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In the mid-1950s, two families in rural Kentucky made headlines across the country when they told police
that their home had been approached by small, metallic creatures that could not be killed or scared away.
The media coverage of the incident helped draw attention to neglected reports
of UFO landings and entity encounters, and the strange, goblin-like creatures excited the public imagination.
At the same time, however, hostile and sensationalized reporting on the incident served to discredit
stories of contact with anomalous entities, and helped erect the veil of ridicule that now surrounds them.
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In the fall of 1955, 50-year-old Glennie Lankford lived in a simple farmhouse about 12 k.m.
north of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in the small hamlet of Kelly.
She owned a small farm about 400 meters from each of her nearest neighbours,
and lived with her son from her first marriage, J.C. Sutton, who ran the farm, and his wife, Alene,
as well as her three children from her second marriage: Lonnie, Charlton, and Mary.
They kept a few pigs, a dog, and some farm cats.
The family had no radio, phone, or TV, and their only water came from a well in the backyard.
On the evening on August 21, 1955, Mrs. Lankford had a number of guests staying at the house:
Elmer Sutton, the eldest son from her first marriage, and his wife, Vera,
as well as Elmer's friend, Billy Ray Taylor, and his wife, June.
Alene's brother, O.P. Baker, was also staying the night, for a total of 11 people.
Mrs. Lankford allowed no liquor in the house, and no one was drinking.
Around 7 p.m., Billy Ray went out to the well for a drink of water
and saw a bright, silvery "saucer"- shaped object gliding silently through the air.
It flew 9 -12 meters off the ground, and left behind a trail of multi-coloured exhaust.
The object flew in from the south and stopped over the neighbour's field to the north of the farm.
It then descended straight to the ground and appeared to settle into a gully some 90m from the house,
though Billy Ray could not see it land through the trees.
He ran inside and told the others that he'd seen a flying saucer, but everyone told him it was just a meteor.
Within an hour of the sighting, the dog began barking violently,
and Billy Ray and Elmer went out the back door to investigate.
The dog ran under the house with its tail between its legs,
and the men noticed an eerie glow approaching from the field.
As it came nearer, they could make out the figure of a small creature, about a meter tall,
with a large, round head resting directly on its shoulders,
and long arms that reached almost to the ground.
It had huge hands with talons on its fingers, and large, floppy, ears.
Its eyes pointed 45 degrees out from centre, and emitted a yellow light.
Its upper body was muscular, but its legs were thin and spindly, and had no knees.
The entire creature was silver in colour, and gave off an eerie glow in the darkness.
The creature walked slowly to the house with its arms raised to the sky,
so Elmer grabbed his 20-gauge, single-barrel shotgun, and Billy Ray grabbed a .22.
They moved inside the back door and shot it when it came within 6 meters of the house.
The men claimed that the creature did a backwards somersault,
then fell to all fours and ran back into the weeds around the yard.
Billy Ray went back inside with Elmer, who gave his gun to J.C. and grabbed the 12-gauge shotgun.
Billy Ray and J.C. then shot a creature peering in through the window,
which also flipped backwards and ran away.
The men went out the front door to see if they'd killed the thing,
but as Billy Ray walked out past the overhanging roof, a clawed hand reached down and touched his hair.
Alene pulled Billy Ray back inside, and Elmer ran out and shot the creature on the roof.
Billy Ray then noticed a second creature on a branch of a maple tree in the yard, and the men shot it.
They said the creature didn't fall, but floated to the ground,
so they shot it again, and it scurried off into the weeds.
At the same time, another creature appeared from the northwest.
Elmer shot it at almost point-blank range, and said that it sounded like shooting a metal bucket.
Later, the men shot another creature on the roof.
When they hit it, the creature floated 12m across the yard and landed on the back fence,
then scurried away when they shot it again.
The men gave up on trying to kill the things, but for the next three hours,
the creatures repeatedly approached the house, climbed over the roof, and peered in through the windows.
The witnesses noticed that the creatures only approached in the cover of darkness,
and did not step into the glow cast from the yard lights.
They had two distinct forms of locomotion - when approaching the house,
they walked slowly with an upright posture.
After being shot, however, they dropped on all fours,
and "ran" away by propelling themselves with their arms, rather than their legs.
The beings seemed to give off more of a glow when shot, and even when simply shouted at.
There were never more than two of them seen at once.
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By about 11 o'clock, the group was becoming hysterical,
so they piled into the two vehicles on the premise and drove to the Hopkinsville police station.
The officers on duty remarked that everyone looked to be in shock.
The officers immediately called the Chief of police, Russell Greenwell,
then notified the Kentucky state police.
Greenwell, two state troopers, and all the witnesses but June Taylor,
who was particularly shaken, drove to the scene.
The Christian County Sheriff's Office also sent a deputy Sheriff
and called the staff photographer at the Kentucky New Era, the local newspaper, who arrived with his wife.
Four military police from Fort Campbell, a reporter from Madisonville, and one or two curious locals also arrived.
On the way to the farmhouse, one of the state police said that he heard a "whining" sound like artillery fire,
and saw two streaks of light flying downwards to the farm.
Later the officer claimed that these were only meteors.
Several other locals said that they had seen meteors that night as well, at different times.
The small army of witnesses, reporters, police and investigators
converged on the farmhouse, and flooded the scene with light.
The witnesses remained outside while Greenwell led the investigators in a search of the house,
yard, and some of the surrounding fields.
Though they saw the evidence of a firefight, they found no evidence of the creatures.
However, Greenwell and others found a small patch of grass by the back fence
that was luminous at a certain viewing angle, which was later suggested to be a type of bioluminescent fungus.
Greenwell, who'd had his own UFO sighting in 1952,
believed the witnesses had seen something strange, but he had no proof of anything.
Investigators began to leave once it became clear that there was nothing left of the creatures,
and by about 2 a.m., the exhausted witnesses were finally free to sleep.
Around 2:30, Mrs. Lankford was lying on her bed with her head towards the window,
when she noticed a light from outside.
When she opened her eyes, she saw one of the creatures peering in, with its claws on the screen.
She notified Elmer, who shot it in spite of her protestations.
More shots were fired in the next two hours, but the creatures were not deterred.
They showed no hostility whatsoever, and never once attempted to enter the house; only to look inside.
They were last seen just before dawn, around 5 a.m.
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Later that morning, investigators returned for a more extensive search of the grounds,
and the story hit the news.
It was first reported by the local radio station, WHOP, in their early morning broadcast,
and their news reporter interviewed the witnesses later that day.
Bud Ledwith, the engineer and announcer, arrived the same day with the station owner's son.
He spoke with Lankford and the Sutton women, and drew a sketch of the creatures
based on their descriptions, documenting the witnesses' earliest recollections.
Ledwith later did two more sketches based on the men's suggested corrections.
Over the next few days, newspaper and radio reporters poured into Hopkinsville
from Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
An officer from Campbell Air Force Base arrived on the scene after hearing WHOP's coverage,
though the Public Information office denied that there had been an official investigation.
Greenwell also claimed that two men arrived from Standiford, a commercial airfield.
Despite the attention, the family declined most interviews, as did most of the neighbours.
Some neighbours, however, claimed to hear gunshots,
and another saw lights on the farm shortly after Taylor's sighting.
Investigators found nothing; not even a footprint of the little creatures,
but other forms of evidence went undocumented.
For example, there was no effort to collect the bullet casings littering the house and yard.
On the second day after the incident, Project Blue Book, the UFO research group of the US government,
put out a press release claiming that there was no basis to the story,
no official Air Force report, and no investigation underway.
It is now listed in the Blue Book files as unidentified.
Still, the media coverage created a buzz, and drew sightseers from the area.
People drove into Kelly in such numbers that parked cars lined the roads for nearly half a kilometre
on either side of the property, and crowds of visitors surrounded the house for days.
Entrepreneurs wanted to set up merchandising booths in the front yard,
but Mrs. Lankford turned down every offer, and never appeared on TV or radio after the WHOP interview.
She put out a plea in Kentucky New Era begging people not to visit,
and she repeatedly called the state police to clear away the sightseers.
Much of the reporting was inaccurate, and often hostile, especially in the national press.
Reporters referred to the unknown entities as "little men," and exaggerated their number and intent.
A few papers said that there were 12 to 15 of the things,
and most described the event as an "invasion," despite the creatures' non-violent nature.
Out of state, papers referred to the creatures as "little green men," a term used in Orson Welles'
War of the Worlds broadcast, even though no one had described the beings as green.
Despite the flippant coverage from government and journalists,
the case received at least one thorough investigation.
In June of 1956, Isabel Davis, an investigator with Civilian Saucer Intelligence,
spent four days in Hopkinsville, with a follow-up ten months later.
She spoke with Glennie and Alene, the only two cooperative witnesses, as well as Ledwith,
the neighbours, a few reporters, and the three police departments on the case.
Davis also later obtained all Air Force documents on the Kelly landing case,
which showed that the Commander of the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright Patterson Air Force Base,
home of Blue Book, requested information on the incident in 1957 after learning of Davis' upcoming report.
The reply confirmed that a reserve officer had visited the scene,
but made it clear that the higher-ups didn't believe in saucer landings.
Hynek, however, who worked with Ledwith on another project, and read Davis' manuscript,
took a personal interest in the case, and discussed it in The UFO Experience.
Davis produced the definitive report on the Kelly-Hopkinsville Incident in Close Encounter at Kelly,
which was published by the Center for UFO Studies in 1978.
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The case has no easy explanation.
Most UFO sightings end up being explained as misidentified natural phenomena
such as planets and meteors,
but it's impossible to account for the Kelly-Hopkinsville goblins with any natural causes.
It is extremely difficult to believe how any person, object, or animal could have been
seen and shot at so many times, for so long a period, and still mistaken for a shiny, floating goblin.
Still the debunker Joe Nickell has suggested that the creatures
were merely great horned owls defending their territory.
How these owls survived multiple gunshots is left unexplained.
Others have suggested that the event was a hoax.
Many investigators found Billy Ray Taylor to be an unreliable witness,
and accused him either of exaggerating his story, or of hoaxing the event outright.
Other witnesses, however, showed no signs of exaggeration,
or of attempting to capitalize on the encounter.
Lankford in particular was considered to be an unimpeachable witness by all investigators.
Even if Billy Ray, or some of the others, had invented their parts of the story,
it seems unlikely that all of the participants went in on the hoax together,
and kept up the ruse for the rest of their lives.
After all, they gained nothing from it.
A few days after the encounter, the Suttons put up a sign in their driveway demanding an admission fee,
with additional fees for pictures and interviews.
The papers took this as a sign that the whole story had been hoaxed for profit,
but only Billy Ray was seen to have collected payments; everyone else just wanted to get rid of the visitors.
If the families contrived the story to make themselves rich and famous,
then they almost completely failed to capitalize on an ideal situation.
At the same time, there is also no physical evidence to verify the eyewitness accounts:
not even clawmarks on the ground or the house's corrugated iron roof.
Still, the ground was dry and hard, and even the investigators left no prints on the scene.
What's more, the witnesses showed clear signs of shock and terror;
one of the medically-trained investigators who rode to the farmhouse with Billy Ray
measured his heartbeat at 140 bpm, twice the normal average.
All but one of the eleven family members saw the silver creatures for themselves:
investigators found no signs that the witnesses were intoxicated in any way,
and had ruled out drug-induced hallucinations.
Whether they were physically real or not,
the little goblin creatures left their mark in popular culture, as did the people who saw them.
The entities inspired a number of movie and video game monsters,
including the monsters in Critters and Gremlins, the Pokémon Sableye,
and the farm invasion scenario in the popular Nintendo 64 game Majora's Mask.
Reporters' use of the term "little green men" caused a revival in its popularity,
and forever associated it with cases of alien contact.
Kelly now hosts an annual "Little Green Men" festival that embraces the stereotypical image
of the green-skinned alien, though it pays homage to the encounter.
The witnesses themselves - and especially Billy Ray, the most imaginative re-teller -
lived on as the basis for the stereotypical UFO witness:
a southern, gun-toting country boy with a meagre education and a wild imagination.
Despite the negative spin, the case helped to bring reports of entity encounters into the mainstream media,
and compelled the US Air Force to acknowledge them.
People everywhere had reported seeing unknown entities since the summer of 1947,
and there was a wave of entity sightings across Western Europe in 1954,
but the U.S. Air Force had a policy of dismissing them categorically.
As more witnesses came forward with their own stories
after the publicity over the Kelly incident, these cases became harder to ignore.
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Whatever happened that night, it's clear that the witnesses felt it was something wholly usual.
Hounded by tourists, and afraid of the beings' return,
Lankford sold the home within a few months of the incident, and everyone did their best to move on.
The Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter became an instant classic in UFO lore.
The strange goblin creatures have inspired a number of pop culture monsters,
and the families that saw them became the basis of the modern stereotypical of UFO witness.
Anyone who thinks that only gun-toting hillbillies see UFOs and aliens
owes a lot of their bias to the media's coverage of the events at Kelly, Kentucky in 1955.
(Sources are listed in the video description.)
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