The Hopkinsville Goblins

On the evening of August 21, 1955, a young man named Billy Ray Taylor walked out to the well behind a farmhouse in the tiny community of Kelly, Kentucky, to get a bucket of water.

He came running back into the house a few minutes later, breathless and excited. He said he’d seen a bright, shining object, like a flying saucer, streak across the sky and come down in a gully behind the farm. The family in the house laughed at him. Billy Ray was a visitor from Pennsylvania, staying with the family, and they figured he was making up stories.

About an hour later, the family’s dog started barking furiously outside — and then ran under the house and hid. It wouldn’t come out for the rest of the night.

What happened next would become one of the strangest and most famous incidents in the history of American UFO lore.

The Sutton Farm

The farmhouse belonged to the Sutton family. That night, eleven people were in the house: Glennie Lankford, a widow, and several of her children; her grown son, Elmer “Lucky” Sutton, and his wife; Lucky’s brother J.C. Sutton and his wife; Billy Ray Taylor and his wife; and others. It was a small, plain house in the country, with no telephone and no television.

When the dog ran under the house, Lucky Sutton and Billy Ray Taylor went to the door to see what had spooked it.

They saw something coming toward the house from the field.

The Creatures

They described it as a small, glowing creature, about three or three and a half feet tall. It had a large, round head, with huge, pointed ears like an elephant’s or a bat’s. Its eyes were large and yellow and seemed to glow. It had long, thin arms that hung down almost to the ground, ending in talon-like hands. Its legs were short and thin. Its body, they said, seemed to be silvery or glowing, as if made of metal or lit from within. It walked upright with its hands raised, as if in surrender.

Lucky Sutton and Billy Ray Taylor grabbed a shotgun and a .22 rifle and fired at it. The creature, they said, flipped backward from the force of the blast and scurried off into the darkness.

Then another one appeared at a window. They fired at it through the screen. When Billy Ray stepped out onto the porch to see if he’d hit it, a clawed hand reached down from the roof and touched his hair. They shot at the creature on the roof, and it floated down to the ground and ran off. Another was in a tree. They shot it, and it floated down too.

Over the next few hours, the family said, several of the creatures — perhaps as many as a dozen, though they were never sure how many — approached the house again and again, peering in the windows and doors. Each time, the men fired at them. Each time, the creatures seemed to be knocked over or knocked back, but unhurt. The men said that when the bullets hit them, it sounded like shooting at a metal bucket.

The Escape

Around eleven o’clock, after hours of terror, the family decided they couldn’t take any more. They piled into two cars and drove at top speed to the police station in the nearby town of Hopkinsville, about seven miles away.

The police could see that they were genuinely terrified. One officer later said that something had frightened these people beyond their normal capacity. Within an hour, more than a dozen law enforcement officers — local police, sheriff’s deputies, state police, and military police from nearby Fort Campbell — had gathered at the farm.

They searched the house and the grounds. They found many bullet holes in the walls, windows and screens, and shell casings all over the floors. They found no creatures, no spaceship, no tracks. Some officers reported seeing a strange luminous patch in the field and hearing odd sounds, but nothing they could identify. They left around two in the morning.

At around 3:30 a.m., the family said, the creatures came back. Lucky Sutton fired at them again. They finally disappeared before dawn.

The Little Green Men

The story hit the newspapers the next day, and reporters swarmed the farm. The press dubbed the creatures “little green men” — though the family insisted they were silver, not green. Crowds of curious onlookers came to see the house. The family, tired of the attention, began charging admission to see the farm. Eventually, they moved away.

The Air Force reportedly investigated, as it investigated many UFO reports at the time. The incident became a famous case in UFO research, and some believe it inspired Steven Spielberg’s films Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., as well as the design of the Gremlins and the Pokémon character Sableye.

What Did They See?

Skeptics have suggested several explanations.

The most popular is that the creatures were great horned owls. These large owls have tufted ears that stand up like pointed horns, big yellow eyes that glow when light hits them, and they fiercely defend their nests — sometimes attacking people. In the dark, seen in the glow of a porch light by frightened people, a pair of owls perched on a roof or in a tree, floating down when shot at, might look very much like small, big-eared creatures with glowing eyes and long, clawed arms. The “glowing” silver bodies might be the result of the porch light reflecting off their pale feathers.

Others suggest the bright object Billy Ray saw in the sky was a meteor. Some have speculated that the family was hoaxing, or that drinking was involved, though police said they found no evidence of alcohol and the witnesses were clearly frightened.

The witnesses never changed their stories. Lucky Sutton, Glennie Lankford and the others insisted, for the rest of their lives, that they had seen something very real, and very strange.

Little Green Men Days

Today, the community of Kelly embraces its strange history. Every August since 2010, it has held a festival called Kelly Little Green Men Days, with costumes, food, live music, and talks about the encounter. There’s a historical marker, and a flying saucer-shaped sign welcomes visitors.