All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 7, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:00
Edition 323 - Jenny Randles

Veteran UK UFO Investigator Jenny Randles who worked with PC Alan Godfrey on his book...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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 return of the Unexplained.
Many thanks for your emails.
Please keep them coming with guest suggestions and thoughts about the show.
You can go to my website, theunexplained.tv, designed by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, and send me a message through there.
And as I say, we will do a lot of your shout-outs and suggestions and thoughts on this show very soon.
But please believe me, as ever, I get to see all of your emails, and I do react to whatever you say.
Thank you very much for caring about this show.
Part two on this edition of the show that we're doing about PC Alan Godfrey and the unusual.
And that's a big understatement.
Events that happened at a place called Todmoden on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border during 1980.
First of all, a body is discovered, a man called a Dampski, on top of a coal pile in the town, a coal storage pile, in very, very strange circumstances, as you heard.
Circumstances that impacted upon the life of this policeman, Alan Godfrey, for all of his years, right up to the present day, and is one of the reasons why he's finally put it all down in a book with the help of the person we're about to speak with on this show.
Then, of course, later in the year was the UFO, so-called encounter, where Alan Godfrey's patrol car has something 14 feet above it, something huge, something that has very unusual properties, something that is truly unexplainable, and something that someone somewhere appears to want to keep quiet about, even up to the present day.
A very, very unusual story.
I'm delighted that Alan Godfrey has come out and decided to write this book with the help of Jenny Randles.
Jenny Randalls is a veteran UFO researcher based in the northwest of England.
Do you know, I first spoke with her when I was a student, and that's a long time ago.
I remember phoning her.
I was doing some research about these things at the time.
There were no shows like this one then, and I was too young to be doing one anyway.
I was doing some research about these things, and I found her number.
Now, there was no internet then, and the only information like this were on photocopied sheets and so-called magazines that were posted out to people through the regular mail.
How things have changed.
Jenny Randles is still around, and Jenny Randalls helped Alan Godfrey to write this book.
It's a great book, and I wanted to be able to unpick the story with Jenny Randles, who's been kind enough to give me an hour of her time, which you can share with me now.
I think you're going to find what she has to say very interesting, and I promise you that we will talk now that I've reconnected with Jenny Randles, with Jenny again on this program.
What a remarkable person who's given her life in this country, the UK, to the investigation of these things.
They don't only happen in America or Russia or China.
They happen right here in the United Kingdom, and the world deserves to hear about them.
So the Alan Godfrey case, astonishing.
His book is still available, by the way, through eBay.
He chose not to go through regular publishers, and I respect his reasons for doing that, too.
So you can find that on eBay.
Personally, I heartily recommend the book.
It is excellent, and it is a man's life story, effectively.
So let's get now to veteran UFO researcher in the northwest of England, Jenny Randles, and let's unpick this story of the weird events and what happened after them to PC Alan Godfrey.
Jenny Randles, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Jenny, first of all, can you tell me a little bit about you and your work?
Because I know personally you've been involved in this work for decades now in the Northwest.
I have.
I became interested because I lived when I was little in the area of the Pennine Hills where strange things were being seen by lots of people.
And as a result, they all used to talk about them.
I got curious.
Members of my family had seen things.
And because I was interested in science at school, and I asked people, what could these be?
And everybody said, it's just all nonsense, don't worry.
And I couldn't take an answer like that.
I wanted to try and find out.
And I became more and more involved.
I joined organizations.
I subscribed to magazines.
And eventually, I found interest in going out, talking to people, seeing what they'd seen, and trying to work out what it was that it might have been that they experienced.
And discovered that you can explain the vast majority of UFO sightings, approximately 95% of them.
And each one is a challenge, but there were also those 5% that defied explanation and that really did seem to be something very strange indeed and that nobody was taking seriously.
So it just fired me up to get involved more and more.
And it's been like a little bug that's been there niggling me all throughout life.
I've had a lot of time off recently because my mother had a major stroke, which meant that she was completely bedbound and paralysed for 16 years.
And as a consequence of that, I've not been able to do very much at all.
I've been unable to travel.
And I stopped writing my books and doing that kind of research.
But I've continued to do the research quietly.
And now that I'm back and I've been in a position to help Alan with this book, I'm more enthusiastic than ever to try and get to the truth because I've discovered that the subject is still there, but it doesn't seem to have gone very far.
It's not progressed beyond the point where it was.
The Alan Godfrey case is a fascinating story.
Your involvement in it, was it right at the beginning of it?
It seems to me that you came into the whole Alan Godfrey thing immediately after the Adansky case and the discovery of the body, and then the papers picked it up and it got a kind of momentum from there.
Yes, by chance, I knew about Alan's case very early on because his sergeant at the station was married to my cousin, who I was very close with.
And she and he told me, this guy is Serious, do not think that he's making this up.
We believe him, and he's having a struggle getting people to understand him.
They're all joshing and joking with him.
But we know you're interested, we know you're involved, and really, we think you should become an investigator into this.
Now, what I chose to do was instead get the team that I worked with in Manchester to come in, and I was partially involved, but I didn't get directly involved simply because I was afraid that because at that time I was becoming reasonably well known as being involved in the subject, I'd already written a book, so I'd had some publicity, and I thought it might have affected his credibility if it was believed that in some way he knew me.
Now, he didn't know me, I'd never met him before the case had happened, but I stayed a little bit in the background for about the first six months or so, but was very closely involved in everything that was happening in the case.
It was very difficult for him, wasn't it?
Not only because of the teasing that he got from colleagues about the way the police and other organizations work and the general scepticism around these things, but also, of course, because he was trying to take on board, and I'm talking about before the Toddmann UFO incident happened, he was trying to take on board what had happened.
He had to go through the inquest of a Dansky and all the rest of it.
Yes, it was difficult.
And this is, as I say, why his sergeant, who was a really good guy, and when he died, Alan was actually at his funeral and helped carry the coffin.
And it was something that he, as an old-fashioned police officer, could not understand because he saw increasingly the ways in which, because of just simply having had this extraordinary experience, he was being alienated by senior officers who were picking on him.
And the community at large around Tottenham were not doing that, but the police just didn't seem to be able to cope with one of their own having these kind of experiences.
And it was almost as if it was an unwanted problem that they needed to get rid of, which they felt they could use him as a reason to pin the blame onto almost.
And I don't know what it was, but for whatever reason, I got very, very empathetic with Alan and felt, you know, this is a guy who's just because he's had a strange experience and is wanting to tell the world what happened and wants to discuss it and he's being blocked from doing this and being threatened with his job and increasingly threatened with even more bizarre things that they did to him.
And it just wasn't right.
It was a plain injustice that someone had to try and champion.
And I'm glad that he had allies at that time because he was very down at many periods of this.
What do you believe happened to Adamski?
Well, that is a big question, of course.
I mean, yes, there are associated things that you can put to the case that might involve UFOs.
And that's, of course, why we did take it seriously at the time.
Mostly the reason we took it seriously was because his widow was desperately unhappy with how the inquest had gone, in that it really didn't resolve anything.
It was quite long.
Many witnesses were called, but none of the witnesses that should have been called were called.
Alan was never called.
The person who was actually in the coal yard at the time when we know, according to the coroner, that Anamsky should have been dead and saw the coal heap with nobody on it, which meant, one would assume, that therefore he did not get onto that coal heap on his own.
And yet that's more or less the conclusion that the inquest reached.
It did reach an open verdict.
It wasn't resolved.
The coroner always said it was the strangest case in his entire career.
But it was an unresolved case.
And again, it was showing evidence that someone somewhere simply didn't want to dig too deep in case of what it might have found.
Now, there have been all sorts of stories around the local communities asked for other explanations as to what might have happened.
And yes, I think it's possible that there is an explanation that has nothing to do with UFOs.
And I do accept that.
And I'm certainly not pushing the fact that it was connected with that.
But it was part of the case in the sense of showing the same kind of problems, that anything that is potentially unexplainable that seems to happen that challenges the authorities in some way becomes something that they prefer not to actually thoroughly investigate, but that they prefer to push to one side and just forget about almost.
And that's not right, because when there are questions like that, when people's lives are affected, you have to face up to it and you have to try and get to the truth.
And I think that the coroner would have wanted that, and I think he was quite disappointed that as a consequence, he probably didn't get to see all the facts to be able to make a proper judgment.
And so the thing was left.
And the question will always remain until we get more information, if we ever do.
What on earth was this man doing in that place where he never went?
What had he been doing in the, what was it, four days, five days prior to his discovery?
Yes, there are many questions like that.
And of course, yes, there was a UFO sighting just hours before locally, which is one of the reasons why initially we connected it to some degree with the possibility that a UFO was involved, in the sense that we know that UFOs can create lots of energy, that they can, we have got cases where people's skins have been burned by them.
We know that they can cause electrical interference.
So if someone has a heart problem, there is a possibility that it can affect a heart condition as well.
So we've had situations like that in the past where not by necessarily any deliberate action, but just by coming into contact with the energy that UFOs can create, someone can suffer harm.
And so It was necessary that we considered that possibility.
I would not say we ever established that there was a link with UFOs.
And as I say, I think it's still quite possible that there was another explanation.
But what I'm sure we did was the right thing, which was to take the whole thing seriously and investigate it more than the authorities seem to do.
And then Alan Godfrey, just as he's trying to get back on track with his life and put this behind him as best he could, gets involved in a call-out that takes him to a place where there is a massive apparent UFO 14 feet above his car.
What was your contact with him when that happened?
Well, it was not the first case of that type that's happened in that area.
So I was not necessarily surprised because this is a location where things of that nature seem to happen much more often than you would expect they would by chance.
Nevertheless, what intrigued me was the fact that the weather conditions were so severe.
It had rained all night.
And my first thought necessarily then was, could it be something connected with the weather?
And that's why I've always dug into the possibility that we're dealing with not necessarily some kind of craft from another world being piloted by somebody, but something from within our own world that we don't fully understand yet, something that we tend to call a UAP, an unidentified atmospheric phenomena.
Something that, in fact, the Ministry of Defence we now know take very seriously too.
They conducted their own top-secret research into this during the 1990s, used the same terminology, argued the scientists behind it, that this was something that was potentially dangerous and a threat to air traffic, and this was a justification for why the Ministry of Defense should continue to investigate these things.
They actually investigated several air crashes which they think might have been caused by these things.
And I think one of the reasons this term UAP was used by them, rather similarly to the way that we use it, is that if you say a UFO caused a plane to crash or a UFO caused an experience like Alan Godfrey had, it creates that impression in the mind immediately that you're saying aliens did it.
And that is, of course, always a possibility you can never totally eliminate, but it should not be the first place that you look at because you eliminate the things that you can resolve first, then you move on to things that make sense within known science as we have it today, extensions of what we understand, or perhaps new types of phenomena around us in the atmosphere.
And only really when you have to and you're being dragged more or less kicking or screaming towards the possibility that something as extraordinary as aliens is involved, should you leave that possibility open.
So that's always been my philosophy when I've been investigating these things.
And unquestionably, in my mind, there was something over that road that night.
I mean, it left physical marks on the ground, which was not just seen by Alan, but was seen by other people too.
What were those marks, Kenny?
What were the marks?
It swirled dry the road surface.
The leaves from the trees, it could be visibly seen being knocked off, not just by Alan, but by other people, formed a circular pattern on the road underneath where it was directly hovering.
And it caused electrical interference on both of his radio communication systems.
And when a bus driver who was in the area a few minutes before Alan saw the swirling on the road but not the object because he could not get out of the bus because he was in a hurry to pick up a driver for an early morning service that was going, he put his arm out of the window and felt this suctional updraft going straight up into the air off the ground and was pretty scared, as you can imagine.
So there was clearly a physically real phenomenon there.
There is no argument about that.
We have too many witnesses who saw it and we have direct experience of the physical causes that it created.
And that's the key thing about this.
Anybody who says this was just an illusion of something or other or that he made this up, they have to be wrong because they don't understand the depth of the evidence.
And once you've got that pattern and chain of evidence with multiple witnesses, what looks at first like a simple either or this guy made it up or he did see what he said he saw becomes clearly an event that happened.
And the only question is, what was it?
Well, yes, indeed.
And one of the emails I got after the show that I did with Alan Godfrey, the interview that I did with him, actually said it was a well-known fact that in Todmodon at this time, there was a space age plastic house that was built in the shape of a UFO and was regularly transported around the town.
And that's what it is.
This person said there is no question here and no mystery.
Here is what it was.
The Futura house, yes.
Everybody in and around Todmodon knew about it.
That's been discussed, investigated for years.
We know where it was at the time.
We know it could not be transported around the town just like that.
It had to be lifted by a crane, for example.
It had to be transported on the back of a huge flatbed truck.
But if it was on a crane, it would have been 14 feet above the police car.
But, you know, the one thing that doesn't add up is if it was on a crane, Alan Godfrey would have heard something and seen something else.
The police could not possibly have not been informed.
It was strict procedure for moving it, and it wasn't moved willy-nilly, and it certainly wasn't moved in the middle of the night, and there is no evidence at all that it was moved around that time.
It remained, in fact, in Tottenham for quite some time afterwards.
It was a prototype house.
Everybody knew what it looked like.
And it's highly unlikely, in my view, that that could have happened without being secret at that time in the day, especially given the weather conditions.
You wouldn't be risking damage to It in the conditions that were afoot at that particular night or at that hour of the day for no apparent reason.
It didn't go anywhere, as far as we know, on that day, and nobody saw it come back.
So I have serious reservations about that, unless someone could come up with some hard and fast evidence that it was moved on that night.
Then obviously we'd have to look at it.
But that evidence simply doesn't exist to my knowledge.
And that Futura House was famous in the Northwest at the time because I can remember seeing the thing everybody knew about it.
Alan definitely knew about it.
Yes, I mean, I talked to Alan about this years and years and years ago.
It's not something new that's just been invented now as a theory.
It was certainly considered because many people said to him, that's what you saw.
And he said, well, no, you know, it wasn't that, obviously.
But people will look for explanations.
And I have no problem with that because that is what you do when you investigate UFO sightings.
So I'm not a negative in the sense that, you know, just people trying to find an explanation for it because that is what we should do as human beings.
But you have to match the facts to the evidence.
And that we can't do in this case.
I mean, I was quite considering the possibility for some time.
That was the other option that was considered, which was that he had actually seen an early morning bus.
And we know that the weather at the time was very strange.
And we do know that the weather at the time potentially could have created a tornado.
There was a whirlwind effect on the road that was being described by the witnesses.
We know from a very close look at the weather with the Tornado and Storm Research Association in this country and a doctor who specializes in tornado development in this country that the conditions were right for something like that to have been created.
So that has been a working theory of mine for quite some time.
And it does remain a possibility that if you've got something as strange as that, which you confront on the road at night hovering over there caused by the weather, and that it has strong electrical charges associated with it that can, in other cases, we know, affect electrical equipment, that that might have been what was involved.
But it's quite a stretch to go from that to what Alan saw and the associated effects and all the consequences it had on his life.
And also, you have to bear in mind that we've tried to track buses.
We've talked to the driver of the only bus who was in the area at the time.
He saw strange things too.
So yes, there was clearly something else other than a bus there.
It was not just a bus.
And I've tried very hard to match the timelines between where that bus was at every step along the way and where we always know Alan was because he's always told us.
And it doesn't work.
And the key to all of this also, if it was a bus, is that right at the very start in 1981, Alan told me the last thing he did before he drove out was see a bus come back down Burnley Road and drive off to the bus station to pick up passengers.
And he said hello to the driver.
That has to be the only bus that was out there because there were no others.
And so if it was a bus, he'd seen it already coming back before he went out.
And so we do try to find answers to these cases.
We do try to match the evidence.
And we're not just simply accepting that someone says they saw a spaceship, so that's what they saw.
And at the moment, there is no other explanation that has evidence that's strong enough to argue that's what you saw.
What do you make of the hypnotherapy?
Were you involved in that, Kenny?
The hypnotic regression?
Well, I was aware of it as it was going on.
I met both of the doctors who were involved in it, and I saw the footage of it as it was going along.
But my view on regression hypnosis for quite some time has always been that it adds complications to the case.
What it does is it produces extra factors because you don't know when you're under regression hypnosis the probity of the information that you're coming out with.
What it does is, and I have gone through this myself, I've experienced it myself deliberately so that I understood the process before I started to form conclusions about it.
What it does is it frees the mind.
It creates a kind of free association so that you visualize things, you see things, and you describe them, but you have absolutely no idea where those images are coming from.
They are obviously, to some degree, coming from your subconscious mind.
Now, as you know, when you go to sleep every night, you can come up with all kinds of images and experiences, but most of us don't assume that the dreams that we remember later were true.
We just say, oh, I had this strange dream, blah, blah, blah.
And that's the kind of feeling you get under hypnosis.
You can describe and relive an experience, and you can go on and describe things that you don't consciously remember, but there's no way you can know whether the two things happened.
Now, one of the things that I did with the experience that I deliberately regressed back to myself was that I went back to an experience that I knew there were written data records about, but which I had not read.
And I could then compare what I described under hypnosis with those records years later.
And the key thing was, yes, it helped me remember a few things in a way that I had not consciously remembered before, and they matched the truth.
But there were also plenty of things where I must have just invented or confabulated or freewheeled and came up with a guess under hypnosis because when I matched that to the facts, they didn't match at all.
So in other words, you can't tell the difference between what's memory and what's imagination.
And unfortunately, in a situation when you're dealing with UFOs, that's not going to help because it's already a complicated problem to crack to try and figure out what someone has seen and determine what possible explanation there is for what it has.
And the last thing you really need is an extra factor which can introduce imagination.
And I vividly remember the first time that Alan saw some of the footage because he didn't remember.
He was given a memory block by the doctors to stop him from recalling them afterwards because they were quite traumatic experiences and they didn't want him to struggle with that.
So when he first saw the film, it was the first time he actually knew what it was that he'd said under hypnosis.
And I asked him seconds after he'd finished watching, what did he think?
And his immediate comment was, well, I don't know whether that really happened or not.
I don't remember any of that happening.
It's really very strange.
It's like me sitting there watching myself on television or an actor playing me saying something that didn't happen.
It may have happened.
It may not have happened.
I don't know.
And that is exactly, in my view, how I felt after having had hypnosis.
And the problem is that because you get so wrapped up in this close encounter that you've had, because you know that you really did have it and you know that something genuinely was there, it becomes easier over time to assume that what the hypnosis has done has filled in the blanks and told you the truth.
And of course, that might be what's happened here.
But equally, your certainty that you may have had immediately afterwards that, well, this is not, you know, I don't know whether that was true or not, tends to fade away.
And you desperately need answers.
You want to look for some truth somewhere in what occurred to you.
You don't like mystery in your life.
You don't like unsolved problems.
And I think as time goes by, many witnesses find that they prefer even a frightening certainty to an even more frightening uncertainty of what has happened to them and the consequence of what that might do to their lives.
So I just feel that hypnosis is a problem we don't need in a phenomenon that is already full of many different questions that we have to try to resolve.
We need to search for answers, and I don't think hypnosis is giving us answers.
I think it's giving us more questions.
And in Alan Godfrey's case, certainly from talking to him, it seemed to me that the hypnosis left him with more questions than it left him with answers, left him even more bemused, if that's the right word, about all of this than he was before.
And that's exactly my experience of it.
I mean, because I don't believe in it, it doesn't mean that I don't go out and talk to witnesses who've had these experiences.
It doesn't mean that I haven't been at hypnosis sessions on witnesses.
I have.
I didn't get to the point where I argued and successfully succeeded in persuading the British UFO Research Association, to be one of the first organisations in the world, to ban the use of regression hypnosis,
which we did in the 1980s, without being sure that this was the right thing to do by actually being enough regression hypnosis sessions on UFO witnesses to see how confused and how less happy they were afterwards, because it didn't resolve the problems for them.
They didn't say, ah, that's what happened.
Ah, great.
Okay, I can get on and have a better life now because I can live with it.
It sowed that seed in their mind of doubt and confusion, which actually made things worse in many cases.
Therefore, I did not think that we, as UFO investigators, had the right to do that kind of thing.
You see, we are interested in finding the truth for ourselves almost.
We want to know what happened and tell people what we think is behind the UFO phenomenon.
We often forget that we're dealing with real human beings who've gone through an experience that's been a trauma to them, which they're going to have to live with for the rest of their lives.
And we don't have the right to impose things onto them if we know that they potentially can make things very difficult for them afterwards and that it's not actually going to help them and might make things worse for them.
And I think as UFO researchers often were very selfish, and that's why we created this code of practice, which included this decision not to use regression hypnosis in cases.
So that's why I was not directly involved in this particular case.
Doesn't mean I wasn't intrigued in the way it unfolded, but it didn't surprise me in the way that it unfolded because I've seen it happen in other cases.
So the people who keep telling me that regression is the magic bullet here.
It's the way of unlocking all the secrets and helping people to move on with their lives.
You think they're probably wrong here?
In my experience, yes.
I mean, I'm always willing to learn.
I'm always willing to be convinced otherwise.
I haven't seen anything myself that would suggest to me that that's true.
There may be certain people for whom just any answer will help them and placate them, and they can live with the experience better by having some kind of surety like that.
I don't doubt that.
So yes, in certain cases, that might well be the case.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the information that they're living with is the truth.
But if it's something that helps to get them through it, then perhaps in those circumstances, it can be a good thing.
Now, here's the question.
If what happened to Alan Godfrey was also innocuous and perfectly explainable, why was he so firmly sworn to secrecy all those years ago?
Exactly.
There is no question that the Ministry of Defence were far more interested in this case, in my view, than we ever understood at the time.
In fact, now that we have records that come out through the Freedom of Information Act only in the last few years of cases that the Ministry of Defence have dug into, we can see how they've been very careful to pick out only very specific cases which they followed up in any kind of detail.
Often they're ones that seem to suggest some kind of phenomenon that involves technology or power sources or energies that can do things to people and to vehicles and damage the environment.
Or indeed the general interest in nuclear Weapons?
Well, I haven't seen any evidence in the data of that.
I mean, yes, there are reports of UFO sightings over nuclear power plants and things like that, but I'm talking specifically about the cases where we know that the Ministry of Defence sent out investigators to talk to people to get information directly from witnesses and imposed the Official Secrets Act onto them.
And that happened in this instance.
It happened in other instances.
And when you put the pattern of those cases together, you understand that they seem to think that there is a possibility of technology here that can be gained and understood from whatever is causing these UFO events to happen, for which there might be practical uses,
presumably from a military point of view or a defensive point of view, but it's that they're interested in, not necessarily solving the UFO mystery, but getting to evidence before other countries do too.
In Alan's case, the fact that he was getting letters from the Soviet Union at a time when the Cold War was still on, from scientists there who were intrigued about his case, they were connecting it with the famous Rendellsham Forest case that happened only four weeks after Alan's encounter.
Alan didn't even know what that case was until I told him about it because he was getting these letters from Russia about that at a time when that case wasn't even public knowledge.
These things were bound to be sending out warning signals to someone somewhere at the MOD and they were therefore taking a much bigger interest in this case for reasons like that.
I think that there was some kind of Cold War going on between the different countries who got UFO reports dealing with the possibility of there is something we can use from this information, whatever is causing UFOs, there is something we can gain from it to use for our own purposes, build weapons out of, and we need to do that first before any other country does.
So I think that drove a lot of the interest in the MOD in what really was a phenomenon that otherwise you wouldn't have expected them to have been terribly interested in.
And a specific problem, not a defense problem, unless they thought there was something they could do with it.
And whether or not you can use that information as the British government, as the American government, as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics government, whoever you are, you're going to want to know more than the other guy.
Even if it can't be of use to you, you don't want them knowing something you don't.
Precisely.
And I think that's been a driving force in why every major country on earth has been interested in a phenomenon that you would assume many of them would normally just say, well, this isn't our problem.
Show it off to a university somewhere.
Let them deal with this.
We've got to deal with the defense of the realm.
They have to have believed that there was a potential advantage for the defense of the realm from looking into these things for all the decades that they have been doing.
I've got to say, I was very impressed with both Alan Godfrey and his book.
You were with him and around him throughout the entire process of putting this book together.
How was he recalling those events?
How was he?
What was his state?
At the time when it happened, he's always been a very cool-headed guy.
He wrote a lot of notes, and that's why it was very easy for me to be able to help write this book, because he documented things as they happened.
He put them down.
He knew that they were potentially going to be needed in future.
He also did things like tape record conversations, often secretly, because he was aware very early on that things were going on that should not have been going on.
And for many years now, I've known about these.
I heard these tape recordings 30, 40 years ago.
Are they going to be released, Jenny?
Are they going to be released?
Well, that's down to Alan.
I think the problem is, of course, secretly recording conversations, as he says the book explains he did, in scenarios like when you're sent to see police doctors and psychiatrists and they're attempting to prove things that aren't true about you.
I think that's totally justified.
But of course, there'd be arguments that maybe covertly recording like that in this day and age, especially, would be against human rights and goodness knows what.
But that stands for common.
But they do exist.
I can promise you they do because I've heard them.
37 years ago, though, Jenny, if I was him, I'd be inclined to say, what the hell?
Well, I think he's, you know, wisely protecting them and wisely awaiting the response of the West Yorkshire Police Force to what's in that book because I think they have many questions to answer.
And I think somebody should be asking them those questions.
Indeed.
And Alan Godfrey himself, how is he handling the renewed publicity in all of this?
Because I did a big interview with him and others are going to want to.
It's going to be raking over the past for him.
It is, and he's not been well lately.
And this is another of the motivations as to why I got closely involved in this book with him because he was desperate to get this story out.
He really wanted to tell it for his family.
He wanted his grandchildren to be able to know what happened and not to read stories about him and think the wrong thing.
And that was a motivation that really fired me up because I thought that's a pure, decent, honest human reason.
He doesn't want to tell the world because he thinks the world needs to be convinced.
He doesn't want to prove that he was not a liar.
Obviously, those will be motivations, but his real concern was I want my family to know the truth.
And as a consequence, by doing that and by writing the book in the way that it was written, and by telling it honestly, lots of people out there get that same opportunity as will his grandchildren.
And now I think he's laid down the gauntlet, basically.
He's told everybody what happened.
Now it's down to everybody to explain why they did what they did in response to what happened, which I think was quite shocking, to be honest, in certain circumstances.
And if they're doing that to Alan, we know they must be doing that to other people too.
And it's not right.
And that's the debate that I think we should now be having.
Why Do we react in this way to people who are just honestly reporting things that have happened to them?
Which in other circumstances you would assume we'd say, That's interesting.
Let's figure out what's going on here and find out why that happened.
And rather than say, You're an idiot, you're a liar, we have got to do this to you.
You know, get out of this job if you won't shut up about it.
That is not the right human response to a situation like this.
We should react better.
We should.
And sometimes I think it's been documented as you say we do not.
Has Alan been hearing from police officers, others who may have seen things around that time since the book came out?
Has he had any more contact?
Because I know there's been a stream of people getting in touch with him down the years who've said, good on you, Alan Godfrey.
This is what happened to us.
Yes, there are cases coming in all the time.
Things like this happen all the time.
And that's another good reason for this, because it will hopefully persuade people who have probably sat on stories for a very long time, feeling the pressure of talking about them.
I've found over the years that the higher position of authority you're in, or what kind of respect you've got within the community, the more difficult it is for you to talk about something like this.
And I know there are people out there whose stories could change the world and whose stories would make people sit up and talk and think and say, well, blame me, if that's happened to them, I should tell my story too.
Who we really should be able to persuade that it's worth their while taking that risk and coming out.
And I think that's another thing that Alan's book has done because it has started, I think, a little bit of a revolution to convince people that we need to be honest and tell these stories.
We don't keep them to ourselves.
It doesn't help you to bottle it up and keep it secret for years.
And it doesn't help us solve the problems and the mysteries if we don't know half the evidence.
And that's what we need.
We need to encourage much more so people, regardless of what they think they might have to lose by talking, to be brave and say, look, we know what happened.
We're going to tell you what happened.
You figure it out.
You don't challenge my integrity.
And being truthful and honest with you, you have to be truthful and honest back and find out what's going on here.
Some of the people who were not very nice to Alan, and that's an understatement at that time, and caused him a certain amount of grief in various ways.
Have any of them ever since been in touch with him?
Has anybody ever apologised or wanted to reconnect with him?
Does he have any contact?
Many of the officers who were complicit in it in the sense that they didn't do anything about it at the time have done that.
I think there were one or two very specific individuals.
It does appear that there was a direct policy to do this.
I think, personally, I think what happened was they were so embarrassed by this whole situation.
I think they were potentially under some kind of order from the MOD that this was becoming a problem because Alan was too honest, too truthful and too willing to talk that they were just basically told, get the problem out of the way.
If he's going to continue to talk about it and not a police officer, it's less of a problem than he is as a police officer.
And my view is that's what happened.
He was effectively sidelined to try and damage his credibility.
It's an awful lot to have to live with for him, and I think he does it very, very well.
Is there any more research do you think that can be done on this now?
Do we know everything that we can possibly know?
Have we gathered the data?
I don't think it's true to say that we've ever done all the research on any case or any problem.
There are always new things that come to light.
There are witnesses that we know must have seen something.
We know the man from Cliffiger who called the police and reported it just hours after Alan has never come back forward since that day.
I am still hopeful that maybe he will read this book and he's still out there and he will tell us what he saw.
There are bits of a puzzle that we can put together.
Someone somewhere might have the answer and maybe not even realize that they've got the answer.
All they have to do is be brave, come forward and explain what happened to them and eventually we might have that final piece of the jigsaw that will provide the picture of what happened on that night because something quite extraordinary clearly did.
The MOD has released a lot of files about UFO cases recently.
Not all of them though.
Has anything about this case been released?
No, that's one of the biggest mysteries.
Many, many cases have come forward.
Many are missing.
And Alan's case, which clearly is a real file, we know it's out there.
We know that the police sent it to them.
We know that when he was visited by this person who claimed to be from the Ministry of Defence at Todmoden police station with one of his superior officers in attendance, had that file in front of them.
So it was submitted and it was in the Ministry of Defence and for some reason it has not been released.
I suspect I know why it's not been released and I suspect we may never see it and it might take legal action to get it out of there because in other circumstances, whenever there's anything in a file that's not necessarily incriminating about UFOs in the sense that it's got the answer to the mystery,
but where it's got things that have gone on that the MOD would rather be embarrassed about coming out, for instance, an officer might make some kind of a joke to somebody about something or they may draw a little picture of a flying saucer on it, they tend to get redacted and they tend to get withheld as long as possible so that it doesn't make it look like they've got something to hide.
But why this file has not been released when other cases have is certainly, for me, one of the biggest questions outstanding about this case.
And unless and until we see what they actually did about it, we won't know.
Unfortunately, the most likely fact is that they did very little because I've read the vast majority of the thousands and thousands and thousands of files that the MOD have released over the years.
And the majority of them are basically bits of paper, some of which are quite interesting cases.
And I'm thinking, well, if I had That what I would be doing now would be this, this, and this.
But all what they've done, or allegedly according to the files anyway, is put them away in a cupboard somewhere and forgotten about them.
Do you believe things like this are still happening?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
The phenomenon doesn't go away.
It's been there throughout history.
There's evidence of these things happening right across the centuries.
It goes through periods of quiescence where not much seems to be going on.
And obviously, there must be some reason why there is a pattern and waves of phenomena that occur.
But I have no doubt at all that there will be another big wave of UFO activity and probably in and around Todmoden in the not too distant future.
And we'll know about it when it happens.
And after Alan Godfrey, did things continue to happen around Toddmannon?
We know they did before.
Yeah, I've investigated at least another 10 not dissimilar cases in and around within five, ten miles of Todmoden.
Many of the witnesses who would not want to go on television and talk about it or the radio and talk about it or would even write a book about it or anything like that, but they've told me their stories.
And many of them didn't even know about the other cases that had happened.
They were not interested in the phenomenon.
But there is a pattern of things that have been going on there.
And you can maybe argue that one person is making stuff up.
Two, three, you know, you start to waver.
When you've got ten cases that seem to be more or less telling you the same thing, you have to be pretty silly to think this is not actually happening.
There really is something going on in that area.
And we need to know what it is.
We need to invest some kind of effort into it.
Unfortunately, most, as far as we know, outside of the MOD UFO research that goes on is done by amateurs who, with the best will in the world, are very keen and determined to try and document the truth, but don't have the resources, don't have the expertise to do the kind of research that needs to be done.
Someone needs to be setting up in these locations around the world, which we call window areas, where UFO activity is much more prevalent than it is anywhere else, the right kind of equipment, the right kind of machinery that just the modest investment by universities here and there who have an interesting project that they can here do,
but will probably run away from because of this image of UFOs being something that is not credible.
A brave university department could create a research project, set up the right kind of equipment to monitor these areas, and I think we could make real progress.
It's been done in Scandinavia, in and around the Her Starling Valley, where they made some very useful steps forward in understanding the energy forms involved in these things.
We've got a great opportunity here in the Pennines, in and around Togmaton, because we know these events happen on a regular basis.
And we're basically sitting there recording them afterwards and not doing anything proactive about going out there, putting the right equipment in place, and watching them happen and proving to the world that they have happened.
It makes you wonder, though, doesn't it, why, and I never asked Alan this, why Todmaden?
Because, as you know, I was born and brought up in the Northwest.
I first spoke to you a long, long time ago when I was a student and you were quite new to all of this.
I remember phoning you from my parents' home.
So I go back a long way and I'm from the Northwest.
I always looked on Todmodon as being, it's border country.
It's where Lancashire meets Yorkshire.
You know, you've been through Liverpool, you've gone through Manchester, next stop Leeds.
Why a place like Todmodon?
Well, there are many theories as to why, it's not just Todmodon, it's a whole area of maybe 20, 30 square miles around there.
The Rosendale Valley on the other side of the border, which is where I was born.
I was born in a little place called Staxte, just outside of Bakele.
There were sightings there in the 50s and 60s when I was growing up.
And there are sightings still now.
They're on a very regular basis.
It may be something to do with the hills.
We don't know.
There are theories about geology that might create energies in the atmosphere.
There are other theories about areas of time and space that were weak in certain parts around the globe.
Who knows?
I'm not trying to explain what happened.
All I know is there is unquestionably locations around the world that we call window areas, and this is one of them, where throughout history you can track back hundreds of years, you will see this pattern of sightings, which have been much more consistent in those areas than random scatterings around the world.
There are sightings everywhere, but there are locations where they happen more frequently.
And those are the ones, if we're going to ever understand the answer to this phenomenon, we need to be digging into and we need to be expending some kind of proper effort rather than just getting the reports after they've happened and trying to understand them.
We need to be there when they're happening.
Then we might have a chance of recording and then discovering what happened.
Your involvement in Alan Godfrey's book seems to me to be very understated.
I wondered when I got it why your name wasn't all over the front cover along with his.
Because it was Alan's story and Alan told it and I wanted to make sure that it stayed Alan's story.
I've not been directly involved in UFO research now for about 14 years whilst I was a full-time carer and I've really recently made steps out into it.
This was the first thing I decided to do because I know Alan's long wanted to talk about this and wanted to tell his story.
And I've been trying to help him for the last two or three years whilst I was a carer and it was very difficult because I just simply didn't have the time.
So it was therapeutic for me because it gave me something to do after my mother died and it also meant that I could inch my way back into the field and get me enthusiastic about it again and find out whether I really did want to become a UFO researcher full-time again.
It has persuaded me to do that.
But it was always Alan's story.
It was always right that it be presented as Alan's story.
And I have no involvement in the book at all.
I mean, yes, I helped him write it, but I'm not financially involved in it in any way, shape, or form, and I never wanted to be.
Do you understand why he's, and I think I understand from what he told me, why he's marketing the book through eBay and he didn't give it to a big publisher and make a big splash out of it?
Yes, I think so.
I mean, I was surprised myself initially because I believed this was a story that a lot of people probably should want to read, should be able to read, and maximise it as much as possible.
But he's never been interested commercially in this.
It's not a money-making venture for him at all.
It's a need to tell the truth venture.
That's what he's trying to do.
He just wants people to know what happened and how it happened and hopefully change minds out there and hopefully make one or two of the people who made his life and his family's life hell for quite some time regret what they did and perhaps come back to him and say, you know, at the time we thought we were doing the right thing, but we do now regret it.
And next time, maybe when they are faced with a similar situation from another witness, they won't put them through the mill in the same way.
Because if that happens, then it'll have been worthwhile.
And in the future, if somebody says to a grandchild of Alan Godfrey, what was that that I read about your granddad?
The book is there.
Exactly.
I mean, that was his primary motive.
He wanted his family to know the truth because so many untruths have been told about him over the years.
And it's inevitable when you're involved in a situation like this, people will make stuff up.
They will recite things that they believe are true simply because they've heard them off other people.
And the truth gets blurred.
The only way you get a really good picture of the truth is to hear it straight from the person who actually experienced it.
And Alan was there.
He knows what happened.
To some extent, so did I, because I was.
And it was important to get that truth out whilst Alan was still able to, because he's not been well lately.
Happily, he's much better now than he was.
And when he first decided to do this, it was very important for him to actually get this story out while he was physically able to do so.
He was going into hospital, he was having surgery.
We didn't know what the outcome of it might have been.
I promised him before he went in, look, if you can't do it, I will make sure this book gets finished.
You need to tell this story.
And I'm very happy that he pulled through.
He's been able to go out there and with his customary gusto, tell everybody what really did happen.
And I'm glad that he's got the opportunity now to explain to everybody who might have had doubts about what went on here.
There will be no doubt, I suspect, once they read the book, they will know what happened.
And as we say in the Northwest, he's easier in his mind now.
Exactly.
I mean, it's a weight off his mind because, of course, he's lived with this for many years now, nearly 40 years.
It's been that pressure on him that everybody else is talking about it and telling the world what happened and deciding and theorizing and speculating.
And of course, there's nothing wrong with that.
We all should do that.
But you need to have that chance, just yourself, to explain it and tell it from your perspective.
And many things that were hidden before, stories that he's not been able to really tell because he's felt under pressure and restriction and it might have had repercussions on his family and so on and so forth.
There are all kinds of factors that come into play when you've had an experience of this kind, where you sometimes can't just do what you want to do.
You've got to think of others who it might affect.
True enough.
What about you, Jenny Randalls?
You're back and I'm delighted to have you back.
And now maybe we can talk again and certainly not leave it three decades next time.
So what are you going to do next then?
Where do you start your reinvigorated career?
That's a good question.
I've not really thought about it to any great degree.
I'm just following where the evidence leads.
I'm under no pressure now.
I have decided I'm not going to be going back on the commercial trail of writing big budget books and going doing the promotional trails and lectures and stuff like that.
There may be situations where if I get asked, I will do certain things, but I will do them if I want to, not because I have to.
And I will not be writing books to order for publishers.
I will find something that I want to talk about.
And when I'm ready to do that, I will do it.
And so I feel quite refreshed that I've now got a blank slate in front of me, more or less.
I don't have to write.
I don't have to make money.
I don't have to do anything commercialized, which in the past in the UFO field is a bit of a difficult scenario.
Because if you're a researcher, you want to research.
If you want to find answers, you want to find answers.
And if it takes years, you want to take years to find those answers.
But if you're a writer, you have this pressure of producing things regularly.
I don't now.
And I have created a website which is allowing me to write things on there as and when I've got something to say.
Mainly, it was created just to promote Alan's book.
And I was quite surprised when I looked to produce a domain name for it, that it was more difficult than I expected because I hadn't understood that the term os factor, which is something that I created about 30-odd years ago to explain the strange state of consciousness that witnesses go into prior to having a close encounter where time seems to stand still,
where all sounds in the environment around them disappear, had become adopted by people and that there were things out there like rock albums that had been written about it.
Some so you couldn't automatically have the name.
Exactly.
But I managed to get one that worked.
So what is the website?
What is it?
It's called OffFactorBooks.com.
Okay.
Probably the only book on there is Alan.
But that was just one of the free domain names that I could use.
Well, you know, the great thing is That when you started all of this, and when I started getting interested in all of this a long time ago, as just a young student in Liverpool, all you could get were, they call them Roneo.
They were, you know, like Xerox sheets of stuff that have been copied many times.
The very first magazine I produced was done like that.
My dad's guillotine duplicating machine from work.
But now you've got the internet, you've got so much technology to back you up so you can do so much.
Do you have any plans to pass the mantle on to anybody else?
Because, you know, you are a big name in all of this.
You have been around for a very long time.
Are you bringing along a new generation?
No, I wouldn't say big name.
I've been around for a long time, yes.
And age, I guess, brings some degree of wisdom, but not necessarily total wisdom.
I'm still learning new things.
And there are people out there doing the research, and some of them are very good.
And I've been following them for years.
I've not gone away.
I've been always there in the background.
I actually continued to write a monthly article for 14 Times magazine during the 14 years when I was a carer.
So I've not been entirely out of the field.
So I've been following everything that's been going, and I know who's doing what and why, and been talking behind the scenes to a lot of people.
So there are plenty of people out there who've got it in them to take this thing forward.
I'm not worried about that.
I hope we talk again, Jenny Randalls.
Thank you very much for making time for me.
Pleasure.
Jenny Randalls, and your thoughts about what Jenny had to say, and your thoughts about what Alan Godfrey had to say, indeed, or your thoughts on any of the guests or the show, anything, through my website, theunexplained.tv.
And of course, please don't forget, when you get in touch with me and the show, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
I love to hear your stories.
And thank you very much for being part of the Unexplained family around the world.
Just goes to show, doesn't it, that these things don't only happen in far-flung parts of the globe.
They happen in the United Kingdom.
And, you know, I hope that Alan Godfrey has found some benefit from getting this book out there.
It is still available through eBay, and I enjoyed the book enormously.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the end of 2017 on The Unexplained.
We are definitely on a roll here and looking forward to more shows in 2018.
So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained, and please stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, from London Town, please stay in touch.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection