Hopkinsville Goblin

On the night of August 21 and into the early morning of August 22, 1955, a farmhouse in the rural community of Kelly, just outside Hopkinsville, Kentucky, became the site of one of the strangest and best-documented close encounters in twentieth-century American history. The Sutton family, along with visiting friends the Taylors, reported a siege lasting roughly four hours by a group of small silver-gray beings with oversized heads, enormous luminous yellow eyes, pointed ears, clawed hands, and thin legs. The creatures appeared to float rather than walk, approached the house in waves, and seemed to be impervious to gunfire.

The incident began when Billy Ray Taylor went to the well for water and saw a bright object descend into a gulley behind the farmhouse. He was dismissed by the family until, an hour later, a glowing figure approached the back door with its arms raised. Elmer Sutton and Taylor opened fire with a shotgun and a .22 rifle, and the creatures, after being hit and knocked from trees and the roof, simply floated away unharmed and returned repeatedly through the night. At around eleven, the entire household fled the farmhouse in two cars and drove to the Hopkinsville police station, where Chief Russell Greenwell found them in a state of genuine and uncontrived terror.

Police officers, state troopers, and military police from nearby Fort Campbell returned with the family to the farmhouse and documented physical evidence, including shell casings, damaged window screens, and a luminous patch on the grass. The creatures did not reappear while the authorities were present, but returned briefly after they had left and before dawn. Investigators, including Project Blue Book's J. Allen Hynek and independent researcher Isabel Davis, who wrote the definitive monograph on the case in 1978, noted the witnesses had nothing financial to gain and suffered considerable social cost from the publicity.

The Kelly-Hopkinsville case had a lasting cultural impact far beyond Kentucky. The description of small, wide-eyed, gray-skinned beings helped cement the visual shorthand of the alien, and some cultural historians trace the popular little green men caricature directly to the Hopkinsville reports as filtered through cartoonists and B-movie producers. Skeptics have proposed great horned owls as the stimulus, but the explanation has never fully matched the reported behavior, the multiple witnesses, or the sustained duration of the encounter. Kelly today holds an annual Little Green Men Days festival, an affectionate memorial to a night that, for the people in that farmhouse, was not funny at all.