Ghosts and the Todmorden UFO

By Brian Clegg

I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for (real life) ghost stories and UFO sightings. When I was a youngster, my dad got books on the Borley Rectory hauntings out of the library and they fascinated me. As a result I was tempted to take a look at a podcast covering ghost sightings and other weird occurrences that’s been running on the BBC for some time: Uncanny. 

As yet I’m not totally convinced by the podcast, though I will give a few more episodes a go. Most have been about ghosts, though I’ve also taken a dip into the Todmorden UFO episode.

Overall, the reason I’m not convinced it’s something to stick with is a combination of over-dramatisation and the unbalanced balance syndrome. Perhaps inevitably because of the subject, there’s more than the usual level of spooky background music and dire situation sounds. Irritating, but I can live with it. However, the syndrome is more worrying. It’s the same problem the BBC used to have over climate change. In the early days of reporting this, for ‘balance’ they would always have an expert on one side and a fringe climate denier with no real qualifications to argue against its existence.

They don’t do this any more for climate change, but on Uncanny, pretty well every episode seems to feature a real expert giving the sceptical viewpoint and a random enthusiast for ghosts with no obvious reason for being there. This was even more dramatic with the Todmorden UFO story, where the expert was faced with some bloke from Todmorden who set up a support group for people who think they’ve seen something odd.

Let me take you into the Todmorden story in a bit more detail. Todmorden is a small town surrounded by moorland, just on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines. I grew up in and nearby Littleborough – Todmorden’s mirror alternate, a handful of miles away on the Lancashire side of the moors, so I know Todmorden quite well. Back in 1980, a police officer in Todmorden had a couple of weird experiences.

Firstly, with a colleague, he discovered a body on top of a coal heap by Todmorden station. The body was oddly dressed, seemed to have had its hair shorn and head branded, had on odd wound it its neck with some sort of green gunk on it and had no obvious marks from being dragged up the coal heap. The dead man turned out to be called Zigmund Adamski*.

A few months later, the same policeman, following up overnight reports of a herd of cows being sighted in a housing estate but disappearing before they could be found, witnessed a UFO. It was floating a few feet over a field, rotating anticlockwise while the foliage nearby was blown clockwise. Soon after, it disappeared in a flash of light. He then found himself some distance up the same road, driving, even though the last thing he remembered was being parked and observing the UFO. He also discovered the herd of cows in a playing field that was fenced and gated. 

Later a ‘man from the ministry’ turned up at the police station and told the policeman not to discuss his experience with anyone (somewhat belatedly, given it had all been in the papers). This unpleasant chap turned up several times, apparently keeping an eye on the poor policeman.

What the podcast lacked in looking into this was any real sense of investigative journalism. The former policeman and the experts were not asked any searching questions. A few things jumped out. The policeman had described the UFO as diamond shaped with no windows in its main body. He even drew a picture, as he had been taught to do at car accidents. But in his picture, the UFO had the more classical elliptical shape with large windows around the rim.

The real expert pointed out an obvious issue with this. In Todmorden at the time there was a company building a kind of ‘house of the future’ called the Futuro. There was one on display in the middle of the town. And the policeman’s sketch bore a distinct resemblance to a Futoro. The pro-UFO ‘expert’ said that the policeman would be very familiar with the Futuro, as if this made it less likely to be an influence, but surely if his testimony was flawed in some way, it absolutely would be the influence. In the interview with the policeman on the podcast, no mention was made of the Futuro.

There were several other issues, but the biggest one that wasn’t touched on at all was that the former policeman said that the experience had ruined his life. He left the police. His marriage broke up. He said that he was drinking a whole bottle of scotch a day. But there was no suggestion that maybe he was already drinking too much at the time of the experience – perhaps a more likely explanation for his experience than UFOs.

Inevitably, the dead body was linked to the UFO, suggesting Adamski had been abducted by aliens. But there were plenty of more mundane reasons for the oddities if he had been victim of some kind of gangland punishment. As for the mysterious ‘man from the ministry’, the expert did point out it was much more likely that this was an internal investigator from West Yorkshire Police, a force that had had terrible press over failings in the Yorkshire Ripper case and was doing all it could to avoid more media humiliation.

All in all, a weak attempt at what could have been a really good investigative programme.

For perhaps a better experience that the podcast, if ghost hunting interests you, I’d recommend taking a look at Haunted by Alice Vernon, while for a more effective UFO investigation see How UFOs Conquered the World.

* I can’t believe anyone doing a piece about this story could fail (as the podcast did) to point out that Adamski is a surname that is historically linked to UFO sightings thanks to the work of one of the early UFO abduction exploiters, George Adamski. Presumably just a coincidence, but an odd one.

Image: Futoro from Wikipedia by J-P Kärnä

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.

Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2026/08/ghosts-and-todmorden-ufo.html