If you were watching last week's episode of Happy Valley, you'll have seen the hilarious scene where, winding up a junior officer, a straight-faced Sgt Catherine Cawood asks her fellow bobbies for applicants for the role of 'alien liaison officer'.
Later Catherine, played by Oldham's Sarah Lancashire, explains to a colleague how the prank came about. "Gorkem saw a strange light moving in an erratic manner over Erringden Moor at 5am yesterday morning so he started googling stuff and found out about that bobby in Todmorden in 1980," she said. "He thinks he’s been abducted by aliens."
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The episode actually refers to a real-life incident. The bobby in question was PC Alan Godfrey, who in 1980 investigated the mysterious death of Zigmund Adamski. The body of the 56-year-old miner had been found on top of a 10ft pile of coal in a yard in the small West Yorkshire town of Todmorden having disappeared from home three days earlier.
He had no visible injuries except for a mark, perhaps a burn, on the back of his neck and head. "He had this terrifying expression," said Mr Godfrey in an interview with ITV several years later. "It can only be described as, whatever he last saw had terrified him.
"There were no footprints or disturbance on the coal, how did he get up there? I couldn't work it out.
"I could see that on the top of his head were individual burn marks and on the back of his neck there was a rather large weeping type of burn, and there had been an ointment smeared on it."
Zigmund's death sparked a number of UFO conspiracy theories. A inquest later gave a heart attack as the cause of death, but the coroner James Turnbull recorded an open verdict, later describing it 'one of the most puzzling cases that I've come across in 25 years'.
Speaking to reporters after the hearing, PC Godfrey said there was a possibility Adamski had been abducted by aliens. "I am open-minded, I can't rule it out," he said.
Some six months after the grisly discovery, on November 28, 1980, PC Godfrey was called out an early morning report of cows wandering across the road on a Todmorden estate. But when he arrived at the scene he says something peculiar happened.
"I was driving up the road when I could see an object in front of me," he said. "It looked to be completely blocking the road.
"As I got nearer and nearer this object, I could see it wasn't quite what I was expecting to meet at 5 o'clock on a November morning in Todmorden. It was diamond-shaped. The bottom half was spinning. It was hovering about five feet off the ground. It was about 20ft wide, 14ft high."
PC Godfrey's police radio then suddenly stopped working, so he frantically grabbed his notepad to begin drawing the object.
"After it had all happened, I realised there was half an hour missing from me drawing the object to me turning up on the other side," he said. "I was really curious. I wanted to know what happened in that half-hour."
That missing 30 minutes led Mr Godfrey to undergo regressive hypnosis under the watchful eye of doctors in a bid to trigger his memory. During the session, which was filmed, the policeman described his car being engulfed in a bright, white light. He then appeared to lose consciousness before waking up in a room where he sees a tall man. He's also surrounded by six small robots.
PC Godfrey then described being subjected to some kind of medical examination before being put back in his car. He later realised, echoing the the mark found on Mr Adamski's body, that his left boot had split open and he had a small, itchy red mark, like a burn, on his foot.
Mr Godfrey's account made it into the papers and became an international news story. He became the object of ridicule, his claims seen as an embarrassment to the force.
He says he was later hounded out of the police and talked of the negative impact the sighting had on his life. "I wish I'd never seen the UFO, particularly because of the effects on my children," he said. "It's not easy having a policeman as a father but when he's a policeman who saw a UFO it's even worse."
We will probably never know the truth of what happened to PC Godfrey and Zigmund Adamski. But ever since the two incidents Todmorden and the Calder Valley have become UFO sighting hotspots, dubbed 'Britain's answer to Roswell'.
A UFO society still meets in the town's Golden Lion pub, and there have been hundreds of reported sightings since 1980, including objects spotted in the sky over Rothwell, a triangular craft glowing green over Holmfirth and one of the most famous cases when an object could be seen over the Ribblehead viaduct for several hours.
PC Godfrey would go on to write a book about his experiences. In an interview with Yorkshire Live in 2018, he admitted that he cannot be entirely sure about being examined by aliens, but maintains to this day that he saw a UFO in Todmorden.
He said: "I must stress that I did see a UFO that night. Make no mistake about that.
"That object was real. If I'd got out of my car and thrown a brick at it, it would have gone 'bang'. I definitely saw what I saw. Nobody on this Earth will ever tell me any different."
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