How ALIENS became an explanation for a Polish miner’s death in a small UK town: Inside ‘Britain’s most bizarre cold case’ which started with a man in a suit being found on a 10ft pile of coal…

Perfectly placed on top of a 10-foot pile of coal, a police man found the body of a smartly dressed man.

But his grizzly discovery in a derelict scrap yard would become perhaps the least unusual part of a bizarre unsolved mystery that continues to baffle experts to this day.

It’s June 6 1980, Thatcher is Prime Minister, ABBA have just released Super Trooper and cinemagoers have packed out theatres to watch the hotly anticipated sequel to Star Wars – The Empire Strikes Back.

But in the small West Yorkshire market town of Todmorden, nestled within the Calder Valley and surrounded by the rolling hills of the Pennines, the other-worldly goings-on were not only restricted to movie theatres.

In Tingley, some 30 miles from Todmorden, Polish-born coal miner Zigmund Adamski was preparing to leave his home for what would unknowingly be the last time.

Five days later, The 56-year-old’s body was found in Todmorden by PC Alan Godfrey. 

From the outset the crime scene was peculiar. While Mr Adamski was wearing a suit, his shirt, wallet and watch were all missing. 

His hair had been cropped and ‘roughly cut’, according to PC Godfrey, and Mr Adamski only had a small amount of stubble despite having been missing for days.

He would later remark that the miner looked as though he had been ‘Frightened to death’. 

Most bizarre of all were the strange burns which littered his body across his neck, head and shoulders.

These burns were covered in what coroner James Turnbull described at the time as a ‘strange ointment’ that couldn’t be identified. 

Exhaustive checks failed to reveal any record of Mr Adamski having been treated at any hospital during his missing five days.

The post-mortem examination concluded that Zigmund had died of heart failure due to ‘ischaemic heart disease’ and emphysema and the coroner recorded an open verdict. 

With local authorities unable to deduce how Mr Adamski ended up in Todmorden, conspiracy theories were rife. 

One was that, with the Cold War raging and Poland firmly behind the iron curtain, the KGB could have been involved. This could have explained why the coroner was unable to identify the ointment on his burns. 

Another theory claimed he could have been hit by ball lighting – which is a rare and unexplained phenomenon where spherical balls of light appear and last longer than traditional thunderbolts.

If Mr Adamski was struck he could have become disorientated and wandered into Todmorden before collapsing on the pile of coal. 

However, the distance between Mr Adamski’s home and Todmorden places doubt on this theory.  

But the theory that gained the most traction and support was that Mr Adamski was the victim of an alien abduction. 

It was then none other than PC Godfrey who would pour fuel on to the fire of this final conspiracy theory when the copper claimed that he was the victim of a alien abduction. 

On a wet November morning, five months after Mr Adamski’s death, PC Godfrey was coming to the end of a night shift when a call came in to report cows on the loose in people’s gardens. 

As he drove up Burnley Road – a long and isolated road that cuts across the Pennines and connects Todmorden to the outside world – PC Godfrey says he came across an abandoned bus. 

However, as he inched closer up the road he realised it wasn’t a bus at all. 

What allegedly greeted PC Godfrey instead was a white diamond-shaped object hovering in front of him. 

He made a quick sketch of the unidentified object before he attempted to call in his close encounter over the police radio.

However, curiously, neither his car radio, nor his personal set, was working.

He was then blinded by a flash of light and blacked out. When he woke up 25 minutes later his Ford Escort police car had moved 30 yards down the road. 

Speaking to the Daily Mail in 2021, PC Godfrey recalled that there was then a ‘brilliant, white, blinding flash – a bit like having your photograph taken with the flash gun in your face’. 

When he ventured back up the road he discovered that the area where his car had been was bone dry despite the rainy weather.

To add the mystery the officer also found that his boot was split open and an itchy mark had appeared on one of his feet. 

Unable to recall exactly what happened PC Godfrey visited a hypnotist where the tale took another strange turn. 

Under hypnosis he claimed to have awoken in a strange room where he was being examined by several little creatures and a tall, humanoid figure with a beard.

His claims raised many eyebrows and led to him becoming the butt of jokes in the office. However as a force, West Yorkshire Police did not see the funny side of the claims. 

In 1980, the force was already under intense media pressure for failing to have caught the Yorkshire Ripper who was terrorising women in the region at the time.

And the last thing West Yorkshire Police wanted was news of their coppers being abducted by little green men, rather than catching a killer. 

Perhaps inevitably, the story leaked to the press, under the jokey headline ‘May The Force Be With You’.

But soon it wasn’t so funny. After the story went national, Alan was stunned to receive a letter from a professor at Moscow University, asking for more information about his ‘encounter’. 

In the middle of the Cold War, the USSR would have been very interested in unexplained aircraft, looking for military secrets and he dutifully handed everything to his superiors.

He said: ‘Then one day I was called into the inspector’s office and sitting there was a man in civilian clothing, who simply introduced himself as “the Man from the Ministry”.

‘He had a file on his lap which, when it flipped open, I could see contained my drawing from the night and my sudden-death report on Zigmund Adamski.

‘They cited the Official Secrets Act and ordered me, in no uncertain terms, not to speak of it to the Press. After that, I felt they were out to get me. I left the job four years later.’

PC Godfrey claims he was persecuted by the ‘Man from the Ministry’ and claimed to see him everywhere and even suspected his phone was tapped.

Whatever he saw, it nearly ruined PC Godfrey’s life. Ridiculed and hounded out of the job he loved, he slumped into alcoholism and his marriage broke up.

But despite the intense media attention PC Godfrey’s tale got, it was far from the only tale of other worldly sightings in Todmorden. 

The town has its own unique history concerning other-worldly matters. The Pennine region between Yorkshire and Lancashire has been dubbed ‘UFO valley’, as its unique geology and geography have led to thousands of what investigators term UAPs, or ‘Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomena’.

For example, just a week before his ‘encounter’, three Halifax policemen looking for a stolen motorbike saw bright lights moving around in the sky, something PC Godfrey learned about only years later.

A year after PC Godfrey’s sighting, another local Vicky Dinsdale was out walking her dog with her grandfather when they saw a long, thin, diamond-shaped object that kept changing colour. 

Her grandfather told her to keep what they saw to themselves, mindful of how locals reacted to PC Godfrey.

As recently as 2019 there have been claims that people in the area have seen ‘A very bright steel blue flashing light high in the sky’ and ‘A hovering object that looked like the planet Saturn, with a ring around it, red portholes and four blue lights.’

The frequent UFO sightings were even mentioned in the hit BBC series Happy Valley – which is set in Todmorden and the surrounding areas – when a fake ‘alien liaison officer’ is set up as a joke between police colleagues.   

Residents even meet up for a monthly meeting at the local Golden Lion pub to discuss the sightings and even share their own encounters. 

However, none of the later tales have, or are likely, to capture the imaginations of locals as much as the peculiar encounters of 1980.