It’s easy for most folk to laugh off UFO sightings. Sceptics, driven by their obsession with logic and known science are always pretty quick to do so. Usually, it’s fish in a barrel stuff. So a guy saw some flashing green lights when he went out for a drive one night, did he? Big whoop. Could’ve been anything. Maybe it was a plane. Or a weather balloon. Or some stars. The fella might’ve been drunk. Or just plain making it up.

We get it. One person’s testimony isn’t exactly the strongest primary evidence. But a whole group of people’s testimonies? Well, that’s something else altogether. We’re referring here, of course, to mass UFO sightings.

Mass sightings are uncommon but not unheard of. When they occur, they tend to make a pretty big impact on the place that plays host to the encounter. Take Tinley Park for example.

Tinley Park is a small village in Cook County, Illinois. Some 30 miles south of Chicago, the place is home to around 50,000 people and was BusinessWeek’s 2009 ‘Best Place to Raise a Family in the US’. It’s a tight-knit community that’s become known for its incredible mass UFO incident. 

October 31st, 2004. Halloween. 77 different people reported seeing lights in the sky which none could explain. One of the 77 described the sighting as: 'Three horizontal equally spaced red lights in the sky, way too big to be an aircraft.'

The lights weren't just visible in the exact area of Tinley Park. Locals in neighbouring Oak Forest, Mokena, Orland Park, Frankfort and Evergreen Park also witnessed the strange phenomena. The lights were said to hover in the sky quite still until they shot off and disappeared some 20 minutes later.

It turns out it wasn’t an isolated incident, either. August 21st of that same year saw multiple residents reporting similar sightings. October 1st of the next year also had several serious UFO encounters registered. As did October 31st, 2006. Weirdly, Halloween again...

'The Tinley Park sighting was one of the best mass sightings ever recorded. The 911 centres were being bombarded in the south suburbs,' says Sam Maranto, the sitting president of the Illinois Chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). 'The recording doesn’t lie and we have enough video evidence to exclude many other things.'

'The night was beautiful, people were outside, there were parties all over. There were a lot of people outside that night, hundreds if not thousands. People were able to see and record what was going on,' Maranto goes on.

'Generally, people who see something, at best you get less than 1 per cent of the reporting. But here you have a mass sighting and many people reporting it. They were saying: "Hey — my neighbour saw it." Groups of people... There was a block party during one of them, they all saw it. They were pretty grounded and doing the right thing in getting another person to look too, to get that person's perspective.'

Maranto is convinced that the sightings were legitimate. And, with The Tinley Park Lights being one of the highest=profile and most investigated mass sightings in history (and are still yet to be fully debunked), we can see why.

'Those weren't the only sightings that year,' he says. 'But here in Tinley Park, we had hundreds of people seeing these two events. People said multiple illuminations, red lights, unusual illuminations first in a triangle and then moving around. It was not a hoax. We have analyzed this stuff. And many other people analyzed it. If it was a hoax, it was a really good one. But we discounted it.'

There's something about that area of the state of Illinois and that time, it seems. Another mass UFO sighting event was recorded at the Chicago O’Hare International Airport back in 2006. Many doubters have tried to explain the large scale sightings as balloons, flares or even model aeroplanes. 

With two of the four mass sightings having taken place on Halloween, it’s tempting to think something very strange was going on some 15-odd years ago in Illinois. And, well, it was. Either hundreds of folk got together and decided to all tell the world the exact same lie for no good reason… Or some kind of strange aerial craft danced around the skies on multiple occasions. Either way, if you ask us? It’s seriously odd indeed.

“We have already opened our doors to monsters. They have arrived.”

– Terry Lovelace, from his book Incident at Devil’s Den: A True Story

Listen to his story and you’d be forgiven for dismissing Terry Lovelace as something of a crank. Find out more about the man and even the most cynical of sceptics may start to doubt their initial disbelief.

It’s hard to go all in and take Mr. Lovelace’s tale as 100% accurate. Only, to do so, you’d have to rewrite almost everything you know about how the world - and, indeed, universe - works. If there’s even some truth in his testimony, however… Well, we’ll let you decide...

He’s 67 now. A retired attorney and former Assistant Attorney General, the man spent decade after decade as a noted and respected member of his community. But for more than 40 of those years he harboured a secret. One he, probably quite rightly, assumed would destroy his career and standing in society were he to reveal it.

Terry Lovelace was, he says, repeatedly abducted by aliens, fitted with a tracking device and experimented on. His story starts way back in 1977.

In the summer of ‘77, Terry was working as an EMT for the US Air Force at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. One weekend in June, he and a colleague took leave for a couple of days and nights and went to enjoy Devil’s Den State Park in the northwestern Arkansas Ozarks. As they chatted and ate over the campfire on the first evening, Terry and Toby suddenly saw a blue light whizz into view. Soon, the craft from which the light emanated came into view. It was some five storeys high, a black triangular prism. A laser beam shot out and bathed the men in light.

Terry described in greater detail in a passage in a book he wrote about what happened on that fateful night: 

'They slowly rotated as if on an axis. All the while they maintained their perfect triangular configuration. The points of light grew brighter as they crawled upward. The triangular formation grew larger and sped up a little, blocking out entire fields of stars as it climbed. It came to a halt directly over our heads, it was like someone cut a giant triangle in the sky.'

Both then awoke some time later, the craft now hovering in the field next to them. Under it, what appeared to be a group of children. 'What are these kids doing out here in the middle of the night?' Terry asked Toby. 'They aren’t little kids. Don’t you remember they took us and they hurt us?' Toby replied.

Vague memories of being aboard the ship flicked through Lovelace’s mind, but he couldn’t properly piece together what had happened. Both men suffered quite severe burns and dehydration and were hospitalised for a couple of nights. They were soon interviewed by special agents from the US Air Force's Security Police, specifically their OSI (Office of Special Investigations) division. After that, for the sake of their jobs, reputation and sanity, the two friends decided not to talk to anyone else about what had happened to them.

The bizarre and terrifying incident may well have gone to both mens’ graves were it not for a routine X-ray back in 2012. During the procedure, doctors found something implanted deep into the tissue: a strange piece of metal with two wires attached. An implant, perhaps?

'I’ve had 40 years’ of nightmares. I still have a phobia of crossing open ground. I still sleep with a light on and a gun beside my bed.' While still a somewhat tortured figure, Lovelace does - at least to some degree - feel vindicated by recent acknowledgements and admissions made by the United States government and military regarding UFOs. 'I’ve got a long list of people that I’m going to email and say, "I told you so."'

How much truth there is to this specific story it’s impossible to truly know. All we can say is that Lovelace is a pretty reliable witness and stands to gain very little from lying so brazenly. That said, who knows? Perhaps the man merely has a very vivid imagination.

A pretty market town deep in the Pennines sat just on the Yorkshire side of the border between those two great rival counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire, Todmorden is the stuff of postcards and biscuit tins. It’s more than just rolling green hills and echoes of old Hovis adverts, though. Much more.

Yorkshire’s something of a UFO hotspot in Britain. In the past decade, more than a thousand sightings of unidentified flying objects have been reported to UK authorities there. Most are interesting but explicable. Some are intriguing and less obvious. While a very small amount are downright bizarre. 

And then there’s the Todmorden Incidents of 1980.

Some forty-odd years ago, the West Yorkshire town of Todmorden was known for little more than being just another picturesque settlement in the northwest of England. Perhaps some folk knew of the town’s corn mills, but that was about it. Until 1980, that is.

In November ‘80, police officer Alan Godfrey was called to a minor incident in the town: some cattle had got loose and were wandering around lost. As he drove up the Burnley Road looking for the cows he saw an unusually bright light. Focusing on it, Godfrey claims to have been able to clearly make out the object to be a dome-shaped metallic disc with visible windows. 20ft high, by 15ft wide. Classic flying saucer stuff.

Godfrey attempted to radio the sighting in, but his radio equipment wouldn’t work. According to him, the UFO disappeared and he awoke some way down the road, 30 minutes later. His boot was split in half and his foot was red raw and sore. After hypnotic regression, the police officer asserted that he had been taken aboard the craft and ‘examined medically’ by ‘small beings with beards’. Again, classic alien abduction stuff. Well, apart from the beard thing, perhaps.

That’s not even the weirdest part of the story.

Officer Godfrey had, some six months previously, been involved in the investigation of what can only be described as an incredibly weird murder. On June 6th 1980, 56-year-old Polish miner Zigmund Adamski left his house in Tingley, a small town 20 miles from Todmorden, never to be seen alive again. Five days later he would be found dead on top of a pile of coal in Todmorden itself.

Adamski was wearing a suit that was fastened incorrectly, his hair was oddly short and badly cut and he was clean-shaven, despite having been missing for almost a week. He was covered in odd burn marks and a strange green ointment which toxicology tests were unable to identify. Some of those who saw Adamski’s body would go on to claim that his face was stricken in shocked horror. How true that particular detail is is anyone’s guess.

No one was ever arrested for the crime and it’s still unsolved. James Turnbull, the coroner, would later call the Adamski case "one of the most puzzling cases I've come across in 25 years."

Of course, after his close encounter, Alan Godfrey had his own theories as to what happened to Zigmund Adamski. While other people preferred to dismiss the death as a bizarre suicide, death by a lightning strike or even assassination by the KGB.

 That’s not it, however. Todmorden isn’t just a historical curio in terms of British ufology. The events of 1980 are odd and unsettling enough but since then? There have been frequent - and consistent - reports of strange lights and shapes in the sky. Some of them, again rather oddly, by police officers. Reports released in 2019 detail many sightings, including:

● 'Six lights that split, at one point becoming eight lights, that were orange and red in colour'

● 'A very bright steel blue flashing light high in the sky'

● 'A hovering object that looked like the planet Saturn, with a ring around it, red portholes and four blue lights.'

What makes Todmorden and its surrounding area such a beacon for unusual aerial phenomena? More to the point, what on Earth happened to Zigmund Adamski? And did it even occur on Earth…?