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Over the last 30 years, there have been thousands of reported sightings of unidentified flying objects over the British Isles.

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My first thoughts were, wow, what was that?

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You think I'm bloodied up, but this is a UFO.

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In the summer of 2008, reports of flying saucers and other crafts were capturing the headlines again.

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Over the years, numerous eyewitnesses including military personnel, police officers and experienced airline pilots

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have testified to seeing strange lights in the sky and other mysterious phenomena.

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Wow, what's that? Very bright yellow object.

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It was nothing like an airplane that I'd ever seen before.

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It's the brightest light I've ever seen in my life.

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We could offer no explanation.

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Many of these UFO sightings remain unexplained to this day, but what or who were they?

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Could they really be evidence of extraterrestrial life?

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My thoughts, what's that? I couldn't believe my eyes.

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Tonight, we hear firsthand from those who witnessed them and examine the truth behind some of Britain's most celebrated UFO sightings.

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The World's Most Familiar UFOs

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The World's Most Familiar UFOs

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The World's Most Familiar UFOs

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At the beginning of 1980, Todd Madden was a little known West Yorkshire mill town.

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But before the year's end, the town would be associated with one of the strangest stories in British UFO history.

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For something you only read about or seen on television, you know, and suddenly, it's there.

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If you think of a double-decker bus sideways, that's how big it was.

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And he wasn't the sort of person that would suddenly say something, you know, that hadn't happened.

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So, I believed him.

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I felt quite safe in the police car. Now if somebody got out of it, I'd be bloody scared.

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The story of a young Yorkshire police officer sighting of an unidentified object became headline news.

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I believe Alan Gottfried's telling the truth. If he's lying, he deserves an Oscar.

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Almost 30 years later, his experience has become part of UFO folklore.

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I've had a journalist for 50 years and covered quite a few rather strange stories.

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But the Alan Gottfried story is undoubtedly the most astonishing thing I ever covered.

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In 1980, Alan Gottfried had been a police officer in the Todd Madden area for six years.

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On the night of the 28th of November, he claims to have witnessed something extraordinary.

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We got radio messages from our control room that people were reporting seeing a small herd of cows roaming around a local council estate.

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And as I'm going up Burnley Road, I can see in the distance about 500-600 yards up the road,

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and I thought it was a staff bus that had skidded across the road for some reason.

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Whatever it was, I decided to go and investigate.

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So I'm driving towards this object and I got within about 20 yards and there it was.

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An object, nuts and bolts hovering above the road surface.

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It was shaped in a diamond shape and the bottom flange was rotating.

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The top half appeared to be stationary.

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I didn't know what to do. I mean, what would you do?

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Well, if it were you, you'd probably ring the police up.

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But in my case, I'm already there. So I thought I'd add radio, have a come tour.

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Alfa Pop, stop, 2-0-3 to control.

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Now with two radios, we've got a VHF, which is the car radio,

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a new HF, which is the personal radio.

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I tried both and none of them had worked.

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It was eerily silent.

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That really does stick in my mind now. That was really eerily silent.

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And for some reason, I don't know why, I picked my clipboard up and started to draw it.

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I made a quick sketch. So it's there. Rather than me editing, it's there. It's black and white.

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Although he'd made a sketch, Alan Godfrey's story would ultimately center around what happened next.

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Now with black and white, and I'm at the other side of it, driving.

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Quick glance at mirror, it's not there.

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I got out of the car.

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The road surface was whirlpool dry, like a spinning object would make, you know.

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With all these leaves and branches and what-a-b-w-e.

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You could see an area of road surface that wasn't like the other.

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The other was wet, this was dry.

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Unsure of what had happened to him, P.C. Godfrey drove straight back to the police station in Toddledon.

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When Alan came into the police station, he was very agitated.

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I says to him, you'll never guess what I've just seen, you know.

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You won't believe what I've just seen.

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At first, you know, you think he's totally outrageous, you know.

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But I've no reason to doubt him. I mean, I've known him for a long time.

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And we know each other really well, and I've no reason to doubt what he said.

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But the night still had one more surprise left.

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As Alan Godfrey ended his shift, he noticed something else he couldn't explain.

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There was approximately 30, 35 minutes missing that couldn't be accounted for.

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When we leave the police station, he comes back.

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To me, I don't have been away 15 minutes.

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I've only been away approximately 45, 50 minutes.

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What Alan Godfrey claimed to have experienced was strange enough.

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But he wasn't alone in witnessing unusual phenomena that night.

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On the night of the 28th of November, 1980,

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police constable Alan Godfrey was driving through the pen in town of Toddledon

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when he witnessed a strange object in the road.

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It was something you only read about or seen on television.

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And suddenly, it's there, in front of you.

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It was just something out of a science fiction film. It was totally unbelievable.

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PC Godfrey had no rational explanation for what he'd seen, or for what he discovered later.

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I had this irritating itch on my foot.

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The boot on my left foot was split.

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If that's the sole of the... It was split that way.

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I have no idea why they were split, but when I took it off,

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I removed my sock and it was on the instep of my foot

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and it was around a circle like that, red.

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And it was very, very itchy. It wasn't sore, but it was very, very itchy.

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At work the following day, Alan Godfrey received some surprising news.

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He hadn't been the only officer who claimed to have seen something strange the previous night.

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I came on duty and there was an inspector awaiting to see me.

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I went into the inspector's office and he then informed me that I wasn't alone

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at three police officers in Halifax, in fact, in a police car.

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In fact, he had some sort of an encounter the same night

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and he was putting a report together and he wanted a statement of me.

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Coming out of the inspector's office thinking, yeah, right on.

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12 miles from Todd Morden on the moors above Halifax,

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PCs John Porter, Howard Turnpenny and Julie Baxter had been looking for stolen motorbikes.

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What they witnessed compelled them to make an official report.

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We packed up, got out, walked down over the fields, what it was.

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We nearly reached the quarries and then something, nothing verbally,

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but something told us to turn.

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We turned and just stood.

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And in the sky there was a very cold, and I would describe it as cold steel, blue light.

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Not flashing but pulsating and the ears on my arms and my neck just stood up.

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I cannot tell you in all honesty how big this thing was

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because there was no definite shape to it other than a pulsating steel blow.

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But wherever it went, wherever it went, it was very, very fast.

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As fast as I'm moving my hand now. A second, a second, a second, a second.

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And that's how fast it moved with no noise.

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Tried to speak to Halifax on the radio. Nothing. Absolutely dead.

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I wasn't frightened, I was intrigued to what this was.

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But for WPC Julie Baxter, the experience proved unsettling.

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Julie was scared. There was no doubt about it, she made her feelings very plain.

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Scared. Howard was like me, he wanted to know what it was.

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He wanted to see this thing.

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He had a plumb on his ear and shot off a big overhead heart towards Todd with him.

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Whatever it was, was not of...

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I can't explain whatever it was about making.

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It was something completely alien to my understanding.

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And the night was getting even stranger.

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Two traffic officers on the moors near Littleborough, 12 miles from both Alan Godfrey and the Halifax patrol,

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reported seeing a bright pulsating sphere hovering between two electricity pylons before it sped off over the hills.

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In all, six separate police officers had witnessed strange phenomena that night.

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But it was Alan Godfrey's story which caught the attention of both the local press and UFO investigators,

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many of whom descended on Todd Mudden in the wake of the sighting.

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In 1980 Jenny Randall's headed British UFO investigation group, Bufora.

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She was born near Todd Mudden and has written about British UFO sightings for over 35 years.

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The Alan Godfrey experience when it happened came at the culmination of a whole series of events

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during the preceding three or four months that had been occurring in and around that area.

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They'd been getting stranger and stranger.

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The penines are the backbone of the United Kingdom.

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The area stretches from the Scottish borders to the Derbyshire peaks, a distance of 250 miles.

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Throughout the 1970s there had been dozens of reports of objects in the sky over Yorkshire and Lancashire.

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So numerous with the sightings, the area earned itself the name UFO Alley.

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John Sheerd was a Yorkshire based journalist reporting for both the local and national press.

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This was the time when the whole nation was obsessed with UFO stories.

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We had reports almost every day up here, particularly in the penines,

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but also throughout the country and in fact throughout the world.

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The late 1970s and early 80s were the heyday of UFO mania.

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The release of films like Star Wars and Close Encounters coincided with the doubling of reports of UFO sightings in Britain.

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For the time being, news of Alan Godfrey's Close Encounter had stayed within Toddmaddon,

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but it hadn't escaped the attentions of a group of UFO investigators, led by Jenny Randalls.

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When I first met Alan, he struck me immediately as being a very typical, no-nonsense Yorkshire Bobby.

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He would not have reported something like this unless he was absolutely sure in his own mind that it was real.

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Although there was little physical evidence to support his claims, Alan Godfrey did have a damaged boot.

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There was a split across the bottom of his boot. There was no question at all that that happened

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because we were able to immediately photograph it and it was real.

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There was also the sketch made at the time of the sighting.

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You just have to try and make a value judgment when you put all the evidence together.

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What you believe about the credibility of the witness, what the sincerity of the witness's story is,

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how it holds together again and again over the years.

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But for Andy Roberts, who has researched hundreds of British UFO sightings,

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the origin of what PC Godfrey witnessed is relatively straightforward.

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My personal belief is that he went into some form of altered state of consciousness,

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whether you call it a trance or something like that, something triggered that.

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In his narratives, when he's described what he saw, he always says,

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when he was driving up to it, he thought it was a bus.

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Now, it's possible that was the point when he slipped into this altered state of consciousness.

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When he got near it, he was seeing it as a UFO.

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Interestingly, he describes it as having two rows of windows. Quite like a bus, actually.

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And it was on a main road near a bus stop.

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So it's possible he saw a bus delivering mill workers or picking mill workers up.

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And in his altered state of consciousness, it had transformed into a UFO.

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This object, that saw, was hovering off the ground with no wheels.

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It was of a metallic colour, and it had black paneling of dark windows.

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And it certainly wasn't a bus.

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I know the difference between a bus and what that saw that night.

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And what are the strange lights witnessed by police officers John Porter,

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Julie Baxter and Howard Turnpenny, just minutes before Alan Godfrey's encounter?

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Could they have a perfectly rational, scientific explanation?

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Dr Ian Griffin worked for NASA on the Hubble Telescope Project for a decade

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before returning to the UK to carry out research into the movement of asteroids.

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He now watches the night skies from his home observatory in Tudmadon.

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My view is that nearly every UFO that has ever been seen has some kind of explanation.

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And it's probably because people don't really understand what they're looking at

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that they just call it a UFO.

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The planet Venus is often mistaken for a UFO.

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This is because it's very bright and it's very close to the sun in the sky.

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So very often if you don't know what you're looking at and you see this stonkingly bright light

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beaming towards you, you think what on earth is that?

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Meteors are sometimes mistaken for UFOs as well, caused by a very fast moving rock

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entering the Earth's atmosphere high up.

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As the rock moves through the atmosphere it ionises it and causes the gas atoms to glow in different colours.

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The colours can be green, they can be blue and sometimes they can even be an orangey red colour.

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There are other phenomena which may have existed for as long as the penines themselves

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and which stem from more natural causes.

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Could these be the reason for the many sightings in the area

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including those of Alan Godfrey and the other police officers in 1980?

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Dr David Clark undertook a major study of the area known as Project Penine.

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It described naturally occurring phenomena that range from glowing hillsides to bizarre balls of light.

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It's known that lights have been seen and reported by people

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following major earthquakes and earth tremors around the world.

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So we were interested in checking out whether similar correlations could be made

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with the lights that had been seen on a regular basis in the penines of Northern England.

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Basically you've got underground huge rock movements going on

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and rocks crushing against each other and electrons escaping from that movement.

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People have described seeing these light forms as following valleys

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or appearing above electricity pylons or even apparently pacing cars

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but what may be happening here is that these lights are actually following fault lines

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or magnetic variations in the local area

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and that those movements are interpreted by people who see them as being intelligent

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as if it's a piloted craft of some description.

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In November 1980, PC John Porter and his fellow officers

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had reported seeing a bright object moving at incredibly high speed.

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Could it have been a naturally occurring light or something man-made?

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Aircraft can actually cause UFO sightings too.

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Oftentimes they'll have lights that flash under the wings

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and viewed from certain angles they can appear to be coming straight towards you

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or whizzing across the sky relatively quickly.

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So it's not unknown for an aircraft to cause UFO sighting.

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We've all seen aircraft in the sky at night.

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I've been on nights, many many years as a police officer, I've seen all sorts moving in the sky

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but on this occasion whatever it was was not an aircraft.

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It was not. There's no way it was an aircraft.

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Moving too fast and no noise.

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Air traffic records both civilian and military

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reveal that there were no flights in the area at the time.

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Routinely official police reports of UFO sightings would be passed to the Ministry of Defence

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as part of the Freedom of Information Act they've now been released.

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Dr David Clark has been researching official reports into UFO sightings for over 20 years.

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When the Ministry of Defence files on UFOs from 1980 were opened

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I went to the National Archives and immediately went looking for any mention of the sightings in Tudmadden in 1980

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and straight away I found a copy of the report by the police officers from Halifax.

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PC John Porter and his colleagues who'd seen a bright blue ball of light in the sky

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but there was absolutely no trace of the report that was made by Alan Godfrey the same night, about 30 minutes later.

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Maybe they just thought that his sighting was a bit too weird and a bit too disturbing, you know, to pass it on to the Ministry.

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But Alan Godfrey and John Porter were not the first police officers to have made an official report of the UFO sightings.

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Over the last three decades police officers have contributed to a large proportion of British UFO reports.

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Gary Heseltine runs a database of UFO sightings made by both serving and retired police officers.

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It's my belief that police officer testimony is of a very high calibre.

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There is no reason to think that these officers are mistaken because of their training

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and I believe that police officer testimony should be regarded very highly in the world of the way we treat UFOs.

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Police officers do see quite a lot of UFOs and that's because they spend an awful lot of time out at night

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often by themselves, often remote areas like up on moors and industrial estates,

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places where there are, you know, not much ground light, you can see things in the sky.

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So anything that's up there, explicable or inexplicable, will be seen by police officers.

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Between 1970 and 2000 alone there were more than 700 UFO sightings made by serving police officers.

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Clearly police officers aren't going to make an official report about something they've seen in the sky in a frivolous way.

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It's not something that they would do lightly because it has all kinds of impacts upon their career

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and whether they're taken seriously or not.

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15th of August 1975, two uniformed police officers observed a bright-lighted UFO heading in the direction of Haywood.

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The uniformed officers saw huge UFOs, two undue to uniformed police officers including a chief superintendent,

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and on a routine, at 2.15 hours, Roffton, Wakefield, West Yorkshire,

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PC Patrick Tunney was checking on a couple of shops during the early hours of a winter's morning

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when he suddenly noticed three green lights approaching from around a mile distance.

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Wakefield lies on the very edge of the Pennines, 30 miles from Togmedan.

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At the time of his sighting in 1976, PC Patrick Tunney was a well-respected police officer with over 20 years' experience.

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I thought at first it was an helicopter having trouble and we were looking at it, I thought,

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there's no noise, no engine noise, nothing.

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Just these three lights drifting towards me at about, say, 150 feet high.

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The next minute it didn't slow down, it didn't increase and suddenly it turned to its left

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and then it accelerated at a speed I've never seen before that fast of a life.

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Or would it be a streak of light?

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And that was it, gone.

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Could what PC Tunney saw have been an aircraft, meteor or even a naturally-occurring ball of light?

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And could any of these account for what Alan Godfrey claimed to have experienced in November 1980?

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Whatever the explanation, within a few months Alan Godfrey's story would take a much more bizarre turn.

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After police officer Alan Godfrey reported an encounter with a strange object in West Yorkshire in 1980,

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some researchers claimed it to be a landmark in British UFO history.

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After Alan Godfrey's experience had happened, we were immediately aware that this had cemented the importance of the Pennine area

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as the hotspot for UFO activity in Britain and in fact probably the most active location for UFO encounters anywhere in Europe.

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18 months before Alan Godfrey's sighting, mysterious bright orange lights had been reported speeding across the night skies of Lancashire.

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At 2am on the morning of February 24th, 1979, Mike Sax was at home in the village of Staksteads, getting ready for bed.

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All of a sudden, the room lit. The light was moving.

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I rushed to the window to be confronted with this huge, old void about 8-10ft across light, all diffused around the edges.

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It was pulsing, brilliant to intense, very orangey white.

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There was no sound. I remember that distinctly. We were in awe at this. We couldn't believe what we were seeing.

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It slowly descended out of sight into the quarry. It went through my mind. They do exist. These things do exist.

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And Mike Sax wasn't the only witness to the mysterious object. Local farmer Alf Keim, then 19, was out working with another farmhand when he too saw something strange in the sky.

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We thought we were shooting star flying down in this building blocked to, so we shot past the building to see it.

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It was amazing, really, because it was a two-double deck of buses. It was spinning round, changing colours, a lot of orange.

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It went right across the skyline, right over the valley.

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Right over the valley.

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It went over the chopper houses, right over the quarry.

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Somebody must see that. Even though it was late, we can't live only months to see this.

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I immediately phoned Baker Police, reported what I'd seen, and they said, right, they said, well, two of our police officers have also phoned in.

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They were parked just below the quarry, and they reported it.

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I phoned my brother, Raymond. I went up for him. We came back to the quarry.

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Where the panda car was still parked there.

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And I said, did you see it? And he said, see it. We thought it was coming down on our blooming heads.

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So we decided then to go up to the quarry.

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Now the police officers went up with us.

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But there was nothing to be seen.

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By 3am, Althcime had arrived home.

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When we got back that night, my dad said, is everything all right? You know, the car was all right?

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I said, yeah, everything's perfect. I said, but we've seen a flying saucer or something to that description.

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And he said, don't you think so?

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Well, have you been smoking? And obviously we're laughing to himself.

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And he said, have you been drinking? And Mike said, no, he said, we've actually seen it.

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You know, we've seen some of it anyway. He said, all right, I'll see you in the morning then.

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That night between 2.30 and 2.50am, there were a dozen separate sightings reported throughout Lancashire

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and as far west as Merseyside.

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The reports varied from fiercely bright orange orbs to the oval-shaped craft seen by Mike Sax and Althcime.

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The following week, when he started the local free press, you didn't feel as if I was telling it, you know,

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because we told this story and you could say people didn't believe you when you were telling it,

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because, you know, I don't think I'd believe it myself really.

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If the oval-shaped craft seemed inexplicable, what were the bright orange lights that you saw?

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If the oval-shaped craft seemed inexplicable, what were the bright orange lights seen shooting across the sky that night?

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Astronomer Dr Ian Griffin may have one explanation.

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Since the dawn of the space age, several thousand objects have been launched into space

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and the re-entry of a satellite can cause a bright flash of light in the sky

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and certainly big satellites, for example, Skylab in the late 1970s or the Miya Station in the 1990s,

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when they entered the Earth's atmosphere, they looked like tremendous fireballs with bits breaking off.

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So oftentimes, yes, space junk can cause UFO sightings.

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For many skeptics, the explanation for the sightings is even more straightforward.

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The Pennines has two busy civilian airports situated at its edge.

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There was a huge explosion of air travel in the 70s and 80s

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and that led to the expansion of Manchester Airport, of Leeds-Brackford Airport and international airplanes.

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Now, the Pennine's quite wild, it's very dark at night

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and if you see an aircraft in the sky through unusual weather conditions or coming into land or taking off,

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its beams, its light configuration can appear very, very strange

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and I think that's largely been the result of why there have been so many UFO sightings over the Pennines from the 1970s onwards.

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When it comes to UFO sightings over the Pennines or anywhere else for that matter,

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we can readily explain away 99% more as mistaken identity.

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But it leaves that niggling little number every time that no matter how much research, no matter how much you try,

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you can't get rid of these particular cases and after a lot of legwork, they still remain unexplained.

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There was another possible explanation that the lights in the sky being witnessed that night

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were connected with some secret Cold War military operation.

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After some of his constituents had reported seeing the lights, the MP for Ormskirk even raised the question in Parliament.

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On the 12th of June 1979, the Ministry of Defence issued a statement.

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It said that a US Air Force exercise had taken place between the 21st and 24th of February,

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during which fighter aircraft had been flying at very low levels throughout the British Isles.

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Were both Alfkheim and Mike Sax simply witnesses to a routine military manoeuvre?

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We get many, many aircraft flying over the valley, all different shapes and sizes.

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There are air cargo, passenger, military.

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This was totally unlike anything I've ever seen in my life.

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I can only conclude, and I don't say this lightly, it is extraterrestrial.

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We can never rule out military technology, but I think in this case it looks as if something genuinely unidentified

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was present in the Pennines that night.

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Whatever the source of the strange lights seen over Lancashire,

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PC Alan Godfrey's experience continued to fascinate the UFO community.

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After Alan Godfrey's sighting in Todmeden, he claimed to have lost some 30 minutes in time.

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The only physical evidence of his encounter, a damaged boot and a sketch he'd made at the time.

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In an attempt to find out more, UFO investigators suggested a radical idea.

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When they contacted me and asked me, would I be willing to go under hypnotic regression?

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I declined straight away. I wasn't sure, you know, I thought, what is hypnotic regression?

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The only hypnosis I'd ever seen was on television, on a stage, you know, where they make fun of you.

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Eventually Alan Godfrey was persuaded to undergo hypnosis,

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which was conducted by two psychiatrists, Dr Jaffe and Professor Blair.

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They wouldn't tell either of the psychiatrists what the subject matter was.

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They would only tell them that it was a policeman, or they were going to try to regress to a certain time,

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on a certain date, to an incident that may or may not have happened.

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Mike Sacks, whose interest in UFOs had been sparked by his own experiences the previous year, was present at the sessions.

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The atmosphere in the room was absolutely electric, as Alan is relating this series of events.

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All of a sudden, and under hypnosis, he goes...

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and covers his eyes.

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And somehow he's floating, and he's taken into this room.

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I have no recollection whatsoever what went on during that hypnotic regression.

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Under hypnosis, Alan Godfrey's claims grew more bizarre.

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Not only had he witnessed a UFO, he'd also come into contact with alien beings.

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In UFO terminology, he had been abducted.

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We were actually present at possibly one of the first abduction cases that has happened in the UK.

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Whatever Alan Godfrey had experienced in November 1980, and whatever had happened to the missing 30 minutes,

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the latest revelations seemed scarcely credible.

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UFO abductions, very big in America, not so big in Britain.

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A handful of people allegedly being abducted by UFOs.

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So when you get a policeman seeing a UFO, later coming out under hypnosis with a story he was abducted,

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you've got something that's quite solid there, and people have latched onto it as being a real event.

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I'm asking myself, did that really happen?

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No, I couldn't have done it. I don't believe it.

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But why am I saying it?

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Psychologist Chris French has conducted several studies in the area of so-called paranormal experiences.

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There are a number of different factors which seem to play a role in people reporting that they've had an alien abduction experience.

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Very often there is some initial triggering event, like say, an episode of sleep paralysis or missing time,

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that leads people to believe they may have been abducted by aliens.

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What's probably happening is that they are getting confused between things that are happening in here

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and things that are happening in external reality.

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And basically, as a result, they're having sometimes hallucinatory experiences, sometimes false memories,

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but that's leading them to believe that they've had these alien encounters.

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But it wasn't just Alan Godfrey's supposed abduction that intrigued ufologists.

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The investigators also discovered a connection to another unsolved local mystery,

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one they believed could have extraterrestrial origins.

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Six months before his UFO sighting, Alan Godfrey and colleague Malcolm Agley

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had received a call about a body found at a local coal yard.

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He received a radio message that found a body at Thomadon railway station.

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So I attended with PC Alan Godfrey.

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I also was instinctively told you there's something not right.

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You know, you come across dead bodies all the time, it sounds like.

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What you do?

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And he was lying on his back just staring up into the sky.

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There's no disturbance to the call, you know, to say how he got there.

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You just can't explain it at all.

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It was being treated as a crime scene.

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I think everybody at that stage thought it was a crime.

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That's how obvious it was.

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Why would a man climb a stack of coal,

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lie down on his back on top and die?

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The body was that of a Polish emigre named Zygmunt Damski,

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a former miner who'd moved to the UK after the Second World War

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and had settled in Wakefield, 20 miles from where he was found.

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To me, I don't think he'd died there.

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I think he'd been put there.

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It looked to me as if he had anywhere.

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The evidence was inconclusive.

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You'd expect if somebody had been lying on his back

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or had climbed up the coal, it'd be covered in coal dust.

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It'd been raining, it'd stick to him like glue.

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There was no visual coal on him, on the front of him, anywhere.

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And either on his face or anything.

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And he'd these black marks that transpired to be burn marks

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round the back of the head.

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And there was one at the nape of the neck here, like an autumn wound,

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like a blistering, like a burning, like a burning, like a burning.

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And it had had an ointment applied to it.

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We just thought it was strange, you know, that he had these injuries

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and this sort of green ointment, which...

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Nothing I've seen before at all.

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It just seemed strange and a bit unnatural, really.

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Zygmunt Damski had gone missing after a shopping trip.

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There was no suggestion that he'd planned to disappear

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and he was known as a loving family man with no obvious enemies.

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The autopsy confirmed that Damski had died of a heart attack.

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Korona James Turnbull was mystified,

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not least by the strange substance found on Damski's burns.

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We had the substance analysed and the toxicologists and the scientists

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couldn't come up with any answers to what it was.

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And we came up against a blank at every line of investigation.

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This is one of the most puzzling cases that I've come across in 25 years.

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If somebody proved to me that UFOs exist and that there was one

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around there at that time and that in some way we could associate it with this case,

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then perhaps I might say I'd only raise half an eyebrow.

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Whatever the truth behind Damski's death, which remains unsolved,

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Alan Godfrey's association with it was to turn him into a UFO celebrity.

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In November 1980, PC Alan Godfrey had witnessed a mysterious object

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whilst on patrol in Toddwooden.

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If I'd had got out the car and thrown a brick at it, it would have gone clang.

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That's how real it was.

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Alan Godfrey was also connected to a mysterious death,

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which remains unsolved after almost 30 years.

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Zygmunt Adamski had gone missing in June 1980.

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His body had been found five days later lying on top of a coal heap in Toddwooden.

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At the inquest, Koran and James Turnbull was mystified,

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recording an open verdict and even suggesting a link with UFOs.

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In nearly 27 years in the police, and it's the one thing that I've never really got to the bottom of,

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and it is bizarre and it's always been there at the back of my mind.

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There's just no explanation for it at all.

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Nobody has ever been charged in relation to the death of Zygmunt Adamski

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and the strange ointment which covered his burns has never been identified.

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To this day, we don't know whether or not there actually is any connection with the Adamski death.

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The case is still unsolved. They've never found out how his body got onto the top of that coal heap.

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Some UFO researchers looked at all the pieces of the puzzle.

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The fact that he was put on a coal tip and how did he get there is mysterious.

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And they just jumped to the most massive of conclusions.

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The only explanation must be that he's been abducted by aliens and something's gone wrong.

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The Adamski story was picked up by Sunday Meri journalist John Sheard.

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Although more used to covering Northern Ireland and the trial of the Yorkshire Ripper,

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he recognised the opportunity for an exclusive.

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I sat down and tried to write it as straight as I could.

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I didn't want it to sound over sensational because it was already a very sensational story.

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What I didn't know was that when it hit the streets that Sunday,

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as the front page lead, was the incredible reaction that would happen.

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I'm talking about literally thousands of letters, hundreds of phone calls.

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I began to realise that this was a story that even though I was still a bit iffy about it,

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had gripped millions of people throughout the world.

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John Sheard soon discovered PC Allen Godfrey's involvement with the Adamski case.

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And the later claims made under hypnosis that he'd been the subject of an alien abduction.

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I've been a journalist for 50 years and covered quite a few rather strange stories.

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But the Allen Godfrey story is undoubtedly the most astonishing thing I ever covered.

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What made Allen's story so special from my point of view was the fact that he was a serving policeman.

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And what expects them to be fairly straightforward in recording facts.

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And of course it came on the heels of the Adamski story and the very strange inquest.

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Individually there were good pieces, but when you add the two together and a possible connection, you've got dynamite.

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At the time Allen Godfrey's story captured the public imagination.

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Whatever the truth behind it, it's become one of Britain's classic UFO cases.

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I've got no doubt that Allen's UFO experience was to him real.

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Whether it was objectively real is a different kettle of fish altogether.

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We can all have experiences which we believe are real to us and they can happen some form of lucid dreaming for instance.

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Hallucinatory states, fugue states, trans states, they're all real to the person.

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But that's a subjective reality, not an objective reality.

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On the moors above Halifax, former police officer John Porter is meeting Allen Godfrey.

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Both reported seeing something unexplained on the night of the 28th of November 1980.

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You're going grey. You still got yours, don't you? Yeah, I know. Stuck on.

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It was only when I found out about you, lads, that it made me feel a lot more comfortable.

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I can understand that one. Do you know what I'm on about? Three of us can't be wrong.

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Three of us cannot be wrong. Three of us saw what we saw. Exactly.

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I was on my own and I've been told I was hallucinating.

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I've had all this. I've fallen asleep at the wheel. I'm driving, you know what I mean?

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I've only left the police station five minutes earlier.

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Allen has never changed his story. He's a very down to earth gentleman.

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He had more to lose than to gain by relating such an incident.

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And that's why Allen's story goes down as a classic close encounter from the UK.

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The Pennines continue to be fertile ground for strange phenomena.

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The numbers of reported UFO sightings are nowhere near those of the late 1970s and 80s, but they do still happen.

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If you look at the number of sightings that have been reported over the years, you know,

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we appear to be absolutely swamped with aliens. You know, the whole planet must be swarming with their ships

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and the population across the universe to visitors. It simply does not add up.

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I have not come across a UFO that cannot be explained when you go through the various things that it possibly could be.

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If you know the sky, you can understand what you're seeing.

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But for many who experience their own close encounter, the passing of time hasn't diminished the impact.

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I have to say, after this experience, it all understood. I believe there's something out there other than us.

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I've never seen anything like it, but I'm lucky enough to work on it. I've never seen anything like it.

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Where they come from? Why are they here? I wouldn't know what they are here.

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Allen Godfrey left the police force in 1985. Almost 30 years on, he's still sticking to his story.

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About 18 years ago, and I still believe in what I saw was really there.

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They've brains that work like human computers. Their description, not mine, meet Flo and Kay next year on five.

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Identical twins who are also artistic savantes and extraordinary people, the Rain Man twins.

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Thank you for watching!