, my dad was a copper, and I know that there were things that happened to him during his service that he wasn't able to explain that happened.
And you just have to get on with your life because if you begin to worry about them and think about them and cogitate about them, it's not going to do you any good.
And I suppose you were in that state.
But a number of months passed, didn't they?
And Something else happened.
Talk to me about that.
This was the night of, I think, November the 28th into the 29th, 1980, same year.
Well, just before I get to that, although the inquest left an open verdict, the file was classified.
You couldn't get hold of it.
Who did that?
You tell me.
People, like yourselves, press and all that sort of people, tried to get hold of a copy of the file and it no chance.
So somebody somewhere thought that this was an odd and unusual case and didn't want the details of it getting it.
I think it was an open court and a verdict given of open, as you say, an open verdict was given by the coroner because he wasn't happy with the way it had been dealt with.
It's classified.
You cannot get a copy of that file.
Have you ever seen anything like that before?
No, have I echo?
No.
To me, it's just so unusual.
It's something not right.
But I can't just put my finger on who or what or whatever, you know.
So you're left with this very strange case that you have to continue reporting for work and doing your duty.
It's in the back of your job.
Yeah, you're doing it.
Burning away in the back of your mind.
It's a bit of a way of doing.
I mean, lots of things happen on a daily basis sometimes on a weekly basis.
But it's burning away in the back of your mind and you just have to get on with things until something else happens.
And that's the night of, what, 28th into 29th of November, 1980?
Yeah, we're on night duty and just after midnight, it had been raining like a thing had come over, you know, all cloudy and rainy and drizzly and horrible night.
Just after midnight, we kept getting calls on the station, because in those days you rang the local station as opposed to what they do today, some call centre, you know, a million miles away.
You actually rang the local station and people were ringing, I said people.
We got a couple of calls originally about some cows that was roaming around a local housing estate, council estate, you know.
And I was asked to go and see if I could see them.
I don't know what they wanted me to do, but I actually found them.
Well, there you go.
But I went up there with one of my colleagues in the car.
We drove around the estates.
And there was no trace of these cows.
So we just thought, I hope it's after midnight.
Pubs are shut.
Blah, blah, blah.
Somebody's just wasting our time.
And this seemed to carry on for a couple of hours.
And then one call came in and she actually gave a name.
And it was an old lady.
And I went up to see her.
I was talking to her.
She was saying that the cows were outside her house at the bottom of the garden, but there was like steps down to the road.
And they were on the road there.
And she said, when she picked the phone up to ring the police up, when she went back to the window, it had gone.
They'd gone.
It's just gone.
But she mentioned that there was a big bright light, like headlights had come through a window, you know, like a car passing.
I didn't think much of it at the time.
And now she'd reported it, I thought, well, she's not the sort of person that would do a mischievous phone call, you know.
Again, we drove round the avenues and no trace of these cows.
Then we move on to about, I think it was five o'clock in the morning.
One of my colleagues who I work with was going, had an hour off, so he was going off duty at five o'clock.
That's how I know it was five o'clock.
And I was having a drink of water, excuse me.
No worries.
No, I mean, it's a hell of a story.
And, you know, you haven't told this story on radio, I don't think, very often.
So it's good to get you on telling the story personally.
Anyway, we both left the police station.
It's about five o'clock.
He was going off duty and he was living in the police flats across the road.
I jumped into car, drove down to the town centre where there's another bobby on beat patrol, you know, foot patrol.
And I spoke to him.
I said, everything all right.
We used to do the last hour, we used to call it the last hours, the round-up hour, where you went round all the shops and made sure that no windows had been put through and all this sort of stuff.
Generally, you know, general making sure everything was in order before you went off duty.
And I said to him, do you fancy coming up to Estate to see about them cows?
He says, no, no, it's right.
I'm quite happy just wandering around here.
So I left him in the town centre and I drove back up Burnley Road, past the police station, and just as you go past it, Centrevale Parks on your left-hand side, there's a road called Fernilly Road.
And that leads up to the estate.
And I was just turning, going to turn right up there.
But in the distance, a few hundred yards up the road, I could see this object, which initially I thought was a bus that had gone sideways across the road.
But I thought, well, instead of going up Burnley Road, I carried on up Burnley Road, the main trunk road through the town centre.
Well, I'll tell you what, Alan, I've actually read a little piece, an excellent piece of your book.
I've kind of done it.
I mean, they'll never employ me to do audiobooks, I don't think I'm that good, but I actually earlier today read a bit of the book, and it relates to this exact moment that you're talking about now.
So let's just hear exactly as you wrote it in the book.
What the hell is this?
I was saying to myself.
The large object was just hanging there in the air, only about five feet off the road surface, and I was no more than 20 yards away, so easily able to take in full details of its appearance.
I could see it was definitely not a bus.
Instead, I realized that it looked like something out of the recent Star Wars movie.
A diamond-shaped object about 20 feet wide and 14 feet in height.
And what appeared to be a row of dark paneling across the upper top third of it, although what I took to be paneling, Might also have been darkened windows.
My headlights were shining off and illuminating the side.
What I do know is that I could have got out of my patrol car and thrown a brick at the thing to find out if it went clang.
That missed opportunity has always annoyed me, but there was no way I was brave enough to have attempted such a feat in this extraordinary situation, far beyond any routine police patrol.
As I was staring at the object before me, there seemed a fluorescent glow coming from a large dome on the top, and the whole thing was spinning slowly in an anti-clockwise direction.
Its overall colour resembled unpolished gunmetal.
For a few moments, I just sat there staring in awe, not knowing what on earth I was going to do about this impossible situation.
I was trained to dealing with the unexpected and used to being in control of my reactions from any circumstance that was sprung upon me.
But this was just outside any of the police rulebooks.
Then, as I watched it still spinning, I noticed that the dark brown leaves that had fallen from nearby trees beside the highway were spiraling upwards around the object in an eerie dance that took them in a clockwise direction.
The whole thing was so weird.
Weird indeed.
And, you know, forgive me for reading that like an audiobook, but that was a beautiful part of the book and describes exactly what you must have been feeling there.
I mean, it must have all been going through your head at that time.
There is this thing hovering above you.
I can't imagine, Alan, what that was like.
I won't say I was frightened.
Again, I was just gobsmacked.
I just couldn't believe what I was looking at.
I just don't know what it didn't know what it was.
Did you pinch yourself?
Not literally, no.
I'll tell you one thing I weren't going to do, and that was to get out of the car.
I don't blame you.
No, you know, I'm in two minds where they do a quick reverse.
But I decided that I got onto my personal radio, which is in, is it UH?
Yeah, UHF, to contact our local control room at Sorby Bridge.
But I got no response.
So I tried the car radio, which is VHS.
VHV, I can't remember the frequency anyway.
And that goes down to Bradford control room.
Basically, VHF goes further.
UHF is only line of sight local.
Well, thank you for that.
I would have known that at the time.
But I couldn't get any response off any of the radios.
It wasn't so unusual in that spot because, you know, you're in the deep valley.
It was a bit of a dip, wasn't it?
But unusual not to have any communication at all.
Nothing.
In parts of the valley, you know, it's where Happy Valley's filmed, actually, you know, the TV programme.
So you had to decide then, without being able to report back to anybody, what to do?
Well, this is it.
I couldn't leave it there, could I?
The only thing, actually, we didn't have cameras.
We didn't have mobile phones, you know, with cameras on, and we had nothing like that back then in those days.
The nearest thing I could do was draw it.
And the drawing's in the book.
I mean, it's quite a detailed drawing.
How soon after this encounter?
Or was it during this encounter that you drew it?
I drew it during the encounter while I sat there staring at it.
And then there was this big white flash.
You know, when you're in a dark room and somebody takes a photograph, say you're at a party, and that flash hits your eyes.
Well, you multiply that by, I don't know, a thousand times.
The whole place just went white.
And then the next thing I remember, I was at the other side of where the object had been.
It had gone, by the way.
Do you think you had some missing time?
No, no, no, no, no, not then.
No, no, it never occurred to me.
I just turned the car around and drove back to where I'd seen this object.
Now, just to give people an idea of what you drew, I'm looking at the picture now.
This is your original sketch.
Yeah.
It looks a little bit like something that you would put in a wedding ring.
It looks like a giant gemstone.
Yeah, like a big diamond.
Exactly, yeah.
With windows or something on the top.
Yeah, it looked like darkened windows or paneling.
As I say, I wasn't sure what they were, but that's what they looked like.
Did it make a noise?
No.
I couldn't hear anything.
And surprisingly, to say I was so near it, I didn't get any vibration in the car.
I don't recall any vibration, although these leaves and what have you were all swirling around it and the trees were shaking.
The car, I didn't felt any trembling in the car, you know, as though I was getting any force off it at all.
It's as though I was immune from it somehow.
It was just there.
And as I say, it had gone when I, after this white flash.
Now, this is 1980.
We'd already had the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
We'd seen Star Trek.
There was a lot of this stuff in science fiction.
Yeah.
Were you able to relate any of that that you might have seen on the telly to this thing that was actually above you?
It didn't occur to me at the time about that at all.
Listen, you don't expect to see something like that.
In Todmoden or anywhere.
There are some weird things in Toddmedon, but not that.
But that.
It was just out of this world.
I didn't know what it was.
So I suppose, you know, we're all rational, and you've got to be rational if you're in the police, you're paid to be.
Going through your mind is the thought, I've got to work out what this is.
It's so outside my experience.
What is it?
20 feet wide, whatever it is.
Nothing that I've ever experienced in my police training, I think you trained just over the Yorkshire border, prepared me for this.
Exactly.
I can't explain it.
It's very difficult to explain.
You know, people, you know, since then, people have told me they've seen things themselves, you know.
And I think they'll find it difficult to put into words what you're actually seeing.
And your mind, I couldn't think what it was.
There were all sorts of things, you know.
It was only after a certain time, and you start thinking about it.
Now, like one road accident, and you think you've seen it, and then you haven't seen what you thought you saw.
You're constantly replaying it in your mind.
Now, this wasn't all of it, though, because...
It replays all the time.
I remember my dad sitting on the settee at home polishing them.
Yeah, you want to parade 10 minutes before you do on duty.
And you could see your face in them, but these things had enormous great soles.
Yeah.
Yours got a hole in them.
They were brand new and they got a hole in them.
It were more than a hole.
It was the left one it was, it was split across the side to side, not length to length, right across the side to side it was, split wide open.
And when I took my sock off, I had a little red mark on the instep of my foot, like as big as an half crown or an old penny.
Do you believe that you will, do I?
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that you were taken into this craft and maybe experimented upon or they did something to you?
Not at the time, no, it never even entered my head.
About a year after the event, a chief inspector from the fraud squad in the Greater Manchester Force contacted me.
He was a chief inspector.
He was head of the fraud squad in Greater Manchester Police.
I didn't know what he wanted at the time.
He left a note for me to contact him.
And when I rang the Greater Manchester Police and spoke to him, he then told me he had an interest in UFOs and would have prepared to meet him and tell him what I'd seen.
And obviously I agreed with him being a copper, you know, an high-ranking copper.
So he came to my house in Tombedon with Harry Harris, who was a solicitor, who I found out, and a guy called Mike Sachs.
And they asked me, would I mind being videotaped?
It's all in this book, Who or What Were They.
This is the bizarre events of the night of November 28th into 29th, 1980, when something weird appeared over the head of an ordinary British policeman.
Something huge.
Something shaped like a giant diamond in the sky.
Huge, massive.
And of course, when you have an experience like that, you have to try and assimilate it, I guess is the way to put it.
You have to try and take it on board somehow.
So, Alan, we don't have a whole lot of time here, but in the period after this, what did you do?
You had these people who came to your home, and there was the guy from the fraud squad and a solicitor, and they wanted to video you and debrief you about this.
Was that a process that helped you?
It did, because they made arrangements for me to be hypnotic regression with two psychiatrists, two separate psychiatrists.
And while I'm under hypnosis, I come out with that incredible story of the aliens, if you like, being taken aboard this craft.
I have no conscious memory of it, but I do come out with this story that I was basically abducted, I suppose.
And the only sign on you that you could see was a mark on your foot and the split in your boot.
Yeah.
And whilst I was being examined, if you like, again, I do stress, it was under hypnosis, they attached something to my left foot and my right wrist.
I don't know what it was, but...
Yeah, I think the hypnotic regressions were me mind, really, imagination of the mind, you know.
Or it really happened.
I don't know which...
Some people say it was my mind playing tricks on me.
It could be either or.
But going through the region.
Going through the regression was not the end of it for you because, according to the book, you had what we would call nightmares for a long while after that.
I did, yeah, yeah.
Whatever was going on under when I was being hypnotised and regressed, so to speak, and taken back to the incident, on the way home, I started feeling very ill.
And in fact, on one occasion, I had to pull over and I was violently sick on this side of the motorway.
And I did have lots of, shall we call them, nightmares about these little creatures and these lamp-shaped, you know, lack of lamp-shaped heads.
It wasn't nice.
It wasn't nice.
And what did your colleagues make of it?
I know that you didn't have the easiest of times with some of your colleagues, I think.
Well, for the next four years, as you will read in the book, we haven't time to go into it now, have we?
But there was lots and lots of pressure for on.
In fact, they nearly drove me to the edge.
I started drinking heavily.
They were doing stuff to me, making my life a misery.
Well, they were taking the Mickey out of you.
No, I don't mean that, but I'm talking about over and above my local lads.
I'm talking about the bosses.
Is that because you were talking about it?
I don't know why, because I was calling one day just after the incident to the inspector's office at Tombedon.
And present in the room was a guy dressed in civilian clothing that just introduced himself as a man from the ministry.
He didn't give a name.
And he had in his hand my file.
The file had my report and everything.
So the MOD were interested in you and your account?
At that moment in time, that is what I believed, because I was made to sign what we call a minute sheet, which is an internal letter basically, a report.
And I was reminded that when I joined the police force, I'd signed the Official Secrets Act.
And I was reminded and given this, which told me in this order that I've been given to sign, I mustn't speak about Zygmuda Damsky or my UFO encounter to the media and, you know, the words speaking, you know, vocal, you know, any long bloody thing.
But that obviously wasn't a permanent ban because you're talking about it now and you've got the button.
Well, as time progressed, and when I actually came out of the job, I had nothing to lose, really, because I come to the conclusion that if you're going to break the official secret site, then what you're talking about must be an official secret to start with.
Do you follow me?
Yeah?
Well, they've already been in the papers, there'd already been an inquest, so it couldn't be an official secret.
Do you follow me?
So the cat was out of the bag?
The cat was out of the bag, yeah.
So when did you retire?
Now, we have to say to people who don't understand this that police officers, they have to retire younger than many other people.
So, you know, a lot of police officers retire in their 50s.
When did you retire?
I got seriously injured.
I was badly assaulted and I lost one of my, I forgot it to say it on here, one of my genicles.
Okay.
And I had a split.
I think we can say you lost one of your testicles.
I think it's okay to say that.
I don't know.
I was listening to that.
It's a medical term.
Medical term.
So you left the police after that.
Perforated.
The other testicle was kicked inside me.
All right.
I mean, these terrible things, terrible things happen, we have to say, when police are on duty doing their work for the community, and people need to appreciate that.
You were a victim of that.
Then you left the police and then...
Then you felt it was okay to talk about this because, let's face it, it had been in the papers anyway.
It had been in the papers.
There had been an opening quest on the damn scare.
I couldn't say anything other than that.
So this official secrets, it did occur to me after I'd left.
But while I was in the job, and the other things that were going on and happening to me, you got a bit worried.
It kind of sent me nearly to the edge.
I was sent to see psychiatrists in the police sent me to Stanley Roy Hospital in Wakefield.
All right, so how are you now and how do you look back on it?
Oh, I'm fine now.
I mean, there's a $64, I was approached by somebody in the Lions and asked if I'd give a talk for charity.
So I did, and we raised quite a bit of money.
So I thought, now this is a good idea.
And now you've got the book out.
I've been all over the country giving talks, and I've helped raise tens and tens of thousands of pounds for charities.
Oh, that's excellent.
Something good came out of something bad.
It did, and it sounds like you've finally rationalized and come to terms with what happened.
Listen, we haven't got nearly enough time for you tonight, but I'd love to talk with you again.
The book is called Who or What Were They?
PC Alan Godfrey's Account of That Weirdness.
There were other sightings around that time as well that are all documented in the book.
And Alan, thank you very much for being so patient with me and telling your story so methodically and logically.
Yes, yeah.
Could I tell people where they can buy it from?
You can.
Of course you can.
I decided to go with eBay because it's more personal than Amazon.
Okay.
So you can purchase the book on eBay by entering the title of the book, and I sign each copy.
Well, good for you.
And that's excellent.
And I have to say, I'm holding the book now.
I read it today.
I loved it.
And I think it would make a great, if somebody wants a Christmas present that's unusual, it would make a great Christmas present.
And I don't think I'm breaking any rules by saying that.
Alan Godfrey, thank you very much indeed, and have a good night.
I hope we talk again.
I do as well.
Thank you very much.
It'd be nice speaking to you, Alan.
Please take care.
Thank you.
Gary Hesseltine, just quickly, Gary, and I'm sorry to squeeze you into a couple of minutes here.
Gary Hesseltine from UFO Truth magazine.
You know Alan Godfrey.
How should we look back on this story?
What should we make of it?
It's an excellent case.
When I created the Proof Force Police Database, so British Police Officers Items, in 2002, I found out that Alan lived quite close, so literally about 40 miles away.
So I made it my business to get to meet him.
And over a period of about 18 months, on and off, I researched his case.
Fantastic case.
A couple of little things, just to put it in context how unusual the Adamski case was.
When the coroner, Alan Turnbull, summed up the open verdict, he said, in my 12,000 cases, this is the most baffling case I've ever had.
He actually went to print in the newspapers with that, and he said, if somebody had said a UFO took this man up and dropped him on the coal stack, I would only raise one eyebrow.
So that's where you get a UFO link.
Yes.
And of course they classified it.
They classified the case.
They classified the case file.
No, we know that happened because Graham Birds, who ran the British UFO printed magazine until his death, I think in around 2000, had approached the West Yorkshire Police and asked for a copy of the file.
And he was told it was classified.
You will never get a copy of it.
Quite why.
We don't know.
But then when you look at the Alan Godfrey case, for those people that aren't aware of the abduction phenomena, he also had a period of about 25 minutes missing time.
He is a very rational police officer, like you said when you were interviewing him just then.
He rationalises what came out on the hypnosis, as maybe his mind, he doesn't really know.
But in retrospect, it's regarded as Britain's first top abduction case for the simple reason is that everything he described, the mark on the foot, that left an itch and he had to have ointment for a week, the split boot, the missing time, being taken aboard, something, being examined on a table, small creatures putting things on his legs, bits of equipment.
Now, that all turns out to be classic abduction scenario that is worldwide.
And you've heard, I mean, we've heard the man tonight.
We've heard the man tonight.
He doesn't sound like a fantasist.
He doesn't sound like the kind of man who would willingly make that up.
Rational guy.
Here's a quick interesting thing, though, that with regards to the hypnosis sessions, there were four sessions over a year, and the first session was not recorded in any way.
He was hooked up to machines, and the first professor that interviewed him, basically, when this story came out, he was not given a brief that this was UFO related.
He was given a cold brief that just said, this man appears to have some memory problems.
Can you unblock the memory?
Then that story came out.
Now, after that first interview, they did not tell Alan what had come out of that interview because they were so shocked.
So, what the professor said was, I want to have another professor do another cold test to see what emerges.
And the second time, three months later, different professor, the same story came out, but this time it was recorded on video.
And I'm one of the very few people to have been into Harry Harris's home, a Manchester solicitor.
And I've watched all those three videos, which are not available anywhere.
And I did a lot of notes.
I literally kicked him out of his living room on Saturday afternoon and said, look, I want to study these because I was trained in body language, advanced interview, and I watched.
And my conclusion is that if the guy's lying, he deserves an Oscar.
Now, there is one, according to Mal in Belfast tonight, there is something that doesn't add up.
Alan told us that he was made to sign something that effectively told him to shut up about it, which, of course, when he left the police, he didn't because it was already out there.
So he talked about it, and now we've got the book.
Mal says that he was a police officer, and he very much doubts that any government body would get anyone to sign anything that made you keep shtung.
What do you say?
Well, having interviewed many, many police officers over many years now, I conclude that, yes, it was common practice.
If somebody had a top UFO sighting, if they were a police officer, what would invariably happen that they would receive a visit either by somebody in civilian clothes who said he was from the MOD or they would receive a visit from somebody claiming to be from the Air Force.
And I have heard of other officers having to sign or re-sign Official Secrets Act.
When you join the police, when you join the military, like I did, when I joined the police, you sign them and you're not usually expected to ever sign them again.
However, in these abnormal, very unusual circumstances, then there have been one or two occasions when police officers have been asked or been reminded that they're under the Official Secrets Act and they're not to speak.
And most take hold of that for the time that they're in the force.
But generally what happens is that when they retire, or as in Alan's case, the real health, I think he retired in 1985 due to the injury that he'd sustained in 1977 that came back to haunt him, that literally, one, you've got your pension, your retirement, people feel a bit more relaxed to say, right, well, actually, this happened to me.
The majority of police officers who are serving will never go forward publicly.
Alan is an exception to that rule because they fear for their careers.
And of course, Alan found himself a bit of a magnet for reports from other police officers.
This is before your Prufoss organization was around.
People started contacting him.
Out of when I originally met Alan and we started going into his case in depth over like this 18 months on and off period, I met all the witnesses, the people that he mentioned, or the majority of them.
And basically, from his case, it led to about another eight or nine cases for the database because of that reason that people, I mean, the guy who contacted him, this senior officer, I think he ended up as like a chief inspector.
He himself had had a sighting that created his interest.
So you tell me what you thought about the account of PC Alan Godfrey and what he endured, went through, he says, after these strange events that happened on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border all of those years ago, and he's now talking about in this really good new book.
In the next edition, we're going to talk with Jenny Randalls, who worked on the book with him, Jenny veteran UFO researcher and a really interesting person.
I'm glad she's back in the field.
And we're going to be speaking with her in the second edition of this special on PC Alan Godfrey and whatever happened to him during that year of 1980, the year of Rendlesham Forest, don't forget.
So that's coming soon.
Thank you very much.
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