A VALLEY resident will featured on in this documentary about close encounters with UFOs, Mike Sacks, from Stacksteads, is interviewed on Channel Five’s Britain’s Close Encounters about three sightings in Rossendale between late 1978 and mid 1979. At the time the Free Press reported Mr Sacks’s story that he saw an object in the sky over Stacksteads on two separate occasions within four months of each other. The 67-year-old said: ‘I am not talking about an anonymous light in the sky.

The first one just went down behind Lee Mill Quarry. We thought it was an aircraft coming down.’ Mr Sacks made his way to the quarry along with two police officers, but after looking for several hours they failed to find anything. Four months later, in February 1979, Mr Sacks said he saw a ‘pulsing’ object out of his bedroom window. And then in May 1979, as he watched the sky with a friend, he said a craft appeared in the sky and hovered just feet away from them.

Mr Sacks added: ‘We were sat there and saw it, it was just amazing. There were lights shining from within it and there were these huge big jet black triangle things beneath it. It looked like it was 10,000 years ahead of anything we have.’ Experts and investigators argue that in the late 1970s there was a ‘UFO wave’ across the world, with a high number of sightings reported.

Mr Sacks said: ‘I became an investigator because a lot of people in the area were confiding in me that they had seen things. ‘When my story came out a lot of people were coming up to me saying they had seen something. ‘There were sightings all over the world at the time, but no-one knew it was happening.’ As a UFO investigator, Mr Sacks has built up a close friendship with Alan Godfrey, a former Yorkshire policeman who is also featured in the program, who claims to have seen a UFO and, after hypnosis, says he even recalls being taken on to an alien craft.

A British Bobby’s Abduction

Alan Godfrey is a retired police constable who served with the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police Force. On November 28th 1980, 200 miles north of Rendlesham Forest another British UFO encounter took place, but this time it was the British police who witnessed and came in contact with UFOs. His experience in November 1980 is widely regarded as one of the most significant examples of an ‘alien abduction’ in the UK. It is certainly seminal, in that such claims were few and far between at the time it occurred, even in the USA. Like many other UFO reports, it relies on the testimony of a single witness. But Godfrey is an impressive witness. Everyone who has met him has been struck by the straightforward, matter-of-fact way he recounts his story. And this story, despite minor variations and inflation, has remained remarkably consistent over the years.

So when, early in 2008, the producers of Channel Five’s series Britain’s Closest Encounters asked David Clarke and Andy Roberts to take part in a documentary centered on Godfrey’s experience, they lept at the opportunity to look again at a classic British ‘close encounter’ case that had long fascinated them. Following the program, they were joined in further raking over the case, in protracted email exchanges, by Gary Anthony, Peter Brookesmith, and Jenny Randles. Jenny was part of the team from the Manchester UFO Research Assoc­iation (MUFORA) that investigated the case in the early 1980s, and she later wrote a detailed report of it in The Pennine UFO Mystery (Granada, 1983). Despite persistent wheedling, we were unable to persuade Alan Godfrey to respond to our inquiry.

The picture above is a CGI reconstruction of the UFO that PC Alan Godfrey encountered on the 28th November 1980.- Per illustrator David Sankey.

Alan Godfrey’s life and career are notable for having been entangled in some of Britain’s most unusual mysteries, including one of the most compelling UFO abduction incidents in UK history. Mr. Godfrey holds what can only be described as a heroic place in the world of international UFO studies and has informed conference organizers that this will be the last time he intends to speak on these experiences in a public forum. Not to be missed!.  Alan has confirmed this will be the last time he will EVER speak publicly on what happened.

The Storyline

Of the four-part documentary series, a Five spokesman said: “This installment looks at the case of Pc Alan Godfrey, who claimed to have seen a UFO while on patrol in Todmorden in 1980. “This film also hears first-hand accounts of other UFO sightings across the Pennines. ‘The sheer number of incidents over the years has earned the region the nickname UFO alley – but is there any truth to these stories?”