The Kelly-Hopkinsville 'Little Men' Siege
August 21, 1955
Late on the night of 21 August 1955, eleven people from a farmhouse near the hamlet of Kelly, Kentucky, burst into the police station in nearby Hopkinsville. They said their house had been besieged for hours by small glowing creatures with huge eyes and clawed hands that seemed to shrug off gunfire. The case helped give the world the phrase 'little green men', although none of the witnesses originally said the creatures were green.
What people reported
Eleven people were at the farmhouse that Sunday evening: the widowed Glennie Lankford, 50; her three younger children, aged 12, 10 and 7; her grown sons Elmer 'Lucky' Sutton and J. C. Sutton and their wives; a brother-in-law, O. P. Baker; and a visiting couple from Pennsylvania, Billy Ray Taylor, 21, and his wife June, 18. HISTORY notes that the farmhouse had no running water, telephone, radio or television. Taylor and Lucky Sutton had worked together in a travelling carnival.
At about 7 p.m., according to the accounts summarised by HISTORY and by the investigator Joe Nickell in Skeptical Inquirer, Taylor was drawing water from the well when he saw a bright object streak across the sky and come down beyond a line of trees. He said it was 'real bright, with an exhaust all the colors of the rainbow'. The others laughed it off.
About an hour later the dog began barking, and Taylor and Lucky Sutton went to the back door. They said they saw a small, glowing humanoid with a large round head, huge eyes that shone yellow, long arms reaching almost to the ground and hands that ended in talons. They grabbed a shotgun and a .22 rifle and fired. The creature, they said, flipped over and ran into the dark. More appearances followed over the next three hours: a face at a window, which the men shot at through the screen; a clawed hand reaching down from the roof to touch Taylor's hair; one creature on the roof and another in a tree that, when shot, seemed to float to the ground. None was killed. Glennie Lankford said one approaching the door looked like 'a five-gallon gasoline can with a head on top and small legs', of shimmering bright metal.
At about 11 p.m. the whole group drove to the Hopkinsville police station. The police chief, Russell Greenwell, later told investigators that these were not the kind of people who normally ran to the police; they reached for their guns. HISTORY reports that the women and children were hysterical and one man had a pulse of 140. After the police left, Mrs Lankford said, the creatures returned before dawn, and she saw one at her bedroom window.
What investigators found
More than a dozen officers from city, county and state agencies went to the farm that night, along with military police from nearby Fort Campbell and a newspaper photographer. Both HISTORY and Nickell report that they found shell casings and a hole in a window screen, but no tracks, no landing marks and no other evidence of the creatures. A former state trooper told Nickell he suspected drinking, though he conceded he saw no evidence of it; Mrs Lankford said liquor was not allowed in the house. The US Air Force's Project Blue Book took an interest and ultimately listed the case as unidentified.
The descriptions shifted as the story spread. Nickell notes that the first newspaper report described creatures about four feet tall and said there were twelve to fifteen of them, while Mrs Lankford's signed statement put them at two and a half feet; HISTORY's account says about three and a half. In only one episode did the witnesses see more than one creature at a time. The creatures were described as silvery or metallic; the green colour seems to have been added later by the national press. The family, swamped by hundreds of sightseers, tried charging admission, which led sceptics to brand them fortune-seekers.
The 1956 investigator Isabel Davis, author of a detailed report on the case, took the family's fear seriously and found most of the witnesses credible, though she singled out Billy Ray Taylor as the one who embellished his account.
Nickell, who visited the site for the 50th anniversary in 2005 and interviewed surviving witnesses, proposed a natural explanation. The light Taylor saw, he argues, was probably a bright meteor; other 'meteor' sightings were reported in the region that evening. The creatures, he suggests, were great horned owls: birds about two feet tall with large yellow eyes, ear tufts, a big head with no visible neck, long wings that could look like arms, and talons. They hunt from dusk, can perch on roofs or glide down from trees, and are extremely aggressive when defending a nest. Others have suggested a hoax or escaped monkeys, for which there was never any evidence. No explanation has been proven, and members of the family maintained their story. Hopkinsville has since celebrated the story with a Little Green Men festival.
Further reading
- HISTORY: How the 'Little Green Men' phenomenon began on a Kentucky farm
- Joe Nickell, Skeptical Inquirer (2006): Siege of 'Little Green Men'