A former officer of West Yorkshire Police, Alan Godfry, still believes he may have been a victim of alien abduction as he nears the 35th anniversary of the traumatising series of events.

While on a patrol in Todmorden in the early hours on November 28, 1980, to search for missing cattle, Mr Godfrey claimed a huge UFO spotted him.

It was a fuzzy oval that rotated at such speed and hovered so low over the road that it was causing the bushes on the side to shake.

He was on the outskirts of the town in Burnley Road looking for the farm animals that were reportedly missing. He was about to give up finding the reported missing animals when he claimed to have noticed what he thought a bus approaching from a few hundred metres away.

But as he got closer, he came to a realisation that it was not the commuter bus scheduled to pass at around 5 a.m. Instead, he saw what he described “a large mass.”

He said, “It was a fuzzy oval that rotated at such speed and hovered so low over the road that it was causing the bushes on the side to shake.”

He reported that he stopped to make a sketch of the UFO on his note pad. However, a burst of light overcame him.

The next thing he knew was that he drove his car again further up on the same road and the UFO was now gone. He turned around to see the area where he believed it took place. He found out that the area was wet due to rain in the night and there was a circular path of the dry road in a swirled pattern.

Godfry also noticed his police boots were split at the sole – like he had been dragged along. When he got back to the police station, he realised that he had lost around 15 minutes.

Mr Godfrey initially decided not to report the encounter because of fear to be ridiculed, but on the same day, he heard a lorry driver three miles further out on Burnley Road at Cliviger reported to police spotting “a brilliant white” object at about the same time.

Moreover, neighbouring Halifax police officers also received reports about a “brilliant blue-white glow” coming down Todmorden, also at the same time.

The coming out of other witnesses made Godfry file an official report. Since then, UFO investigators have been looking into his case. The case has eventually become one of the country’s most famous alien abduction cases.

His superiors sent Mr Godfrey for mental health and medical assessments but was found to be fine. British UFOlogist Jenny Randles, who had a chance to get an interview with him, said that he was “refreshingly honest.”