What Planet Am I On? (16 page)

During the session, Alan claims that the UFO stopped his car engine, filled his radio with static and then blinded him with an intensely bright light, which caused him to lose consciousness. His next supposed memory was being inside a room that looked like it was in a normal house (although it was supposed to be on the craft). There was a large black dog and a geezer with a beard in the room, plus several small, robot-like creatures with heads shaped like light bulbs. The bearded geezer was dressed in ‘biblical’ clothes and communicated with Alan telepathically, revealing that his name was ‘Yosef’ and that Alan already ‘knew’ him. All very strange, isn’t it? This geezer Yosef also promised Alan he was going to have another encounter.

Another local press cutting that we find talks about the huge interest in Alan’s story around the world: ‘Unassuming local bobby Alan Godfrey is “waiting for the dust to settle” before another attempt is made to plunder his memory in search of the answer to a UFO mystery.’ It reveals that the thirty-four-year-old policeman had been ‘hounded by Europe’s media all week after hypnosis sessions revealed he might have met “space invaders” during a close encounter of the third kind’.

The UFO incident proved to be a huge turning point in Alan’s life. He left the police force and now is a speaker at charity fundraising events. But it’s not all been positive. In the past Alan has said, ‘I wish I’d never seen the UFO, particularly because of the effects on my children . . . It’s
not easy having a policeman as a father but when he’s a policeman who saw a UFO it’s even worse.’

I can see that. Todmorden is a small town, so you can imagine when Alan was going about his business people were nodding and saying, ‘There’s that copper who reckons he was abducted’ and stuff like that. I can see how it would be a nightmare for his kids as well. It would obviously be a talking point at the local school – ‘Did your dad get abducted again last night?’ Kids can be a nightmare, can’t they?

The thing that freaks me is a picture of this dude Alan Godfrey alongside the report in the paper: he looks the absolute spit of Travis. Or what Travis must have looked like back then. It’s very weird. Even though I’ve just met Travis I rib him a bit about it, but he’s cool with it.

We find out that Alan is still living just outside Todmorden, between Walsden and a place called The Summit, so we decide to go and speak to him and get his version of events. Travis had never met Alan, but coincidentally they had both been filmed for the same TV show once.

Alan lives in a bungalow he built right on the Rochdale Canal. You can just sit at the kitchen table chilling out and watching the barges go past. Which I am quite into. This might surprise you, but I nearly bought a barge recently. Me and Joanne even took one for a test drive or whatever the equivalent of a test drive is for a barge. We went from Salford into Castlefield in central Manchester, which took about five hours, jumped off
for a bit of lunch and then back on again. In fact, in Castlefield there’s a nice gaff called Dukes 92, named after lock number 92, which is nearby. When me and Jo had the idea of getting a barge, we dreamt of just picking up the kids from school on a Friday, throwing ’em in the barge and just doing one for a nice chilled weekend. We quite fancied that. Having it barge. That’s how chilled out I am when I’m at home now . . . I’d be quite happy to spend the weekend barging it than larging it. So even though we didn’t end up buying the one that we took out for a test drive, we still haven’t ruled out getting one.

Travis and me sit in Alan’s kitchen and he tells us about the two incidents he was involved in and some stuff that never made the official reports or papers. He tells us about old Zyggy and what he looked like when he found him. ‘He’d been missing for six days. We later found out he had thick, wavy hair when he’d gone missing but when he was found his hair looked like it had been cropped really roughly . . . and he had individual burn marks around his head, as if something was placed there [like a helmet or some sort of contraption, I think he meant]. Then as you turned his head over, there was also a hole in the back of Zyggy’s neck, in the nape of the neck, which was smeared with some sort of ointment, like Vaseline or something.’

As we already knew, the ointment was sent away to the Home Office laboratories for assessment, but despite doing loads of tests, they had no idea what it was.

‘When we went to the post-mortem the pathologist
was straightaway really taken aback by the look on his face. He suggested he had died of a heart attack, and he said to us, “You’ve heard the saying ‘Frightened to death’? Well this is a typical example of it.”’

Alan stresses, ‘That guy didn’t die where he was found. There’s no way.’

Although he still thinks the case is really mysterious, Alan doesn’t think UFOs were involved in Zyggy’s death. Which gives more credence to his own encounter.

He tells us about that night and how he came across the UFO. I ask him how much time he reckons he lost, and Alan says, ‘Between about ten past five in the morning and ten to six.’ So that’s about forty minutes that he can’t account for.

He draws me and Travis an image of what the UFO looked like – a flying saucer, with panels underneath and fairground-type lights round the outside. Travis says it’s very similar to the craft he saw. Old Alan had a framed, hand-drawn picture of a UFO on his kitchen wall as well.

Alan describes the creatures he saw as having a head like a light bulb and a child-like body, which has become a popular image of aliens more recently but it wasn’t back then. Back in the seventies the little green man was more popular, rather than the ‘greys’ that Alan has just described.

Alan also tells us about going into regression with a police psychiatrist. He had been pretty sceptical about it, and when he watched the tape back, it shit him up. He
says it wasn’t him, by which he means it felt as if he was watching someone else going through the experience.

Alan seems pretty credible to me. Again, I don’t want to come across like I just swallow anything UFO-related – I try to judge each case on its own merits and each person on their own merits. Obviously, when someone’s telling you a story about what happened to them, you’re judging them, both consciously and subconsciously – not just what they’re saying, but how they’re saying it, their actions and all sorts. You do that with anyone you just met, don’t you? It’s human nature. And what I see makes me believe him.

Alan then agrees to take us to where the incident happened, by the police station. By this time it’s dark, and we can get a sense of what it must have been like that night. Although Alan was on his own when he saw the craft, there were several other spottings that night. One major detail that backs up Alan’s story is that other cops also saw something that matched Alan’s description of the UFO, and they filed reports independently.

‘Twelve miles away from where I was, three police officers got up on t’moor, and as they’re driving up there, they became aware of this blue pulsating light in the sky, on the horizon. They stood watching this object, and then – ssssshhhhoooommmm – it went from one side of the horizon to t’other, in a split second, it went backwards and forwards, up and down . . . and they then observed it heading in the general direction of Todmorden.’

Two other coppers in the Todmorden area also saw a
craft and submitted a report with their own drawing of it, which was very similar to Alan’s drawing.

I do disagree with Alan on one thing though. He thinks the two incidents were unrelated, that it was just coincidence that they both happened to him but I don’t really believe in coincidence, so I’m not having that. As far as I’m concerned, if those two incidents happened to Alan, and I believe that they did, then they’re definitely connected.

After we leave Alan, me and Travis go for a drink to have a chat. Travis reckons Alan has three things in his favour – he was a police officer, he had the corroboration of other police officers who saw the same thing, and as a police officer he had a lot at stake by coming out and being public about what had happened. Some of his superiors even advised him not to say anything and tried to shush him up. You can see why the Old Bill in some small town wouldn’t want one of their cops going round spouting off about how he’d seen a UFO. Especially in the seventies. You’ve got all the locals, who are probably a bit straight, thinking, ‘We can’t have this guy as our cop, he sounds a bit unstable’, you know what I mean? I can see why it wouldn’t look good. Alan even said he had other coppers try and plant stuff in his locker to try and discredit him.

Travis says he was impressed by Alan’s own astonishment at his regression, and thinks that counts in his favour. Travis also knows about a case involving a cop in New Mexico that sounded pretty similar.

It’s hard to know exactly what to make of the incidents in Todmorden but Travis and I are both in agreement that something definitely happened to Alan.

That night we drive down south, heading for Suffolk on the next leg of our UFO road trip. We are heading to Suffolk to investigate the Rendlesham Forest incident.

I already know a lot about this case, as I’ve seen it on various documentaries over the years. It happened just outside RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters Air Force bases in late December 1980, which at the time were both used by the US Air Force, so most of the witnesses were Yanks. Dozens of USAF personnel were involved in various incidents on the base after going into the forest to investigate mysterious lights. What happened next has been debated for over thirty years, and is still being debated today. Even those who were there can’t agree on what happened, but some of the men have since said they saw an alien spacecraft and at least one of them claimed to have touched it.

Shaun’s X-Files

The Rendlesham incident from 1980 has been dubbed ‘the British Roswell’ by many people. Some files released by the National Archives show that Rendlesham remains the UK’s most enduringly fascinating UFO sighting. Dr David Clarke, who
analysed all the documents released by the National Archives, estimated that ‘almost half’ of all UFO correspondence directed at defence officials related to requests for information or ‘tip-offs’ about the Rendlesham incident. Dr Clarke came to the conclusion that, ‘There is no way you will be able to get to the truth of what happened because like a snowball rolling down the hill, the stories have been more and more embellished.’

The incident started around 3 a.m. on Boxing Day 1980 when strange lights were reported descending into the forest. At first, the Air Force dudes who saw the lights thought a plane had come down, but when they went into the forest to investigate they witnessed a ‘strange, glowing object, metallic in appearance, with coloured lights’. One of the American geezers, Sgt James Penniston, later described it as a ‘craft of unknown origin’ and claimed he touched the craft and it was ‘warm’. He also described symbols on the exterior of the craft, which he copied down. The local police were called but the only light they could see was the one from Orford Ness lighthouse, which was a few miles away on the coast (well, obviously it was on the coast – where else are you going to have a lighthouse?).

Unlike most cases, which involve a single sighting and last a matter of minutes, this incident was stretched over several days.

The next morning after the first sighting, the same
guys returned to the clearing in the forest where it had happened, and found three triangular impressions in the ground and burn marks on the trees.

From everything I’ve seen and read before today, it seems to me that something
definitely
went down that night at that military base. The other thing that is interesting is that there are theories that some bods high up in the military knew what was going on that night, almost as if it was a prearranged meeting with aliens or something. Or as if it was a set-up and they wanted to monitor reactions. I don’t quite know, but there is definitely more than meets the eye to the story, and there’s definitely some withholding of information going on. Someone, and probably quite a few people, knew more than they were letting on about what happened that night, and they still haven’t come clean, so I’m keen to try and get to the bottom of it.

We’d arranged to meet one of the original witnesses, called Larry Warren, in a country pub near where the incident happened. It feels a bit like the three amigos with me, Larry and Travis all having had a life-changing UFO adventure. Larry and Travis had met each other a few times before at UFO conferences, which is hardly surprising since they’re two of the most in-demand dudes in the UFO world. Larry’s a character. He seems to be happy to be out with the boys – the first thing he says to me is ‘Shaun! How you doing, brother?’

Larry acts as if me, him and Travis are old school mates who haven’t seen each other in years, finally getting the
old band together. It’s quite amusing and endearing. He has a goatee beard and is going grey, and looks like he’s done his share of partying over the years. He also has a gravelly voice which sounds like it has paid the price for some of that partying. ‘It almost looks like Shaun Ryder and Travis Walton meets Willie Nelson,’ he rasps, ‘the way I’m looking right now with the beard and all.’