So Supernatural - ALIEN: Zigmund Adamski

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

In June 1980, police officer Alan Godfrey investigated the strange death of Zigmund Adamski. While his superiors eventually ruled the death an accident, it bore all the hallmarks of an alien abduction. 

Todd Merton, England is this picturesque town about 17 miles north of Manchester. It almost feels like stepping back in time. The town's most famous landmark is this 19th century church, and the region is dotted with all these old cotton and corn mills. But Todd Merton has an unexpected claim to fame. It's a hotspot for extraterrestrial activity. 10% of all UFO sightings in Great Britain are said to happen in or near Todmorden. The area experienced a frenzy of cattle mutilations, and people reportedly see spaceships like clockwork once every 21 months or so.

But the most famous set of incidents occurred in 1980. Two alleged alien abductions happened five months apart with the same police officer involved in both, and one of those incidents went fatally awry. This is the story of Zygmunt Adamski. This is Supernatural. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, I'm covering the bizarre case of Zygmunt Adamski. In June of 1980, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances.

Five months later, the officer investigating his case had a close encounter of his own, and he later realized there's a lot more to the story than he initially remembered. I have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. On June 11, 1980, a policeman named Alan Godfrey is on foot patrol in Toddmerton. That afternoon, he gets a call over the radio that someone found a dead body out in a local coal yard. When Alan and another cop, who I'll call Officer Wright, arrive at the scene, they find the corpse atop this 10-foot-tall pile of coal. It's steep and it's raining, so everything's extra slippery. At first, Alan isn't sure how he or his partner are supposed to get to the top, let alone how the deceased found his way up there in the first place. But after a bit of strategic

planning, Officer Wright climbs up some nearby rails and scrambles onto the coal heap to examine the body. And as soon as he gets to the top, he goes silent. Like, he can't even find the words to tell Alan what's wrong. So Alan decides to go up there and look for himself. Once he makes his way to the top of the pile, he sees exactly why Wright was speechless. The deceased man is in his mid-50s. His clothes are totally free of coal dust, which means he didn't scramble up that stack on his own. He'd get filthy if he tried. So Alan figures the guy didn't die here.

Someone must have dumped his body here post-mortem. He's wearing a suit but no shirt underneath. The jacket buttons aren't in the right holes and his pants don't really fit him properly. There's no wallet or ID with the body so good luck identifying this guy. But what really grabs Alan's attention is the look on the man's face. His eyes are frozen wide open and his face is contorted into an expression of pure fear. Like in his final moments, this guy saw something terrifying. Alan also notes that the victim's hair has been shaved or cut in this really haphazard way. It's short enough that Alan can see a few wounds on the guy's head and neck,

or more specifically, burn marks. They're pretty small, like no bigger than a penny, but there are several of them. They're arranged in a circle around the crown of this guy's head, almost like he was wearing a burning headpiece or something. As far as I can tell, these injuries aren't bad enough to have killed him, but they're definitely bizarre. Additionally, Alan sees an open wound on the base of the man's neck and there's some kind of gelatinous goo on it. At this point, Alan can only theorize about what happened. His primary theory is obviously that someone killed this guy and dumped his body. On the other hand, it's possible his death was an accident. Maybe the man got burned, someone tried to help him, and when that didn't work, the other person panicked and dropped

him off here. Either way, Alan's fairly certain this guy did not die of natural causes. But the autopsy tells a different story. The medical examiner concludes that the victim's only been dead for about eight to ten hours, which makes sense because the worker who found him is positive that the corpse wasn't in the coal yard when he did his morning rounds. There's no indication that the man was restrained or tortured. He doesn't have any serious or potentially fatal injuries. But the coroner does find evidence of a heart attack. So that, coupled with the terrified expression on the man's face, leads to one conclusion. The victim died of fright. Now, this doesn't totally rule out foul play.

Someone might have done something that terrified this guy so badly it triggered his heart attack. But there's other details that don't add up. Like, the examiner doesn't recognize the goo on the guy's head and neck. He's never seen anything like it before. So he sends a sample to the lab and the results come back inconclusive. Nobody can identify this stuff. And when it comes time to identify the deceased, it only gets stranger. Alan searches through missing persons reports until he finds one that matches the body. He appears to be a local 56-year-old coal miner

named Zygmunt Adamski, or Ziggy as his friends call him. Now, might be thinking okay he's a coal miner he turned up dead at a coal yard maybe this is just some kind of workplace accident right? Except Ziggy lives 20 miles away from this colliery and it's not the same one that he works at. In fact it's not even clear if Ziggy ever set foot in Todmorden before he turned up dead there. The last time Ziggy was seen alive was June 6th. That day, his wife sent him on a grocery run. He picked up some food, chatted with the shopkeeper, left for home, and then just vanished. And that was five full days before his body turned up. The weirdest thing is Ziggy's body only had about a day's worth of stubble. And the autopsy says he'd been dead for less than 10 hours. So for the five days he was missing, he must have been shaving regularly.

Which is odd because according to Ziggy's family, he isn't the sort of guy to just abandon them and rent a hotel room for the week. He's a devoted husband with a chronically ill wife, so he literally can't take off without warning. And his goddaughter's wedding was scheduled for the day after he went missing. Ziggy was supposed to walk her down the aisle. So Alan suspects something fishy is happening here. But his superiors just want to put this case to bed. After reviewing the autopsy report and the witness statements, there is no evidence of foul play.

Ziggy doesn't have any enemies or people who'd want him dead. So the police chief says, case closed. The death was natural. I've got to imagine this doesn't sit right with Alan. His gut's probably telling him there's more to this story. And five months later, he finally stumbles across the missing pieces. Ziggy's death wasn't an accident.

And his killers? They aren't human. Coming up, Alan has a strange encounter of his own. Now, back to the story. On November 28, 1980, Alan is working an overnight shift at the station when he gets this weird call. Supposedly, there's a herd of cows

wandering through a residential area. Now, on the surface, this isn't that strange. Todmorden is a rural area and there are cattle farms around. But it sounds like an entire herd must have escaped from somewhere. So Alan's going to try and wrangle them back to where they belong. He drives out into the dark to investigate but doesn't see anything. Eventually he shrugs it off and heads back to the station. But as soon as Alan returns, the phone rings again. It's another call by a completely different citizen complaining about cattle in their yard. At this point, Alan's thinking this has got to be a prank, until he gets a call from a local elderly woman who I'll call Meredith. Like everyone else, Meredith says there's a whole herd of cattle wandering around her home.

So Alan hops in his car, drives out to her address, and no cows. But Meredith's this sweet little old lady, not the kind of person who'd be involved in a hoax. So Alan questions her about it. And Meredith insists she definitely saw the livestock earlier, but they disappeared in this brilliant flash of light. Alan heads back to the station, but something about this mystery is bothering him. So around 5 a.m., Alan gets back into his car to go looking for the cows one final time. He turns onto this remote thoroughfare called Burnley Road. The streets are slick because it rained recently, but it's early enough that there isn't a lot of traffic to worry about. At least, not until Alan sees this large vehicle on the road ahead of him.

At first, Alan figures it's just a bus kind of blocking the road. But before he can make out more, he feels this weird pull from the object. Like it's physically drawing his car towards it. Once he's about 20 yards away, Alan puts his car in park and just sits there, looking at this object in front of him. And now he can tell it isn't parked on the road. It's hovering above it. It's shaped like a long domed saucer, about 20 feet wide and 14 feet tall. And it's spinning. Alan tries to call his department to report what he's seeing,

but neither his personal walkie or the car radio have a signal. Then this blinding light washes over him, almost like someone just snapped a picture with a flash on. Alan can't see a thing for what feels like a few seconds until the light fades away. When his vision comes back, he realizes he's about 60 feet down the street, which is weird because he's sure he'd been parked this whole time. It's almost like his car teleported. When he looks up, the ship is gone, but there's a dry spot on the road, as if the saucer had been shielding the ground from the rain. And there's this mess

of twigs and leaves in the road, like this ship churned up a bunch of debris before it took off. Which means Alan didn't imagine it. There's physical evidence here that something was here. So Alan's probably feeling a bit unnerved. To top it all off, when he gets back to the station, he realizes his shift is nearly over. Like, somehow he's missing at least 30 minutes of his day. Which is strange because that stretch of road where he had the encounter is only a five minutes drive from headquarters. Alan's curiosity is kicking in, so he corners another officer and is basically like, hey man, something pretty weird just happened to me. Can you come check this out to make sure I'm not like hallucinating?

So Alan and the other officer drive back out to Burnley Road. Alan estimates that it's only been a few minutes since his initial sighting and it's not raining anymore. So sure enough, the dry spot and all those swirled leaves are still there. But there's no other evidence to corroborate what Alan saw. Alan considers filing a formal report, but nobody else at the station is really taking his story seriously, so he figures there's probably nothing to gain from telling his superiors and he just drops it. But later that day, out of the blue, this brief flash of memory pops into Alan's head.

He remembers parking by that flying saucer. But then he has this new memory of putting his squad car in reverse to back away from it. And this doesn't make sense. Alan is sure that he never backed away from the ship. But then comes another inexplicable flash. He has this memory of climbing out of his car and wandering right past the vessel and into a nearby field, which again is weird because Alan's positive he never got out of his vehicle. On top of this, Alan discovers a burn mark on his left foot and his shoe is kind of ripped open. He doesn't remember doing anything to his foot or his shoe and he doesn't have any idea where the burn could have come from.

Eventually, Alan gets some much-needed validation when he hears big news through the grapevine. The same week as his sighting, six other police officers, presumably from other stations, see a similar flying saucer. The reports are all pretty vague, but the witnesses all spotted something hovering in remote areas outside of town, and then they watched the craft fly toward Todmorden. Now that people can corroborate his sighting, Allen formally reports it to his superiors, and they actually do take his statement seriously. This high-ranking inspector pulls Alan in for questioning. A little while after that, Alan hears from an officer from Manchester. But the officer isn't

there in an official capacity. As it turns out, he's just super into UFOs and alleged alien encounters. He even belongs to this UFO enthusiast group. So he asks Alan all about his experience, particularly the moment when he saw the bright light. Then the officer consults with his group, and they conclude that this is where Alan misplaced those 30 minutes. Now, this concept of lost time is actually extremely common in UFO encounters. Many witnesses report several minutes, hours, or even days passing in what feels like an instant.

And like most of them, Alan doesn't have any recollection of what happened to him during this missing half hour. All he has to go by are those occasional flashes of memory. And by now I think it's clear Alan is not the sort of guy to leave a mystery unsolved. So he takes some advice from one of the officer's UFO buddies, a guy named Harry Harris. Alan seeks out professional help from a couple of hypnotherapists named Professor Robert Blair and Dr. Joseph Jaffe. Alan doesn't want these doctors to judge him, so he doesn't mention anything about flying saucers or aliens when he first books his appointment. He only says that he's a police officer who had some kind of incident and needs help remembering the details. His first session is with Professor Blair on August 2nd, 1981.

Harry accompanies Alan and even brings a camera hoping to record the meeting, but Blair refuses to let Harry or his camera into the room. Once Alan and Blair are alone, the professor does his thing. Alan slips into a hypnotic trance, but when he wakes up, he has no memory of what happened in the session. It feels just like he dozed off. So Alan asks, like, hey, did we get anywhere? Except Blair literally refuses to answer. Later, he only replies to Harry saying, quote, something very weird happened to that young man. So, okay, not very reassuring, but Alan will not

drop this. He arranges for a follow-up appointment, but this time he insists on recording the session so he can listen afterwards. He also meets with another hypnotherapist, Dr. Jaffe, and records two of their appointments as well. He waits until all three tapes are made before he listens to any of them. And when he plays the reels back, they're shockingly consistent, enough that Alan has to admit that he could be recovering real lost memories. And those revelations completely defy reason. Coming up, Alan unlocks those missing 30 minutes. Now, back to the story. Eight months after the UFO encounter, Alan still has a half-hour gap in his memory of that morning. He undergoes hypnotherapy to try and remember what happened in those 30 minutes,

and here's what he uncovers. As soon as Alan sees the flying saucer, he gets out of his car in a daze. He approaches the ship, but then this wave of terror washes over him. He just wants to get away, so he runs back to his car and throws it in reverse. But once he tries to change gears, his car dies. Alan's a sitting duck. Out of nowhere, this bright beam of light illuminates the entire car, and Alan starts floating off the ground, rising up into the sky until he's inside the vessel.

There, Alan encounters a tall humanoid figure. He has a full beard and wears this billowing white robe, like a character out of a biblical painting. He introduces himself as Joseph. But he's not alone. There are these robots in the room, eight of them. And it's hard to picture what they look like because Alan's descriptions are pretty vague. He just says that they're three feet tall and they look like lamps or maybe they're wearing lampshades on their heads. It's not super clear. Beyond that, he'll only describe them as horrible. Now, Joseph and these horrible robots grab Alan and force him onto an examination table.

They rip off Alan's shoes and socks, which could explain how his shoe got torn and where that burn on his foot came from. Next, Joseph touches Alan on the forehead. And something about this memory is really upsetting for him. I don't know why exactly, because Alan won't even talk about it to the therapist. And this is actually where Dr. Jaffe cuts the session off. Like he is that worried about Alan's mental well-being that he decides it's best not to continue, at least not that day. In a later session though, Alan does remember what happens next. Joseph applies some lightweight plastic bracelet to his arm and leg. Then the robots plug themselves into the cuffs, which somehow gives Joseph access to Alan's memories.

Afterward, Alan finds himself back in his patrol car out on the street. And the saucer's gone. He doesn't remember how he got back into his car, even with the help from his hypnotists. Look, I know this is all bonkers, but Alan doesn't want to discount these recovered memories, especially once he starts doing research into other UFO narratives and realizes he has a lot in common with other alien abductees.

But this is a lot to accept on Faith alone, especially given how little evidence we have. I mean, even after multiple hypnotherapy sessions, Alan still doesn't remember any of this when he wakes up. Everything we know about the encounter comes from the recordings of his sessions. And Alan's tapes don't exist anymore. It's unclear if he ever made a copy, but Alan says that he misplaced his tapes at some point. And he can't explain how or when he lost them, only that it happened. Which, okay, we're not talking about like a missing sock here. It's a little hard to digest that he lost the only bit of evidence he has from these therapy sessions. But Alan realizes how suspicious this

all sounds. He's not even sure if he should believe his own account. Even today, he admits it's very possible that he did just imagine the whole thing. But it's hard to dismiss Alan's account entirely. He has no motive to make all of this up. In fact, at some point after Alan goes public about his possible abduction, he's pressured into retiring. He doesn't say much about the circumstances, but he's hinted that his UFO theories are embarrassing to the department. So you'd think he'd walk back those claims if he didn't think they were true on some level. Plus, I keep coming back to the man who kicked this all off, Ziggy Adamski. Even if Alan made up everything, Ziggy's death was still very real. To this day, nobody knows what happened to him between the time he left the grocer on June 6th and when Alan examined his body on June 11th.

It's impossible to say how he ended up on the top of that coal pile, with his wallet missing and his jacket fastened incorrectly. But every day between his disappearance and when he was found, people in and around Todmorden reportedly saw mysterious lights in the sky. And one month to the day after Ziggy's corpse was discovered, a pair of police officers watched a flying saucer hover in an area outside of Todmorden for about an hour. As far as I can tell, there's only one explanation that fits all the facts. Ziggy was abducted by the same aliens that took Alan. The lost time could explain how he only had a day's worth of beard growth,

even though he'd been missing for almost a week. That expression of terror might have been his reaction to Joseph and his horrible robots. And maybe the lab couldn't identify that goo on his neck because it didn't come from planet Earth. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.