The Bizarre Case of the Todmorden UFO Abduction
The strange case of the Todmorden UFO abduction has stumped authorities for decades. How did a fully grown man wind up dead on top of a pile of coal ten feet high? And how did a normal bobby lose 25 minutes of his life?
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TRIGGER WARNING: Torture (no graphic depictions), Abduction
A Strange Disappearance Lead to the case of the Todmorden UFO Abduction
In the case of the Todmorden UFO abduction, many questions remain unanswered to this day. The only thing we know for certain is that the victim was 56 year old coal miner, Zigmund Adamski. Or Ziggy, as he was known to his friends. Mystery clouds the how and whys of it all.
One summer day in 1980, Ziggy left his house to do some shopping in his hometown of Tingley. Several hours later, he had not returned. Nor would he return ever again. Lottie, Ziggy’s wife, was baffled. He had been expected at a family wedding the following day, and he’d very much been looking forward to it. None of Ziggy’s mining friends knew what had happened to him either. Although, he had been signed off work several months prior with breathing difficulties due to a lung deformity.
Five days after his disappearance, he was discovered dead in the town of Todmorden. The fact that the two towns are 20 miles away from each other is odd enough in itself. However, the circumstances surrounding how the body was found are nothing if not bizarre.
How Did He Get There?
On the 11th June, local Todmorden police officer, PC Alan Godfrey, was sent out to investigate reports of a body lying on top of a ten-foot pile of coal beside a railway line. When he managed to get to the top to see what was going on, Alan noted that the dead man was dressed in a suit. Yet there were some things that struck the young policeman as odd, not least that the body had hardly any coal on it. Despite the smart attire, the body was missing a shirt, watch and wallet. Anything that could easily identify this person was strangely absent, and there was a look of abject terror plastered on the dead man’s face.
PC Alan Godfrey
“Those eyes were staring up at me. I was looking down on him from a foot away. 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.”
Further inspection revealed that the dead man had strange, oval-shaped burn marks all over his head, neck and shoulders. It was all very Dark*. Alan also found that the body was covered in an unidentifiable substance. This kicked off the theory of the Todmorden UFO abduction.
What Was the Cause of Death?
James Turnbull, the coroner in the Todmorden UFO abduction case, was as baffled as Alan had been. He was unable to identify the strange substance, but said that it appeared as if the dead man’s burns had been treated with some sort of ointment. There was also only a day’s worth of stubble on the chin, and the hair had been cropped roughly, as if it had been hacked at with a blunt implement.
Heart attack was stated as the cause of death on the death certificate. James said that the man looked as if he had been quite literally scared to death.
James Turnbull, Coroner
"The question of where he was before he died and what led to his death just could not be answered."
A Slippery Coal Heap is the Real Sticking Point
It was also evident that Ziggy hadn’t died on top of the coal heap, but had been placed there. There was very little coal dust on him, but there was no evidence of the coal having been disturbed either. It was impossible that the ill man had clambered up slippery loose shale in the rain without getting himself dirty or causing part of the pile to collapse. He had been placed there.
Given that there were no footholds in the coal, it seems that nobody could have carried Ziggy up there either. Which leads to the conclusion that he was lowered down by… something. But for what reason nobody really knows. Next to a busy railway line isn’t exactly a great hiding place, for someone wanting to commit murder.
After contacting all the local hospitals, James was still none the wiser. None of them had treated anyone with these types of burns. The ointment was sent off to be analysed by forensic scientists. To this day, it has never been identified. This case of the supposed Todmorden UFO abduction case remains the biggest mystery of James’ career.
Who Was the Man at the Centre of the Todmorden UFO Abduction
Zigmund Adamski was a Polish national, who, like many, had emigrated to the UK during the war. He had met his wife, Leokadia, known as Lottie, and they married in 1951. By the time of his disappearance, Lottie was wheelchair bound and relied heavily on Ziggy’s help.
Because of his wife’s situation and his own health issues, Ziggy had applied for early retirement. He had initially been denied, but the decision had been appealed. Sadly, the decision to grant Ziggy’s request arrived in the post the day after he went missing. His failing health, though, makes it incredibly unlikely that he could have climbed to the top of a greasy coal pile ten feet high without help. Especially given that it had been raining the day he went missing.
Ziggy and Lottie were inseparable. Completely devoted to one another. So when Ziggy went missing that fateful Friday, his family were convinced he hadn’t been suffering from depression and hadn’t any reason to disappear.
A Family Visit Makes the Todmorden UFO Abduction Even Odder
At the time of his disappearance, the Adamskis were entertaining visitors. Ziggy’s cousin and her son were over from Poland. They had been out shopping in Wakefield during the day and then sat down to a chippy tea. He had run through the speech he had prepared for his Goddaughter’s wedding the next day. Everyone present said that he had been in high spirits.
At 3:30pm, Ziggy realised that they were running low on potatoes in the house and said he was going to nip out to the shop. He spoke briefly to a neighbour, who was outside cleaning his car, and continued on his way. He never made it to the shop.
Later on that evening, Lottie made a call to Wakefield police station to report her husband missing. Despite an investigation and an appeal in the local paper, the police drew a blank. Ziggy had vanished without a trace.
Who could have known that the disappearance of one man would become the basis for the Todmorden UFO Abduction case?
The Newspapers Begin to Make Claims of the Todmorden UFO Abduction
When no satisfactory answers were found for why Ziggy would be found in the state he was, the newspapers went wild. “Amazing UFO Death Riddle!” announced the Sunday Mirror. It’s not quite the knee jerk reaction it seems.
In the weeks leading up to the tale of the Todmorden UFO abduction, there had been several reports to newspapers and the police about orange fireballs and other UFOs sighted across West Yorkshire. This activity seemed to be occurring mainly in Bradford, Halifax and Todmorden. While some of these sightings were explained as aircraft, atmospheric phenomena, and flares used by moorland rescue teams, a few are still unexplained.
This continued to happen for some time after Ziggy’s disappearance. We are still unsure as to what caused them.
The Todmorden UFO Takes An Inexplicable Turn
Alan Godfrey couldn’t forget the case of Ziggy and the supposed Todmorden UFO abduction. Yet he couldn’t have known that he too would become an integral part of the case in a way he could never have anticipated.
On Friday 28th November 1980, Alan Godfrey, our trusty bobby, was on night patrol. He was driving on Burnley Road out of Todmorden after receiving a report of escaped cattle on a housing estate. As he was driving, he became aware that there was a strange oddity on the road up ahead of him. Thinking it was a crashed bus, he slowed the car to a crawl and drove closer. But on nearing the object, he stopped the car. This was no bus. In the sky up ahead, hovering about five feet from the ground, he could see a very large aircraft.
Not quite believing what his eyes were seeing, he gawped, aghast. The aircraft was diamond in shape with a row of lights on the top. Alan estimated that the UFO was 20 feet across and 14 feet high. It was spinning slowly, and the leaves on the road were spinning in the opposite direction with the force.
PC Alan Godfrey
“It looked very real; real enough that if I’d got out of my car and thrown a brick at it, it would have made a clang,”
Backup Required for Todmorden UFO Abduction
Too scared to get out of his Ford Escort panda car, Alan picked up his police radio and tried to call for backup. But his radio wasn’t working. He turned on the blue lights and tried his personal police radio. Nothing there either.
Being the professional police officer he was, he decided that the best course of action was to take out his notebook and make a sketch of the scene. Just like he would have done in the case of a road traffic incident. But as he was sketching, there was a brilliant flash of light and then the next thing Alan was aware of was being sat in the car 30 yards from where he had been. When he checked his watch, he was astonished to discover that 25 minutes had passed and he had no idea what had happened in that time.
Bizarrely, Alan also noticed that one of his boots was split and his foot was itchy. He took his boot off and saw a strange, red mark on his foot. He decided to return to the scene of the crime and saw that the road where he had seen the UFO was bone dry. It had been raining and the rest of the road and everywhere around in either direction was shiny and wet from rain. If that wasn’t strange enough, Alan then saw that the cows he had initially been called out for, were all congregated in a park at the side of the road. They hadn’t been there before.
The Case of the Todmorden UFO Abduction Becomes Stranger
When Alan returned to “Tod Nick” (Todmorden police station), he recounted his tale. His colleagues were very unsure as to what to make of this tale. Most of them were sceptical and he was even ridiculed by some. But he couldn’t forget the incident and, on the advice of a friend, booked himself a hypnosis session.
Under hypnosis, he recounted a strange tale. After the flash of bright light, Alan said that he woke up in a strange room surrounded by small creatures that he was unable to identify. He also said that there had been a tall, humanoid creature with a beard in the room.
When he told his colleagues of this new development, he was disappointed to find that he was openly laughed at. He decided not to talk about it anymore. Convinced as he was that something very odd had happened to him on that road, he didn’t want to discredit himself as an officer of the law.
Sinister Military Intervention
Several weeks later, a very dejected Alan was called into his inspector’s office. On entering, Alan saw a man in a dark suit and was told that he shouldn’t ask questions. All he was told was that this man was from “the Ministry.” The man from the ministry opened a folder and Alan was surprised to see that the sketch of the UFO from his notebook was in this folder. Why did this person have his drawing?
Alan wasn’t allowed to see what was in the rest of the folder, but was told his accounts of his interaction with the UFO and his report on the Adamski case were in there. He was ordered to swear under the Official Secrets Act not to speak to the media about any of the things that he had witnessed. Especially given their interest in the Todmorden UFO abduction.
Being a gruff Yorkshireman, Alan begrudgingly agreed and left the office. After that encounter, the ministry man kept showing up wherever Alan was. He was clearly being followed. A few days later, Alan was in his local having a pint when the mysterious man appeared next to him. At which point, a very distressed Alan told him to fuck off. Surprisingly, the man disappeared after this.
Alan’s theory is that the man was an MI5 agent, sent to spy on him. Others have speculated that the man could have been a representative of West Yorkshire Police. Sent to dissuade him from drawing media attention to the force. They had received quite a lot of negative attention already on account of their incompetence in the Yorkshire Ripper case.
Alan’s Life Falls Apart After His Todmorden UFO Abduction
Shortly after 1980, Alan left the police force. He was in a serious state of depression and had started self-medicating with whisky. His marriage fell apart and he ended up living in a friend’s attic, utterly destitute.
Luckily, Alan met his second wife, Kathryn, and she encouraged him to talk about what happened. They married in 1995 and Alan’s life began to pick back up again. Alan is now something of a celebrity about Todmorden and happily talks about his experiences.
Shocking UFO Documents Released from the Ministry of Defence
Some years after all of this, the MoD released all its documentation on UFOs. But Alan is very quick to point out that they have never released his. He is convinced that they’re still hiding something.
While the MoD have admitted that UFOs have been spotted over the years, it’s very important to note that UFO just stands for “unidentified flying object” and could include myriad anomalies. Homemade and experimental aircrafts, as well as larger than normal birds can account for some of these sightings. The MoD has never announced the existence of aliens from other planets, which is a very different thing.
Scaredy Cat Skeptic Take
These two cases seem entirely unrelated until you take into account the fact that the man from the ministry talked about them in the same breath.
I agree that the man from the ministry was probably a high-up from West Yorkshire police trying to contain a situation which might make the force look even more like idiots. Given the state of the Yorkshire Ripper case, it seems more likely that than an MI5 spook. In which case, the Adamski case is unrelated to Alan’s encounter.
Not being able to solve the case of the murder of Ziggy would further reiterate to the public that the police were incompetent. They were already making a laughing stock of themselves in the Ripper case and people were scared.
In addition, a member of the force claiming to have been abducted by aliens would have added another layer of clown shoes to West Yorkshire Police’s reputation. They just didn’t need the bad press.
Separate Stories and an Unfortunate Coincidence
Zigmund Adamski and Part I of the Todmorden UFO Abduction
So, having separated the two stories, I can honestly say… fuck knows in relation to Ziggy. That one is a real mystery. There was obviously a series of unfortunate events that took place there that we will never know of. It reminds me of the film, Burn After Reading.
I find it odd that Ziggy was a coal miner and was found on a pile of coal. If I were to speculate based on what we know, I would say that it boils down to racism. Polish people still receive a lot of flack, here in the UK. And Yorkshire is particularly patriotic, in my experience. If you speak to the white residents of Dewsbury or Bradford, for example, they can be very bigoted towards non-Brits. They seem to blame absolutely everything on immigration. “They take our benefits and our jobs!” etc. etc. I mean, they don’t – the rich people are to blame for that, but hey ho.
A Polish Miner in an English Mine
So here you’ve got a Polish worker taking a mining job at a very turbulent time for the miners. But not only is he taking the job they feel belongs to a British national, he’s claiming disability benefits because of his illness. Double whammy.
I think what happened is that some of the British miners planned to kidnap Ziggy and beat him up. And I think that happened as planned. I think they stripped Ziggy, burning him and shaving his head as a form of humiliation.
But I think the days’ worth of torture caused Ziggy to go into cardiac arrest. Scared, because they hadn’t planned to kill him – just to make a point, the men tried to fix it and covered his wounds in something like petroleum jelly (or some concoction they used at home) that they thought might help revive him. They shaved him and tried to nurse him back to health. But it was too late and Ziggy died.
Panic Ensues
Frightened, they hastily dressed the Polish miner in his suit. Without his shirt either in their haste or because it had some sort of evidence on it. They took his belongings to make it look like a mugging gone wrong and then they put him into something and got on a train to dump the body. Maybe they were planning to bury him on the moors, but ended up getting spotted and panicked, getting off at Todmorden. Or perhaps they were delivering the coal and popped the poor miner on top once they’d dumped the coal.
Given the location in which he was found, it’s clear that this wasn’t a pre-planned murder. But the fact that the coal pile was slippery and intact, and that the body had no coal on it makes me think that people who knew what they were doing got him up there. More than one burly coal miner makes sense. They work with coal and they’re exceptionally strong.
What We Mean When We Say Tiredness Kills
In the case of the Todmorden UFO Abduction Part II, I think there’s something to be said for being a tired bobby on the beat in the wee hours of the morning.
Not to cast aspersions here, but alcohol also comes into play here somewhat. Twice we’ve mentioned drinking in this case. When Alan is in the pub and again when he begins drinking a bottle of whisky a day. Now, I am a drinker and when times have been bad, I have self medicated. I could not, however, drink a bottle of whisky in a night (and I can drink a lot… I’m not proud of it, but that’s just a fact). To get to that point, you have to be quite a seasoned drinker already. Absolutely no judgement here – like I said, I like a drink. But that seems to me like a man who already downs quite a bit.
Alcohol can cause time slips and blackouts. Extreme tiredness can have a similar effect. So on a cold November night, at 5am when Alan was patrolling on his own, it wouldn’t surprise me if there had been a little hip flask action going on. It was the early 80s, drink-driving wasn’t considered anywhere near as bad as it is now. We’re talking about a time when people refused to wear seatbelts just because they didn’t feel like being told what to do.
I Feel Like Alan Went Through an Awful Time
I think Alan did see something in the sky. But I think it was warped by several nips of whisky and extreme tiredness. Plus being alone at night-time on a dark road. When you add the obsession with Ziggy’s case into this and the reports from the papers about an alien abduction, it’s not a huge leap to assume that Alan’s brain filled in the gaps.
Hypnosis can be problematic. Blackout memories can’t be recovered, because they’re not there at all. There’s nothing to recover – they were never there to begin with. The part of the brain that records during blackout periods has been switched off. So it’s highly unlikely that a hypnotist could bring back Alan’s memories. But false memories, and memories based on subconscious expectation and fear are all too common.
I think Alan really went through the ringer. And I think he genuinely believes he was abducted. But I don’t. That isn’t to take away the terrifying nature of what happened in any way. I just don’t believe extraterrestrial life has reached earth… yet. Given the vastness of space and the fact that we’ve only been broadcasting since the 60s, it could be that life from other planets is on the way. Who knows?
Alan’s evidence in the case hasn’t been released because the authorities don’t believe it is anything. Rather than that they’re trying to cover it up. Actual photographs and recordings of other UFOs have been released, so there’s no reason why they wouldn’t release a hasty drawing unless it was just dismissed.
All of this is just speculation on my part and is not meant in any way to ridicule or dismiss anyone’s experiences in the Todmorden UFO abduction cases. They’re both very odd and very intriguing.
Your Take
So let us know what you think happened in these cases.
Do you think they’re related?
Do you have more information that I might not be privy to that could affect how I think things played out?
Are you convinced that space aliens have visited Earth?
Comment below. Or drop us a line.
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