Double Alien Abduction: The Vanishing Yorkshire Miner and the Policeman Plucked from Time

Hovering moodily against the utterly silent landscape of The Pennine Hills in Northern England, the spherical scout craft Hypertension casts an eerie flickering glow over the peaks and valleys of the backbone of the country. Inside the alien craft, Captain Fizzybeard casually rests three of his green legs on the pulsing bank of instruments as he awaits an incoming video conference with his superior back on homeworld. When the video screen finally crackles into life, Captain Fizzybeard is momentarily taken aback by the sight of no higher authority than Emperor Pesto himself. And neither of his faces look particularly happy.

Captain Fizzybeard clears his main throat. “Emperor Pesto, what a pleasant surprise!”

Emperor Pesto pulls several frowns. “No time for small talk, Fizzybeard. We’re long overdue a progress update on your mission. Can you confirm that you have finally obtained human specimens for testing? And can you confirm that these specimens include a wide range of influential figures plucked from every corner of the planet?”

“Yes, Emperor Pesto.” The captain ponders for a second. “Well, we did run into a spot of bother. We only managed to get two specimens this time.”

“Only two?” splutters Emperor Pesto. “I take it that you have at least captured two powerful world leaders from either end of the political spectrum?”

“Yes, Emperor Pesto.” Captain Fizzybeard pauses again. “Well, not exactly. We had a bit of engine trouble. We were only able to get a couple of specimens from a little town in West Yorkshire. One of them was a local policeman, the other was a miner.”

Emperor Pesto shakes two of his heads in fury. “This is unacceptable, Fizzybeard! And what are all those things in the background? Are they cows? I’m sure I can see dozens of Earth cows milling about on your flight deck.”

“Ah yes, Emperor. Just a slight technical problem with the abduction process. I’ve got my finest men cleaning up the mess right now. It doesn’t half stink down here, I’m not even kidding.”

Emperor Pesto puffs out three cheeks in frustration. “You’re a useless lump of lard, Fizzybeard. This mission is aborted. You’re fired.”

Captain Fizzybeard solemnly stands and bows as he prepares to leave the flight deck. “Thank you for the opportunity, Emperor Pesto.”

1980 may be widely remembered on planet Earth as the year in which Ronald Reagan won his first presidential election, John Lennon was shot dead, and Pacman first began popping pills in arcades around the world. But for the people of Todmorden – a small Yorkshire market town nestled in the Pennine hills – it’s more likely to be remembered as that pretty odd year in which at least two of the locals were allegedly abducted by aliens within the space of five months. And only one of them survived to tell the tale.

Todmorden has developed something of a reputation as a UFO hotspot and a hive of mysterious activity, but one of the most shadowy mysteries ever to fall on the town remains unsolved today. And the story begins with the case of a Yorkshire miner who just vanished into thin air and re-emerged under deeply troubling circumstances.

The miner in question had the quintessentially Yorkshire name of Zigmund Adamski. Hang on, that can’t be right. Ah, it turns out that Zigmund originally hailed from Poland but had been forced to flee his home country during the horrors of the Second World War. Adopting the affectionate new nickname of Ziggy, he married his sweetheart Lottie in 1957, and the happy couple settled down in the little village of Tingley in Leeds in West Yorkshire, where Ziggy got a job as a miner in the local Lofthouse Colliery.

By 1980, the coal dust of the mines and a heavy smoking habit had begun to take its toll on 56-year-old Ziggy’s lungs, and he had applied for early retirement. His initial request had been rejected but he was still awaiting news on an appeal. In the meantime, he and Lottie remained in good spirits, and they were particularly looking forward to the wedding of their goddaughter whom Ziggy would be giving away on the big day.

In fact, it was the very day before the wedding that Ziggy went missing. He had announced in the afternoon that he was just nipping down to the local grocery store to buy a bag of potatoes, an errand which should have taken around ten minutes. He exchanged brief greetings with a neighbour on the way to the shops, and the store clerk later declared that Ziggy had been in a typically jovial mood. It was the last time he was seen alive in Tingley.

When Ziggy didn’t return home that evening, Lottie called the police and informed them that her husband had gone missing. She seemed fearful that he had been kidnapped. It was completely out of character for Ziggy to just randomly wander off and fail to return home. Vigorous police enquiries and an appeal for information in the local newspapers drew a complete blank. It was as if Ziggy had just vanished off the face of the Earth.

That is until five days later, when a grim discovery was made.

Around twenty miles away from Tingley in the town of Todmorden, foreman Trevor Parker was busy working alone in Tomlin’s Coal Yard which belonged to his father. He briefly left the yard for a few hours in the late morning to see to other duties, but when he returned in the afternoon, he was shocked to find that he was no longer entirely alone. Lying face-up on the top of a 10-foot pile of coal was the dead body of Zigmund Adamski.

Trevor Parker was adamant that nobody accessed the closed coal yard whilst he was away, and that the body definitely hadn’t been there in the morning. My immediate thought here was that Ziggy may have picked up a few crates of vodka whilst he was buying the potatoes, embarked upon a barmy five-day bender, and ended up crawling to the top of a coal pile to die in a drunken slumber. But when one of the attending police officers, PC Alan Godfrey, closely examined the scene and the body, he uncovered a rising stack of curious points to consider.

For starters, he reported that the coal heap appeared to be completely undisturbed, and there was no trace of coal dust on Ziggy’s body. It looked as if nobody had even attempted to climb the coal pile, so how exactly did the body end up there? It was as if Ziggy had just been dropped from the sky.

Ziggy’s shirt, watch, and wallet were missing from the body and were never recovered. And whilst the body was mostly dressed, it was dressed in a peculiar fashion. The trousers and coat and shoes were all fastened in a crude manner, as if Ziggy had been re-dressed after death by somebody who didn’t entirely understand how trousers and coats and shoes work.

Although Ziggy had been missing for five days, his hair had recently been cut, and his face displayed only a day’s beard growth, indicating that he’d had plenty of opportunity to shave during those many lost hours away from home. But even more puzzling was the ring of burn marks around Ziggy’s head and neck. A mysterious slimy yellow and green ointment had been rubbed into these burn wounds, and although this substance was later exhaustively tested by forensic scientists, it was never identified.

All this gave the coroner James Turnbull a bit of a headache. He described the death of Zigmund Adamski as “the biggest mystery of his career,” and after several months of deliberation during which he couldn’t pinpoint an exact cause of death, he reluctantly reached a verdict of natural causes. He ruled that Ziggy had most likely died from heart failure, but he didn’t seem entirely convinced.

PC Alan Godfrey would remain forever haunted by the face of Zigmund Adamski. He revealed: “Those eyes sent a shudder down my spine. They were wide open. He had a look of someone who had seen something or someone that had scared him to death.” When asked by the press if he believed the hushed local whispers that Ziggy might have been abducted by aliens, he replied: “I am open-minded. I can’t rule it out.”

There were other less outlandish theories, of course. Lottie always seemed convinced that her husband had been kidnapped and held hostage for days before he was murdered and dumped onto the coal pile. Others pointed the finger squarely at the KGB who had a bit of a habit of hunting down enemies of the state in foreign countries and quietly eliminating them.

But there’s no evidence that the Polish-born Ziggy ever pissed off The Soviet Union. And it’s not clear why the KGB – or indeed, anyone else for that matter – would go to all the trouble of kidnapping a well-liked coal miner of declining health for five whole days.

Perhaps the cause of death did indeed come from the skies, but from the mysterious and largely unfathomable Ball Lightning – a spherical form of lighting which tends to hover over the ground like a giant menacing golf ball. This might at least explain those strange burns and Ziggy’s possible heart failure, but it doesn’t really answer the question of why he was covered in an unidentified ointment, or how he was dropped onto the top of a 10-foot-high coal pile.

So that just leaves us with alien abduction. It’s clear that Ziggy was abducted shortly after picking up those potatoes from the shops and was probed for five days on an alien spacecraft. After accidentally setting his head on fire, the aliens briefly attempted to heal his wounds with magic cosmic goo. But when Ziggy’s frail heart gave out from the stress, the aliens clumsily re-dressed him as best as they could manage, and beamed his corpse down to the top of a coal pile in Todmorden, before zipping back to the Pennines to await further instructions.

They may or may not have kept the bag of potatoes.

However, within the space of just five months, the aliens would be back in Todmorden, and this time they had their bulbous eyes targeted on another victim. Quite incredibly, that second victim would be none other than PC Alan Godfrey, the very same British bobby who had attended the death scene at Tomlin’s Coal Yard.

In the early hours of one cold November morning in the town of Todmorden, PC Alan Godfrey was on high alert during an intense midnight mission. There’s a good reason why all the best high-octane TV cop shows are set in places like New York or Miami or the mean streets of San Francisco. If PC Alan Godfrey’s exploits had been adapted into an episode of Todmorden Tribulations, the viewers would have been on the edge of their seats as they watched the constable driving around the town in search of a herd of runaway cows who were annoying local residents with their manic mooing.

33-year-old Godfrey – a married father of two – hadn’t had much luck through the night in tracking down the rogue cows. In fact, he was starting to think that the whole thing was a wind-up, and had nipped back to the station after failing to pick up the slightest scent of a single displaced cow. But just as he was getting ready to clock off at around 5am, he was spurred into action again when yet another call came in from a concerned resident.

This unnamed elderly woman had phoned to complain that around five or six cows were mooching around in her front garden and trampling all over her Chrysanthemums. Yet during the call, the resident reported a blinding light from outside which illuminated the whole house. When she peered out of the window again, the cows had disappeared.

Godfrey wasn’t too spooked by this. He figured that the light was probably just the full beam of passing car headlights which had frightened away the fugitive cattle. But he got back into his police car and had one last scout around town for suspicious cow activity. Along the way, he passed a fellow police officer who politely declined Godfrey’s offer of a lift back to the station.

Godfrey later pondered on how he wished that officer had got into the car with him. Because he would then have had a reliable witness to the inconceivable event that was about to unfold.

Less than a mile away from Tomlin’s Coal Yard, PC Alan Godfrey came across an unusual vehicle blocking the main road which caused him to slam on the brakes. Twenty yards away, a diamond-shaped object was hovering in the air around five feet from the ground. Godfrey estimated that it was around fourteen feet tall and twenty feet wide. He claimed that a fluorescent light was emanating from a large dome on top of the slowly rotating vessel, and that the trees at the side of the road were shaking violently even though he couldn’t detect the faintest of vibrations.

Godfrey figured that he might need backup to help deal with this one. He attempted to contact the police station via his personal UHF radio and the police car’s usually more reliable VHF radio, but was met with complete silence. Being a quick-thinking bobby, Godfrey decided that the best course of action was to get out onto the road, whip out his notepad, and draw a pretty picture of the unidentified craft. This sounds a bit silly, but back in the pre-Smartphone era, drawing quick sketches on a pad was a fairly common practice for officers who needed to quickly convey the exact positions of vehicles involved in traffic accidents.

However, Godfrey had barely completed his miniature work of art before he was temporarily blinded by a bright flash, and suddenly found himself sitting back in his car, but around thirty yards away from where he had originally parked. The craft had vanished. And Godfrey later deduced that he couldn’t account for 25 minutes of missing time between the flash and the 30-yard hop.

Not only that, one of his boots was split wide open, and there was a small itchy burn mark on his foot. No sign of magic cosmic goo, though. Maybe the aliens couldn’t be arsed to heal this one as he wasn’t too badly hurt. It was thoughtful of them to place him back in his vehicle though, instead of dumping him in a coal yard.

When Godfrey made his way back to the spot of the sighting, he felt a strange electrical tickle in the air, and noticed that leaves and twigs had formed a spiral pattern on the road which was completely dry despite the fact that it had been raining heavily.

But at least this episode of Todmorden Tribulations would have concluded with a happy ending. Good old Godfrey found those runaway cows! Even that was a bit weird, though. He hadn’t spotted a single cow all night anywhere in the town, but then he suddenly came across a massive herd of them in the local carpark. The cows had never previously chosen to hang out in the carpark, and it’s not clear how they even got in there as the gates had been locked all night and there were no signs of hoofprints around the muddy surrounding areas. Maybe the aliens had been more interested in cow probing all along, and the Yorkshire miner and the bobby just got in the way. The cows were keeping schtum for now.

Godfrey was informed the next working day that three other police officers searching for stolen motorbikes in the nearby town of Halifax had witnessed strange steel blue lights in the sky on the same night, although he later discovered that they filed their report several days earlier.

But if Godfrey was expecting support from the force over his barmy notions, he was going to be disappointed. After the story was leaked to the local press, he became a figure of fun within the police station and was given the new derisory nickname of Captain Kirk. Things took a slightly more sinister turn when Godfrey claims he was hauled into the inspector’s office for a meeting with a gentleman who would only identify himself as “The Man from The Ministry.”

Godfrey claimed that this bloke – whom he described as ‘an arrogant bastard’ – ordered Godfrey under the Official Secrets Act not to speak to the media again about his close encounter. The Man from The Ministry was fumbling around with an bulky file, and although Godfrey wasn’t allowed to view it, he reckons that he managed to catch glimpses of both his own sketch of the craft, and Zigmund Adamski’s death report, indicating that higher authorities had clearly linked the two alien abductions.

Later on, Godfrey claims that his home telephone was tapped, and that he was constantly followed around by the same Man from the Ministry. Godfrey finally blew his top when the man popped up in the local pub just as Godfrey was trying to sink a welcome pint. The police constable told the Man from the Ministry – in embellished Yorkshire dialect – to take a long walk on a short pier. He never saw the Man from the Ministry again.

You know, it’s not so out of this world that Men from the Ministry might also sometimes fancy a welcome pint in a pub without being told by angry locals to jump into the sea.

Sick to the back teeth of the stalking and the ridicule, PC Alan Godfrey was persuaded by a solicitor friend to undergo three sessions of hypnotic regression in a bid to pluck out those 25 minutes of missing time from his memory. As he fell into a hypnotic trance and was taken back to the road on that dark November night, Godfrey recalled moving towards the strange alien craft and getting hit by a beam of light which rendered him unconscious. When he awoke, he found himself strapped to a table in a room occupied by small child-like creatures with bulbous heads working alongside a bearded ‘Biblical’ figure in robes who introduced himself as Joseph and telepathically communicated to Godfrey that he would be fine. Oh, and there was a dog in the corner of the examining room too, which may or may not have been an Alsatian.

Sunday Mirror journalist John Sherard watched video recordings of the sessions and reported on some of the bonkers stuff that the hypnotised Godfrey was coming out with: “They’re horrible, like five-year-old lads! There are eight of them. He’s feeling at my clothes. They have heads like a lamp. They keep touching me. Joseph has told me not to be frightened. They are robots! They’re not human! They are Joseph’s robots! There’s a bloody dog! It’s horrible! The size of an Alsatian!”

The final hypnotic regression session was brought to a premature end over concerns that Godfrey was becoming increasingly traumatised by the missing memories. It’s worth pointing out that Godfrey himself isn’t entirely convinced that the hypnosis sessions actually ever meant anything. He’s always made it clear that he has never once claimed outside of hypnotic regression to have been abducted by aliens; he had only reported on the things he believed he had seen with his own eyes on that night.

He played down the hypnosis sessions in later years and speculated that he may just have been lost in a vivid dream. Or it may have been linked to the book he was reading at the time – an account of the first high-profile alleged alien abduction of Betty and Barny Hill in New Hampshire in 1961.

Still, I reckon the Alsatian could have been the dude in charge. Or Godfrey could have just wrongly identified another small cow eagerly awaiting its turn on the examination table.

PC Alan Godfrey wasn’t the only one who claimed to have spotted strange sights over West Yorkshire. In 2021, Todmorden local Vicky Dinsdale broke a 40-year silence when she talked to the national press about something she’d seen during her childhood in the town in 1981. A young Vicky had been walking the dog with her grandfather when they both spotted a glittering diamond-shaped object hovering in the sky and constantly changing colour. Vicki’s grandfather was a retired army sergeant, and he told Vicki to keep what they’d seen to themselves, as he didn’t want to experience the same kind of ridicule that had been heaped upon PC Godfrey just a year earlier.

In 1987, a retired police officer by the name of Philip Spencer took a very crap, blurry photograph of what he believed to be an alien creature running around Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire. He later saw a dome-shaped craft rising away into the skies, and felt that two hours of time had been stolen from him. Spencer also underwent hypnotic regression and recalled similar tales of finding himself on an examining table in an alien spacecraft.

Then there was the curious case of Travis Walton which took place much earlier in 1975. Admittedly, this one wasn’t remotely local to West Yorkshire. Travis Walton was an American logger who had just finished up a shift at the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests near Snowflake, Arizona.

But his story bears remarkable similarities to the cases of both PC Alan Godfrey and Zigmund Adamski. Walton and his co-workers had spotted a saucer-shaped object in the evening sky, but Walton was the only one brave enough to move in for a closer look. He soon found himself bathed in light before waking up on – yep, you guessed it – an alien examining table.

He claimed that he ended up getting involved in a bout of fisticuffs with three short bald aliens, before he blacked out and found himself back on the highway as the flying saucer flew off into the distance. Walton also claims to have lost time, but on this occasion it was more than 20 minutes or a couple of hours. Travis Walton had been officially missing for five days.

Of course, it’s easy to dismiss all these people as attention-seeking fantasists, and maybe some of them were. Well, not poor Ziggy, obviously. He never asked to be found dead on top of a coal pile, and had little to do with the subsequent wild theories. But it’s a little odd that both Alan Godfrey and Philip Spencer had worked in the police force.

They weren’t your usual dribbling nutters that you avoid down the pub. Godfrey in particular was described as a plain-speaking no-nonsense Yorkshireman who, in his own words, “had no time for daft buggers.” He just didn’t seem the type to make shit up. And the manner in which he conducted himself and conveyed his strange tale has attracted its fair share of supporters over the years.

Philip Mantle – an author, broadcaster, and international UFO researcher – feels that Godfrey’s story is particularly compelling. He notes: “Godfrey’s account has been scrutinised from day one and his recollection of it has never changed.” Meanwhile, retired police detective Gary Heseltine claims that he studied Godfrey’s case over the course of 18 months and got to know the man himself very well. He says: “I’m one of the very few people who has seen every minute of his hypnotic regression videos.

Based on all I know of this case, I believe his account is genuine.”

This also leads us into another interesting question: Why would anyone in Godfrey’s position feel inclined to make up such a wacky tale? It’s not like UFO spotters who go public end up getting swamped in fame and recognition and respect. If I had the choice of getting widely ridiculed as a wide-eyed crackpot and not getting widely ridiculed as a wide-eyed crackpot, I’m going for that latter option all day long.

It has to be said that the incident with the hovering diamond craft didn’t really have much of a positive impact on Godfrey’s life. Quite the opposite, in fact. Godfrey claimed that he was forced into taking a transfer to another police station before he was hounded out of the force altogether and pushed into early retirement. He developed a taste for a bottle of whiskey a day, his marriage broke up, and he ended up living in a friend’s attic bedroom without a pot to piss in.

He seems to blame it all on the events of the night of the farcical cow hunt. He said: “It wrecked me. It completely changed me. I wish I’d never seen the UFO.”

However, Godfrey’s life picked up again in the mid-90s. He remarried, got a grip on his life, and after a long period of rarely discussing the events of that night, he appeared to almost embrace the celebrity status. He started appearing on TV chat shows, giving public talks to help raise funds for charity, and today he drives around Todmorden with a personalised ‘UFO’ licence plate. He self-published a book in 2017 entitled Who or What Were They?, and it was announced in 2021 that there are tentative plans to turn his story into a movie produced by Michael Grais, best-known for co-writing the classic 1982 horror Poltergeist. Maybe Todmorden Tribulations wasn’t such a bad pitch, after all. It had better include the comedy cows.

Now in his mid-70s, Alan Godfrey remains convinced of what he saw. He says: “This was a nuts-and-bolts craft, not a trick of the mind. If I had thrown a brick at it, it would have gone bang. I would swear on the Bible it was from somewhere else.”

Well, let’s put the Bible down for a second and see if we can come up with a plausible alternative theory.

Rewinding back to the tragic case of Zigmund Adamski, there’s one specific detail that doesn’t quite add up for me. It was reported that the 10-foot-high coal pile showed no sign of disturbance, leading to speculation that Ziggy must have been dropped onto the pile from above. But unless the foreman Trevor Parker was incredibly tall, he must surely have scrambled to the top of the coal pile himself to confirm that there was a dead body up there. And if his own scramble to the top hadn’t created much of a disturbance, perhaps it’s not out of the question that an earlier scramble to the top had gone equally unnoticed.

We’ll never solve the mystery of the green alien slime as the substance was never identified. But magic cosmic goo aside, I think it’s safe to say that Zigmund Adamski was kidnapped by human hands, and he was either murdered or he died during quite barbaric torture. It’s true that the kidnapper was considerate enough to give Ziggy an opportunity to shave a day before his death. And this is why it can’t just have been a random bungled mugging that proved to be fatal.

This was a long-term situation that was still playing out after four days. But it’s clear that something deeply unpleasant was going on, bearing in mind that Ziggy was burned and completely undressed at some point.

But who would do such a thing? It’s interesting that when his wife Lottie first feared that her husband wasn’t coming home tonight, she immediately suspected that he’d been kidnapped. If one of my family members suddenly went missing, I’d feel concerned that they may have been run over or fallen down a well or something.

I wouldn’t immediately suspect that they had been kidnapped and were being held hostage in a remote barn. But when two UFO investigators recently looked into the case, they discovered why Lottie may have jumped to that conclusion. Ziggy and Lottie had recently accepted a female family member into their home who had taken out a restraining order on her husband, and had been offered a safe space to live within the Adamski household.

But could it be that this troubled husband was the one with an axe to grind over the Adamskis interfering in his marital affairs and giving shelter to his estranged wife? And could he have lost the plot over a five-day act of brutal vengeance against Ziggy? It’s remarkable that this was never properly investigated at the time, as everyone preferred to focus instead on the alien abduction angle.

And we may never know why the kidnapper or murderer decided to dump the hastily-redressed corpse onto the top of a coal pile. But we can speculate that they were just completely unhinged. Whatever the truth, it’s doubtful that Ziggy ever made it to the stars.

Incidentally, the good news for Ziggy is that his appeal for early retirement from the Lofthouse Colliery ultimately proved to be successful. Unfortunately, the letter arrived in the post the day after the discovery at Tomlin’s Coal Yard.

Moving forward to the case of PC Alan Godfrey, I’m not convinced that missing time is such an unusual phenomenon. I once lost an entire night in around 2003. Admittedly, I was blind drunk, but it was still a deeply troubling situation with an alarming outcome.

I can remember drinking at my home one evening with half a plan to call into town later to meet up with a few friends down the pub. But I was knocked for six by the strength of the stuff I was drinking. I woke up next morning covered in cuts and scratches, and with no memory of what had happened the night before.

I reckon I’d lost at least five hours of time. I called up all my friends to ask if anyone had bumped into me, but nobody had seen me all night. Later that week, I flicked through the local free newspaper and came across the startling headline: “MAN FALLS THROUGH PUB WINDOW.”

Apparently, some drunken idiot had attempted to walk into the pub, but instead of using the door, he’d elected to just walk through the large front window. After smashing the window to bits, he just got up and wandered off. It was only when I popped into that very same pub the following week that the disgruntled landlord huffily revealed that the drunken idiot had been me.

That was the most expensive pint of lager I’ve ever bought in my life.

I’m pretty sure that PC Alan Godfrey hadn’t been drinking alcohol when he was driving around in his little Panda car that night in 1980. But it was five o’clock in the morning and he could have been pretty tired. Psychologists have speculated that Godfrey could have been sleep-deprived and prone to a vivid hallucinatory experience. Dr David Clarke from the Sheffield Hallam University has gone one step further and suggested that Godfrey’s experiences of being hit by a blast of white light sounds exactly like somebody having an epileptic fit.

As for those pretty wild hypnosis sessions, Christopher French – emeritus professor of psychology at the University of London – is very sceptical of hypnotic regression in general. He reckons: “The thing with hypnotic regression is that it is one of the best ways known of generating false memories. If you go for hypnotic regression expecting to recover memories of alien abduction, there’s a very good chance that’s what you’ll get.”

And the mysterious Man from the Ministry? It’s possible that Godfrey was getting just a little bit paranoid at this time, and The Man from the Ministry was nothing more than a guy from West Yorkshire Police who was keeping tabs on Godfrey and trying to get him to keep his mouth shut to avoid any further public embarrassment. I still think he only wanted a pint in that pub before Godfrey started giving him directions to the pier.

But here’s a fascinating thought which was first proposed quite recently by UFO researcher Russ Callaghan. It’s very possible that Alan Godfrey really did see something that resembled a flying saucer on that night. Except it wasn’t a flying saucer. It was a Futuro house.

Futuro houses or pods were incredibly funky plastic buildings which were meant to be all the rage in the 1970s. They were originally designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen who envisioned them as futuristic-looking ski chalets which could be easily constructed and transported to different sites. But it ended up developing into more of a universally transportable home or office which could be used in any environment or for any event.

Built from brightly-coloured fibreglass-reinforced polyester plastic with an airplane hatch entrance, and held aloft by sturdy steel legs, the super-cool thing about the Futuro homes is that the pods looked almost exactly like the kind of flying saucers that everyone had seen in old movies. I’d love to have one in my back garden today. I’d probably convert it into a bar.

But perhaps surprisingly, the Futuro houses never really took off, possibly because some people thought they looked a bit too weird and scary. They really did look as if they had just landed from outer space. Only about a hundred were ever built, and only one ever made it to the UK.

And you’ll never guess where exactly it landed. Yep, it landed in the little market town of Todmorden in West Yorkshire. It was bought by a company called Waterside Plastics who used it as a quirky office space for the best part of a decade, but it also got moved around the town quite a bit for occasional celebratory events that required a pop-up ticket office.

Waterside Plastics folded in 1979, but the Futuro house remained in town for several more years and was probably a lot more mobile than it had been for the previous decade. It was often moved around on a truck for different events and purposes within the town, before it mysteriously disappeared at some point during the mid-1980s.

But it was certainly still hovering around the town in November 1980. I reckon that a particularly tired or stressed or overworked police officer may well have reached the end of his long shift at 5am, and in the blanket of darkness he mistook the movement of the UK’s only Futuro house for an alien spacecraft.

That just leaves the most intriguing mystery of all – those vanishing space cows. It does seem remarkably odd that Godfrey was initially unable to catch sight of a single runaway cow reported to be running amok in the town by several residents – but then after his close encounter, he suddenly found them all at once in a locked carpark. How did they get there and where had they been? Perhaps, by accident or design, they really had been plucked from the grazing pastures of Todmorden by Captain Fizzybeard and his crew, and ended up wandering around the scout ship Hypertension in mild indignation. But could it be that the same fatigued or ill police officer, having undergone a mind-melting experience, didn’t produce the most reliable of reports at the end of that fateful shift? And having embraced his celebrity status in more recent years, and with a blockbuster movie on the cards, he’s not very likely to look back at those events in a more logical and rational manner? I’d bet my last very last bag of potatoes on it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the name of the alien captain in the story?

Captain Fizzybeard.

Who was the Yorkshire miner who vanished in 1980?

Zigmund Adamski, also known as Ziggy.

What was Zigmund Adamski’s job?

Zigmund Adamski was a miner at the Lofthouse Colliery in Leeds, West Yorkshire.

What was the name of the policeman who encountered a UFO in Todmorden?

PC Alan Godfrey.

What did PC Alan Godfrey see on the night of his encounter?

PC Alan Godfrey saw a diamond-shaped object hovering in the air, around five feet from the ground, with a fluorescent light emanating from a large dome on top.

What was the verdict of Zigmund Adamski’s death?

The coroner James Turnbull reached a verdict of natural causes, ruling that Ziggy had most likely died from heart failure.

What was the mysterious substance found on Zigmund Adamski’s body?

A mysterious slimy yellow and green ointment was rubbed into burn wounds on Ziggy’s head and neck, but it was never identified.

What was the name of the alien craft in the story?

The alien craft was named Hypertension.

What was the name of the town where the alleged alien abductions took place?

The town where the alleged alien abductions took place was Todmorden in West Yorkshire.

What was the name of the company that owned the Futuro house in Todmorden?

The company that owned the Futuro house in Todmorden was Waterside Plastics.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Double Alien Abduction: The Vanishing Yorkshire Miner and the Policeman Plucked from Time
• Hero image source by Sadie-Michaela Harris / openverse, cc0.