He thought it wasa bus across the road.

Alan Godfrey was an on-duty West Yorkshire police constable when he reported an extraordinary close encounter on Burnley Road at Todmorden. His occupation matters because he was accustomed to observing incidents, recording details and producing reports. It does not make him infallible, but it gives the waking sighting a stronger documentary foundation than a story first told years later.

The encounter has become famous as an “alien abduction.” That label compresses two very different evidential layers. Godfrey consciously remembered the road, the hovering object, attempts to use his radio, a sketch made while looking at it, a sudden discontinuity and finding himself farther along the road. Months later, hypnotic regression produced a far more elaborate narrative involving beings, an interior environment and a figure called “Joseph.”

Godfrey himself remained unusually cautious about that second layer. He continued to insist the UFO encounter was real while acknowledging that he could not know whether the hypnosis material represented reality, dream, fantasy or some mixture. That distinction should govern the whole page.

He did make an official police report, and the case soon entered the local press and civilian UFO investigation. That gives the waking encounter a contemporaneous documentary spine. It does not mean the police force endorsed an extraordinary explanation, and later media treatment quickly amplified the stranger hypnosis-derived material far beyond the original report.

One of the most useful pieces of evidence in the case is Godfrey's own drawing. Its value is not that a sketch can prove an object existed. It is that the sketch fixes his description early: broad diamond or spinning-top geometry, window-like panels, and a lower section he said was rotating.

The later drawings associated with the hypnosis session should not be mixed into that early visual evidence. A sketch of “Joseph” or the interior belongs to the hypnosis layer; the road-object sketch belongs to the conscious encounter.

Roughly eight months after the encounter, in July 1981, Godfrey underwent hypnotic regression in an attempt to recover the missing interval. Under hypnosis he described being taken aboard an object, encountering small beings or robots, a large black dog, and a human-like figure later called “Joseph.”

Those images made the case famous. They are also the least reliable part of it. Hypnosis is highly vulnerable to suggestion, confabulation and imaginative construction. It does not function as a reliable recording device for hidden memory.

Jenny Randles, one of the researchers most closely associated with the case, repeatedly treated the hypnosis material cautiously. Godfrey himself did too. That restraint is important because popular summaries often promote the hypnotic narrative to the status of recovered fact.

The correct evidential hierarchy is simple: contemporaneous conscious sighting first, the pre-hypnosis memory gap second, and the later regression narrative a distant third. That order matters because most popular retellings reverse it. The Sunday Mirror put the abduction material on its front page in September 1981, helping transform a police close-encounter report into a national alien-abduction story. That media shift is historically important because it explains why the beings and “Yosef” now dominate many versions of a case that began as a much narrower waking sighting.

Police-UFO databases preserve reports from other West Yorkshire officers who said they observed bright blue-white or unusual lights in the Calder Valley around the same period. One well-known entry involves PCs John Porter, Howard Turnpenny and Julie Baxter on the moors: Porter later remembered it as the same night as Godfrey, while FOI-derived material has been cited as dating that sighting about a week earlier. Two traffic officers near Littleborough also later reported a bright object heading in the direction of Todmorden. These are relevant regional correlations, but the dating and independence of the reports are not clean enough to treat them as direct corroboration of the Burnley Road object.

That material is relevant as regional context, but it should not be converted into direct corroboration of the close object on Burnley Road. None of those officers stood beside Godfrey and saw the same diamond-shaped craft at five feet above the road.

The same caution applies to the death of Zigmund Adamski, whose body Godfrey had encountered earlier in 1980. The Adamski case became culturally entangled with Godfrey's UFO report because both occurred around Todmorden and because of the strange circumstances of Adamski's death. There is no evidential chain proving the two events were connected.