What Planet Am I On? (15 page)

In the car on the way back to Manchester, Travis tells me about some of the weirdest things that have happened to him through his fame. He tells me about a Swedish death-metal band called Hypocrisy that have written a song about Travis called ‘Fire in the Sky’. I pull it up on YouTube and watch it with Travis, and we have a bit of a laugh because it’s pretty bloody awful. It has those deep rasping vocals that I wouldn’t call singing, because you haven’t a clue what they’re saying. You can’t pick out a word – you wouldn’t even know it’s called ‘Fire in the Sky’ – but we Googled the lyrics and it was all about Travis’s experience.

Travis also tells me about a few other songs that have been written about him, including ‘Why’d They Had to Let Me Out in Tucson’ by Lewis Wickham, an old
country and western tune that was written just after the incident in 1975. It didn’t happen in Tuscon, but old Lewis Wickham was told it did. Travis also said there’s a song by Pete Kozak, also called ‘Fire in the Sky’. I had no idea there were songs about Travis, but it’s not that surprising given than he is the most famous abductee ever.

HOPEFULLY YOU’VE GOT
the idea by this point that although there are a certain amount of loons in the UFO business, I’m not out to take the piss out of anyone. There are so many wild and wacky stories out there, but I wanted to make sure the ones we concentrated on were fascinating – the ones that couldn’t be explained away because they were told by some prime nutters living in cloud cuckoo land.

After our adventures in North Yorkshire with the Deverow family, the next day we’re off to West Yorkshire to investigate an incident that happened back in 1980 in Todmorden. This part of the Pennines has had quite a few sightings over the years – the Calder Valley has become known as ‘UFO Alley’ to some people due to a wave of sightings that date back as far as the 1970s. I find it a
pretty odd part of the world anyway. It’s quite desolate but pretty beautiful in a raw way.

First, we have to film some links for a Facebook page – just one of those things you have to do in this day and age. As I’ve said, I don’t have a Facebook page myself – can you imagine the nutters it would attract if I did? – but the TV series has a Facebook page so they want me to record a few pieces to camera, just saying, ‘Hi, I’m Shaun Ryder, blah blah’, which is easy enough. Apart from the fact that it’s pissing down. Our director is from Texas and our sound guy is Canadian, and even though they both live over here, they live down south and can’t quite believe how grim the weather is. I’m like, mate, the weather is like this for ten months of the year in this part of the world, from Rochdale down the valley to Todmorden – it always seems to be at least drizzling. Peter Kay calls it ‘that fine rain that soaks you through’ and it is, it’s deceptive, and it means you’re always a bit cold and damp. The sound guy complains that ‘this rain and wind just permeates you’. I promise you it’s colder in Todmorden than it was up the Andes, certainly today.

I nail these pieces to camera pretty quickly and then we drive back into the centre of Todmorden. We’re here to investigate one of the UK’s most renowned UFO incidents, but first we want to gen up on all the reports of the incident from the time, so me and Travis nip into Tod library to discover whether the local papers hold any clues. Weird gaffs, libraries, especially nowadays. Who goes to a
library now, when everything is available online? Having said that, the old dears who run Todmorden Library and knew we were coming are super helpful. They’ve even arranged some tea and coffee for us in their staff room, where there is a computer that is so old school it has got a floppy-disc drive. Looks like it should be in a museum rather than a library. We’re not using that to search on today, though – we’re going even more old school and using microfiche.

When the incident happened it was first reported in the
Todmorden News & Advertiser
, so Travis and me look up the articles on microfiche. I’ve never used microfiche before but you see reporters and police using it to look at old newspapers in films. I didn’t really think people still looked things up on microfiche in the real world; you presume everything is archived online nowadays, don’t you? Can’t we just bloody Google it? Then again, no disrespect, but I suppose the
Todmorden News & Advertiser
is not exactly the
New York Times
, so maybe there’s not the demand.

While we’re waiting for the librarians to set it up for us, I tell Travis that when I saw one of the earliest filmed interviews with him, I thought he looked like a man with post-traumatic stress disorder. Travis says that’s not surprising because he was shell-shocked by what had happened. He’s a pretty chilled guy now though, Travis. Almost a little bit Zen, I think you could say. He still seems pretty affected by it, but I suppose you would if you’d been abducted by aliens.

I ask Travis if he’d heard of the Todmorden case back home in the States and he said no, probably because he had enough to cope with just dealing with his own case and what happened to him. He kept himself to himself for years and in the end tried to ignore what was going on in the ufology world. But he had read up on the case once he knew we were going to be investigating it.

Anyway, the old dears at the library show us how to use the microfiche. It’s pretty weird at first, but I soon get the hang of it and I find what we’re looking for. There are actually two cases that happened in Todmorden in 1980, but there’s one man who connects them both.

The headline for the first news story in the
Todmorden News & Advertiser
is ‘Riddle of body found in Goods Yard’.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, 11 June 1980, a man’s body was found lying on top of a big coal tip in a goods yard in Todmorden. There were no footmarks to indicate that anyone had climbed the twelve-foot high heap of coal to put the body there, or that the bloke had climbed up there himself and then died. It was as if it had been dropped from the sky somehow.

Two Todmorden coppers, PC Alan Godfrey and a colleague, arrived at the scene at 4.10 p.m. The body was clean, as if the man had just had a shower, but there were weird marks on the back of his head, neck and shoulders where the skin had been burnt off. The precise cause of the burns was unknown but it was possibly some sort of corrosive agent.

On seeing the burns, and finding his wallet, watch and shirt missing (the rest of his clothing was intact), Alan and his pal immediately suspected a crime, and the police investigation began. In the first news report, the day after this poor geezer was found, there wasn’t any mention of a possible link to UFOs. It was just a pretty straightforward news report. The UFO link came later.

No one had even worked out who the poor dude was yet as the report said, ‘Police were yesterday trying to discover the identity of the man who was described as having a shaven head probably because of a skin complaint from which he suffered.’ The official line from the Old Bill to the press was, ‘We are not applying any suspicious circumstances to this body yet’, but they always bloody say that, don’t they? If a dead body with weird marks on it found semi-clothed on top of a massive coal heap isn’t suspicious then I don’t know what is.

The poor dude was later identified as a fifty-seven-year-old Polish coal miner called Zygmunt Adamski. Top name or what? Some handle that. I don’t think he was related to Adamski who had the Number One with Seal in 1990, who I played with one or twice with Happy Mondays. This Adamski – or Zyggy as I started calling him because it was easier – was from Tingley, near Wakefield, which is about thirty miles away. Apparently, old Zyggy was a normal loving family man, and he’d popped out to buy some potatoes (that’s what the press said, I’m not taking the piss) for dinner on the previous Friday afternoon and never came back. The coroner said the
actual cause of death was a heart attack. He reckoned that the weird burns marks on the back of his head, shoulders and neck, where the skin had been peeled away, were caused two days before he died. There were also traces of a greasy substance on the burns, possibly an ointment that had been used to treat the wounds. Apparently they sent it away to be analysed at some lab or wherever they send things, but whoever the geezer was who analysed it had no fucking idea – he’d never seen anything like it.

The specialists reckoned he’d been dead for about twenty-four hours before he was found, and he only had one day’s growth of beard. The whole thing was weird. His wounds were two days old but he only had one day’s growth of beard? What, so he’d had a shave after his head and shoulders were burnt? Zyggy’s family also said he had thick black hair when he went missing, but his head was shaved when he was found.

To top that, his clothes were fairly clean. Which they wouldn’t be if he’d clambered up a massive coal heap. And the lack of any footmarks up the coal heap was very strange. Have you ever tried to climb up a coal heap? It’s impossible. Imagine trying to climb up a massive coal heap carrying a dead body. It just isn’t happening mate, so there’s no way someone else carried and dumped poor old Zyggy up there. Weird.

The medical examination concluded that death occurred somewhere between 11.15 a.m. and 1.15 p.m. that day, and the body had been on the coal tip beside a busy railway line for perhaps three or four hours before
it was discovered. His widow believed that he had been kidnapped and tortured. The inquest returned a verdict of ‘death caused by heart failure due to a shock or fright’.

To this day the death of old Zyggy remains unsolved. He had been missing for five days when his body was discovered on top of the coal heap; the same amount of time Travis disappeared for. When they did the post-mortem, the coroner, James Turnbull, said it was ‘the most bizarre case he’d ever come across’, and I imagine coroners have seen some bizarre things in their time.

Turnbull said, ‘The question of where he was before he died and what led to his death just could not be answered.’

As I said earlier, there is a long history of weird activity along the Calder Valley, and there had even been some weird orange-glowing balls spotted near Todmorden around this time. The incident was linked by some to UFOs.

This is where the story gets slightly weirder. A few months after Zyggy was found, PC Alan Godfrey, one of the coppers who had attended the scene, had an experience of his own.

Alan was on the nightshift on 28 November 1980 when he saw a UFO on Burnley Road, near Todmorden Cricket Club. He was on his own, but other coppers also reported seeing something similar. Three coppers from
Halifax were up on the moors and spotted this bright blue light, which moved very quickly from north to south, then from east to west.

Just before dawn Alan was driving along Burnley Road near the park on the edge of Todmorden, looking for some cows that had been reported missing. Around 5 a.m., he was about to give up searching for the cows and head back to base to finish his shift when he saw ‘a large mass’ a few hundred yards ahead. At first, he thought it was an early morning bus coming towards him, as he knew there was one due about that time that took workers to their jobs in town. But when he got within twenty-five yards of the object, he realized it was not a vehicle on the road, but a craft hovering five feet off the ground. He tried calling for backup but his car radio wasn’t working, and his personal radio was also ‘completely dead’. Alan could also see that the craft was emitting some kind of force that was disrupting the trees on either side of the road, a bit like a helicopter, but it made no noise whatsoever and he couldn’t feel any vibration in the police car.

For safety reasons, Alan stayed in the car and started to sketch the craft on his notepad. He described it as a diamond shape, with the bottom half rotating and the top stationary. But as he finished his sketch, he realized there had been a ‘jump in time’; he suddenly found himself driving the car again, approximately twenty or thirty yards past the point at which he met the object. Alan came to the conclusion he had been abducted. He retraced his steps to check out where he had seen the
craft and the road was dry, despite the fact that the rest of the road was wet with rain.

He went back to the police station and reported the incident, although some of his colleagues were sceptical.

The cows Alan had been looking for, by the way, were only found after sun-up, mysteriously relocated in a rain-soaked field without hoofmarks to indicate their passage. Alan reckoned the only way they could have got there would have been if they had been ‘dropped from the sky’.

It was all very odd. The report in the paper had the headline, ‘Amazing encounter in Calder Valley – May the Force be with you’.

Some of the press made the connection between Alan’s sighting and old Zyggy’s disappearance, and claimed there must be some extraterrestrial link between the two. Later, some fellow police officers suggested to Alan that he should undergo regression therapy to try and work out what had happened during his missing time. Despite initial reservations, he eventually agreed to do it. There’s a video of the regression, which I’ve seen, and it’s quite odd. Fair play to Alan, I’m not sure I’d want people to watch the video if that was me in it. He looks quite disturbed in the film – he’s clearly really uncomfortable with what’s going on, although it’s hard to tell how much of that is down to what he’s apparently remembering, and how much of it is down to him not being happy with the whole regression thing. It’s in black and white as well, so it looks like a mixture between a very early episode of
Doctor Who
and a pilot episode of
Juliet Bravo
.