In August of 1955, a group of family and friends in a rural Kentucky farmhouse had a battle with what they believed to be aliens from a flying saucer (see part one for the full story).
In the years since the harrowing events of that night, UFO enthusiasts have elevated the significance of this case far beyond its humble origins. The Kelly-Hopkinsville case has been featured on numerous UFO documentaries, highlighted in mystery shows, inspired fictional work such as the sci-film Critters, and been dramatically re-created in shows like Project Blue Book, and the goblins have even been immortalised as a monster in the popular game Pokémon.
But that first day after the events was troubling for the humble farmers. With no physical evidence for their story, the community quickly decided that the event had been a prank, a publicity stunt, or some other mundane cause – anything but a real encounter with the unknown. However, researchers like Joe Nickell have made a compelling case that the root cause of the “goblins” was likely a pair of territorial great horned owls. These large and sometimes aggressive birds have many features that match those of the goblins – perhaps most notably the large eyes and feather tufts that resemble the ears said to be on the goblins. The wings of the owls end in finger-like projections and when the owls hop along the ground with their wings up, in the dim single-bulb night of rural Kentucky it doesn’t tax the imagination to see how – with the proper framing of the night’s earlier fireball sighting – these animals might be mistaken for something more esoteric.
To really understand Nickell’s explanation of the incident one must avoid the temptation to reductively say that “the goblins were really just owls.” The more serious (and, plausible) explanation of the events of that night involves the psychological priming that comes from a media environment where UFOs and aliens were being reported in the media from witnesses and fiction alike. Davis & Bloecher’s work was notably titled Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955. The “and others” included many other examples of people reporting small humanoid creatures at the time, creating an atmosphere of narrative plausibility for stories and experiences that included this feature.
Recall that the incident begins with Billy-Ray saying he saw a flying saucer. He had gone out to the well to get water and came back with the water and that story. But nobody went to look because he was known to tell wild tales and exaggerate. Joe Nickell, in his 2006 comprehensive write-up of that night’s events, adds this:
As to the “flying saucer” sighting that preceded the encounter, there were area sightings of “meteors” at the time (Davis and Bloecher 1978, 33–34, 61–62). Most likely what was witnessed was a very bright meteor (or “fireball”).
You’ve got a small house full of people, a man telling a story of having seen a saucer crash, a narrative environment where stories of flying saucers and little people are in the news and you end up with a situation where aliens and flying ships are readily available framing devices for everything that was to come.
But skeptics of the close-minded variety have made some regretful conclusions about that night that do neither the truth, nor serious inquiry into these matters any service. Since I’m doing my own research into this case, and have made some conclusions, I believe I’m disallowed by the rules of Wikipedia to fix the entry on this case but I hope this discussion will inspire some clarification and improvement in the article. Let’s take a look at some of the claims that – at the time of this writing – still muddy the waters of understanding about what really happened that night.
The goblins did not come from a bottle
A major point of contention amongst skeptics around the events or some explanations of them, is whether or not the primary witnesses were drunk or influenced by alcohol. The popular online free encyclopedia Wikipedia – at the time of this writing – holds an erroneous bit of “evidence” as the basis for concluding that alcohol was the root cause of the sightings.
Psychologists Rodney Schmaltz and Scott Lilienfeld cite the alleged incident as an example of pseudoscience and an “extraordinary claim” to help students develop critical thinking skills. Although contemporary newspaper stories alleged that “all officials appeared to agree that there was no drinking involved”, Schmaltz and Lilienfeld suggest that intoxication may have played a part in the sighting.
I have many objections to that claim.
- Nobody reported drunkenness in the primary documentation
- There were 11 people at the farm, including children and alcohol is not a good explanation for the confounding and unusual sightings when only a portion of the witnesses might reasonably have been intoxicated.
- There is not a rich psychological history of alcohol causing mass delusions (the hidden premise of blaming the bottle).
- The local newspapers contemporaneously reported, “All officials appeared to agree that there was no drinking involved.”
- The wiki cites a paper by psychologists Rodney Schmaltz and Scott Lilienfeld but the paper was not a primary investigation of this case. The mention in the paper is a casual off-hand example and it should never have been used as a citation when the assertion is neither accurately attributed, nor representative of the evidence that was collected contemporaneously to the events.
- The scholarly paper mentions both the Davis and Bloecher research and Joe Nickell, but neither source attributes alcohol as a contributing factor. This is deeply troubling if the goal of the skeptical editors is to promote accuracy within Wikipedia.
In other words, Wikipedia – which for many people is a primary source of learning about almost any topic – is written in such a way that it attempts to dismiss the events of this night as being sourced in a bottle. But it would be just as accurate for one to claim that the skeptic’s doubts come from a bottle as well.
I tried to clear this up previously, even corresponding with Schmaltz and Lilienfeld, but they’re not responsible for this being in the Wikipedia page. And I’m saddened that Lilienfeld passed away with my correspondence regarding this matter being among the very few interactions I had with a man I respected very much.
I’ve been complaining about this since 2017 and still haven’t managed to get this scrubbed from the Wikipedia article. It’s an embarrassment to the skeptic community that given the amount of reliable information we have about that night, people still insist on promoting an explanation that is neither supported by evidence nor by the psychology of mass psychogenic experiences.
Do we have any cases out there where one person drinks and ten see pink elephants? This whole alcohol induced mass hallucination thing is an embarrassment and needs to be struck from the deck of cards that skeptics use to explain the unusual.
Little Green Men?
Somehow the Kentucky Goblins case has become associated with the phrase “little green men.” Once again, this erroneous bit of information is enshrined in the Wikipedia article about the case.
The event is at the origin of the popularization of the words “little green men”. Prior to this sighting, flying saucer occupants were called “little men”; “little green men” were limited to the science-fiction culture, in particular the Mack Reynolds story The Case of the Little Green Men (1951) and in Fredric Brown’s Martians Go Home (1955). The day following the alleged sighting, however, local reporters started to call the creatures “little green men”, and the words were soon reproduced in many newspapers, quoted on the radio, and translated into other languages.
This is just wrong. If we go back to Davis & Bloecher’s work we can find the following entry:
The whole creature was seemingly made of silver metal that gave off eerie light in the darkness, like the light from the radium dial of a watch.
If that description was given to reporters, it may have been the source of the ‘little green men’ take on the creature – but it is important to note that the phrase LITTLE GREEN MEN was already in general use in the public and had been for a long time. Around the turn of the century the phrase appears in children’s stories to refer to sprites or other mysterious humanoids of the fairy lands – and it is also associated with Saucers before the Kelly case. Regardless, none of the original witnesses called the creatures green.
So Davis & Bloecher mention a “take on the creature” but don’t report it as being green. Even the original description is silver and metal that glows – but perhaps the inclusion of the “like the light from a radium dial” is what got people hooked on the idea? It is perfectly clear to the authors that this is an idea that has been glommed onto the case, not one that originated with the case.
Further, a rudimentary search into the history of “little green men” as an idiom will show you that the phrase has been around long before the 1955 incident in Kentucky. In fact, prior to some of the science-fiction related uses that started emerging in the 1930s, Little Green Men were already a well known trope but tended to be used to describe fairies and other wee folk. They were also notably the sorts of hallucinations that would come out of a bottle.
There is a deeply entwined mixture of pre-existing symbolism at play in this story. The dire economics of rural farming suggest that class discrimination may have been at work in the public’s ready dismissal of the peculiar night’s experiences. Add to that the metaphor of little green men and the already well known ties to drinking and fairy lore, and it is easy to see how stereotypes might have led to a prejudiced take on everything reported that night.
One possibility is that if we accept Nickell’s idea of owls as the real-world core of the sighting, it has been reported that sometimes owls nest in the presence of foxfire, a bioluminescent fungus that can cause rotting wood to glow. I am not saying that this is precisely what caused the glowing silvery appearance. Great horned owls already have a mixed feather colouration that can look silvery under some lighting conditions. Occam’s razor suggests we might conclude that the lighting conditions of the night were sufficient to give the lighter parts of the owl’s feathers a silvery appearance than to add in a story about the owls nesting in a tree where foxfire was present. While foxfire does glow, there’s insufficient evidence to suggest its narrative inclusion is needed to fully explain this aspect of the sighting.
Putting the Arms in Armchair Skepticism
One part of the story which got a lot of skepticism in the days after the event was the question of whether or not the farmers had actually shot out through their screened windows. The witnesses reported firing .22 and shotgun rounds, some through a screened window. In the aftermath, some people questioned whether or not the holes in the screen were actually consistent with the weapons alleged to have been used.
As I was reviewing the details of this case, I realised that I possessed all the tools to re-create this part of the story and just see if the holes created by those caliber weapons fired through a metal window screen would look similar to the photos and drawings of the window in the actual incident.
Here is a drawing of the original window. There is a photo in the book as well, but it did not reproduce very well.
Here is a close-up of my own results from firing the shotgun through the screen at a comparable distance.
I wasn’t sure what the results of this experiment would be, but I did take the time to video it. Here is that video:
As you can see, the results are quite close to those reported by the families in Kentucky. I feel we can put this particular mystery to bed and conclude that while we may not know how many rounds were fired that night, some did indeed go through the screen as described in the testimony.
There may be some innate urge amongst the people of a community to reject stories that are so strange that they are rendered unbelievable. This is not the kind of skepticism that is becoming of the rational community at large. Skepticism should be a methodology for discerning the likely truth, not for compartmentalising things we’re uncomfortable with into the realm of “lies.”
The locals – and some in the larger sphere of UFO culture critics – held conflicting beliefs about the events. While some – perhaps many – want the story to be a real and exciting 1950s style tale of alien invasion, others were simultaneously saying the whole incident came out of a bottle (it didn’t) and that the family was lying about even the mundane elements of the tale like shooting out of a window (they weren’t).
Flipping the Bird
One peculiar aspect of the witness testimony struck me differently than many investigators and I may have an explanation for it. Three times during the incident the creatures were shot at and their movement was described as them having “flipped.” (Davis & Blocher, pg 2, pp 57-58)
They were also described as gliding or floating, and having spindly legs. When they’re described as goblins – especially given the highly suggestive witness drawings from the night – it’s easy to assume we’re talking about little humanoids. But if Nickell’s owl identification is correct, then some of this behaviour becomes more recognisable as that of birds. The long arms and spindly legs are analogous to wings and bird legs. Owls are sometimes presumed to have short stubby legs, but an owl’s feathers hide a secret.
I suspect that birds aren’t generally thought of as animals that will “flip.” However, some birds do have a propensity for this tactic. This is anecdotal, but when I was younger I frequently took part in bird hunts and it was not uncommon to hit a bird with one or two pellets but not take it down. The wounded birds would sometimes flip in the air and then recover and continue their flight. This struck me as unusual at the time, but then I discovered that a similar behaviour is common in a breed of pigeon. Roller and Tumbler pigeons are bred to encourage this trait.
While this may not be what happened that night, if we accept the owl hypothesis we need to also consider that the behaviour of these birds that night was not going to be typical. They were in a heightened and agitated state. They were not doing the sorts of things one typically sees in nature videos, silently hunting prey or looking sagacious on a tree-limb and asking their timeless question to the night. Given my experience seeing other breeds of birds flip and recover, I don’t think it impossible for owls to do the same but I have been unable to find an owl ethologist who might confirm this unusual (but perhaps not biologically impossible) behaviour.
Who Investigated That Night?
Another question that has become muddled through retelling is the question of what official entities were involved with the investigation that night. Stories recounting the events now include the local police, state police, the air force, Project Blue Book, Men In Black, newspaper reporters, local citizens, UFO hounds, and I’m sure others.
According to the Davis & Bloecher research, the entities investigating that night were primarily local law enforcement. Sheriff officials from Christian County and Terrell County Sheriff, the Hopkinsville Police Department and the Kentucky State Police were involved in the investigation. There were air force personnel there but it appears they were investigating on their own, not at the behest of the air force or (more particularly) Project Blue Book (Project Blue Book files on the Kelly encounter state that the incident was “never officially reported to the Air Force,” and “no official investigation was ever made.”).
There is a tremendous amount of confusion about some of this stuff, especially given that writers subsequently have seen the military, government and law enforcement presence and inferred much more official involvement than there is evidence for.
If only a couple of police had shown up, once again it would be unlikely that this story would still be around today. But we can infer a few things from the large number of people that did go out there. First, it would seem that whatever was going on, the report was being taken seriously. Second, the variety of responses from different agencies suggests that a network of friends and acquaintances may have called or informed each other that “something interesting” was afoot.
Was it the novelty of the claims? The fact that guns had been involved? It’s hard to know for sure, but I’m inclined to think that there was something in the air figuratively that all of these people would have been aware of and this incident seemed – on the face of it – to be the alien invasion the media had everyone primed to experience.
Only when they investigated, it quickly became clear that whatever was going on, it was not anything like War of the Worlds or Invaders from Mars.
Context Matters
The most thorough write-up on the case comes from Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher from the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). It is one of the most thorough amateur case investigations I’ve read and it is clear that both authors were serious and diligent as they tried to document the events of that strange night.
Their work was published in 1978 but Isabel Davis’ investigation took place in 1956, just a year after the event. The combined work contains a very thorough look at the eyewitness testimony, the contributions of the police and military investigations, feedback from locals, and photographs and drawings to illustrate the narrative details. The book also contains additional cases from the time that suggest that even if the skies of 1955 weren’t really littered with little humanoids, the minds of the people were. Cases from 1947 to 1955 are enumerated to give some context, although the information is presented in a journalistic fashion for the reader to draw their own conclusions.
There were many cultural things going on. There were many social-class things going on. There were likely many complicated psychological things going on. Monsters were a hot topic and it turns out that our goblin witnesses had been near another monster sighting just a week before.
In her book The Kelly Green Men “Alien Legacy Revisited”, Geraldine Sutton Stith writes:
The weekend of August 20th 1955 was just like any other that time of year…
They [Elmer, Billy Ray, Vera and June] were making their way down old U.S.41 from Evansville, Indiana where they were staying with the carnival they were working for at the time.
They were leaving Evansville the weekend of August 20th, but could that really be said to be “just like any other that time of year?” because something happened just a few days prior to their road trip that might be quite relevant.
On August 15, 1955 the front page of the Evansville Press read “Fights Off Claws. Woman Battles ‘It’ in Ohio River.”. The story details how a Mrs. Darwin Johnson (her name was Naomi) and a friend encountered something unseen in the river. As they relaxed in the water, Naomi felt something clawed and furry grab her leg and pull her down. There was a tense few moments before she and her friend managed to get free and out of the water. She received scratches but vowed to never swim in the river again.
This story is one of the many “one off” peculiar incidents that lie scattered amongst the larger and more well known monster stories of the time. But it was front page news in Evansville, and we know that Elmer and Billy Ray were in town when the event took place. They had nothing to do with the river incident, but there’s little chance they wouldn’t have been aware of it. Evansville was a good sized city in 1955 with a population of 120-140,000 people but it’s difficult to overstate how much more important newspapers were in communities in the 1950s compared to now.
This event wasn’t merely chronologically close to Kelly-Hopkinsville, separated by just a few days, it was also geographically close. And writers have tried to tie the two events together despite the lack of connective narrative tissue. There’s nothing to suggest that what happened under water in Evansville had anything to do with what happened in Kelly in a material sense. But people are absolutely influenced by ideas, as decades of social psychology demonstrate, and the idea that there are monsters lurking around us. For these hardscrabble farmers, monsters had left the realm of the speculative and become a plausible threat.
In other words, the events of that hot and terrifying Kentucky night are best understood as being a complicated interplay of strange and unusual incidents combining with readily available templates of alien invasion narrative to give quick (but probably erroneous) explanation to what was taking place. If there had been no meteor, or if they had successfully killed one of the “invaders” and it had been an owl, it’s possible that the entire incident would be a briefly unusual but now long forgotten hot summer night, lost in the diluting sea of the past.
Nothing about this story is made clearer by trying to reduce it to the drunken rambling of a family of struggling farmers, or to say “it was just owls.” The real explanation isn’t any one thing, it’s the complicated web of culture, perception, society, narrative, and psychology.
If we really want to understand the world’s mysteries through the lens of science and rationalism, we need to work on actually trying to explain these mysteries and not just explain them away.
Additional links of possible interest:
- It Came from Kelly – a newspaper retrospective about the events of 1955
- Isabel Davis on the Long John Nebel Show
- Astonishing Legends podcast Three Part Coverage
- MonsterTalk’s coverage of “goblins”
