The Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter

Kelly was a small community on U.S. Route 41, about eight miles north of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. On the evening of Sunday, August 21, 1955, a farmhouse there was crowded. Glennie Lankford, a widow, was there with her grown sons Elmer "Lucky" Sutton and J.C. Sutton, their wives and several children. So was Billy Ray Taylor, a family friend visiting from Pennsylvania, with his wife June.

About 7 p.m., Taylor went to the well for water. He saw something in the sky. The earliest newspaper account says it came over the trees and landed in a field behind the house. "There was no explosion, only a semi-hissing sound." Later retellings describe a bright saucer with an exhaust all the colors of the rainbow.

Then the dog began barking. Taylor and Lucky Sutton saw a glowing figure, about three and a half feet tall, coming toward the house. They fetched a shotgun and a .22.

The witnesses described it with care. A round, oversized head. Large pointed ears. Huge eyes glowing with a yellowish light. Long arms reaching nearly to the ground, ending in talons. The whole creature seemed made of silver metal. Glennie Lankford put it plainly: "It looked like a five-gallon gasoline can with a head on top and small legs."

For hours, the figures kept coming back. To the doors. To the windows. To the roof. One pressed its face against a window, and the shotgun was fired through the glass. A huge hand reached down from the low roof and grabbed a man by the hair. Hits sounded like shooting a tin can. Struck, the beings would flip over or float to the ground, then scurry into the woods.

Around 11 p.m., the household piled into cars and drove to the Hopkinsville police station. Police Chief Russell Greenwell later said of the family: "These aren't the kind of people who normally run to the police for help. What they do is reach for their guns." City police, state troopers, deputy sheriffs and military police from Fort Campbell came out. They found shell casings, broken windows and a hole in a screen. No tracks. No mark of a landing. Officers left about 2:15 a.m. At about 3:30 a.m., the figures were back at the windows. The shooting went on until shortly before dawn.

Bud Ledwith of radio station WHOP interviewed the witnesses and sketched what they described. Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher of Civilian Saucer Intelligence worked the case in 1956. Their report, Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955, appeared in 1978. Project Blue Book filed the case as a hoax. A 1957 statement by Major John E. Albert suggested an escaped circus monkey painted with silver paint.

Skeptics came later. In 2006, Joe Nickell proposed that Taylor's light was a meteor and the visitors were aggressive great horned owls, nocturnal and silent in flight, with yellow eyes and ear tufts. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid linked a luminous patch seen near the house to foxfire, and argued that Taylor first spoke only of a shooting star. A 2014 paper called the witnesses probably intoxicated, though contemporary reports said they seemed sober. No investigator ever found evidence of a staged hoax.

The witnesses described silver beings. The Evansville Courier wrote the story up with a different phrase, "little green men," and it stuck. The case fed Spielberg's unmade Night Skies, which led to E.T., and loosely inspired Critters. Lucky Sutton's daughter, Geraldine Sutton Stith, has written books about her family's night. Hopkinsville still holds festivals in its honour. The farmhouse is gone. The story is not.