Moon, stars and planets

January has seen a rare event in the sky with planets lined up in the week of the year's first full moon. The moon is bright and a January moon is called "wolf moon".
It's the coldest time of the year, with a severe spell of winter storms, floods and chilling snows in the Northern hemisphere, but drought and fires in the Southern hemisphere.
As the winter of ice and fire enters the transition of linear planets across the night sky. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter visible in an alignment, a row of five luminous planets during twilight.
We've lost many great people including "Ziggy Stardust" David Bowie (who appeared in The Man Who Fell To Earth and Labyrinth) and Alan Rickman (who played Professor Snape in all of the Harry Potter films).
And we watch astronauts such as Tim Peake live among stars on board ISS, inspiring a new generation of children.
There's been discoveries including Planet Nine and finding alien DNA in humans.



 

Todmorden

Another mysterious dark place in England is Todmorden. Located in the green Upper Calder Valley of West Yorkshire, northern England, near the Pennines and River Calder. Calder, an ancient Celtic name for "violent water," referring to River Calder. Yet the name Todmorden comes from variations of Anglo Saxon words such as Totmerden. It means means "death woods".
It was a place of human sacrifice in prehistory. Digs found Bronze Age relics with decapitated human skulls. Since the Middle Ages, the area became farmland and later in the Industrial Revolution, a rise in mills and producer of cotton as well as deaths. There have been records of murders there, and is wealthy in hauntings. It's where the last public hanging in Britain took place. In recent times the location of the serial killer Harold Shipman, an infamous doctor who killed his patients.
 Also cases of UFO sightings and abductions, including the story of Zigmund Adamski who was missing for five days. A policeman named Alan Godfrey found the dead body of Zigmund Adamski beside a railway track in Todmoren. A coroner concluded that Adamski died of a heart attack but there were some burn marks on him but his clothes were undamaged. Scientists could not identify an ointment on his body leading others to believe that he was abducted by aliens. Yet some conclude that he was probably murdered by bitter relatives who he had fallen out with earlier. The coroner was "mystified" by the case itself, and further investigations into the death of Adamski were closed.
The policeman Alan Godfrey, later witnessed a UFO following him, and he experienced missing time. Under hypnosis, he recollected that he was abducted by aliens. The so-called aliens looked like robots and there was a large spectral black dog present inside the UFO. His wife also had similar experiences and became pregnant during this time.
Beside this famous case, there have been many UFO sightings. Todmorden is home to legends of a pack of demonic black dogs who howl at the moon and search for people to kill. Bacup Road is a sighting of an unusual ghostly cat. There are too many ghosts and spirits to list but that site is a paranormal hotspot.
It's ancient features include a ring cairn, Blackheath Circle on a hilltop in Todmorden. The site has legends of fae folk, but in 1982 a woman saw strange lights up there and experienced missing time.

Links:

Todmorden on Wikipedia       
Todmorden "UFO alley"
The Northern Antiquarian - Todmorden