In 2017 I traveled to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, which was the location of longest totality for the solar eclipse. You can read about how that went over at this post. But during this season of celestial event anticipation (we have another total eclipse happening this spring, this time in my backyard), I want to re-visit a story I told back then.
Totality
I’d seen partial solar eclipses before, but never totality, and wow. I’d read repeatedly that there is a real difference, and it’s true. The partial coverage was fun, especially as it advanced, when the sunlight got all weird like someone had screwed up the Photoshop brightness/contrast settings. You want to worry that you have eclipse blindness already (you don’t, it takes a day or two to show effects even if you stupidly stared directly into the sun), but it’s just the atmosphere refracting the reduced light.
Totality was a very trippy experience. The sun was SO BLACK, and my poor phone camera just wasn’t equipped to handle the contrast. Cicadas sang as twilight fell. I could see the corona with my naked eye. There was a 360-degree sunset. It was really cool, and not nearly long enough even at the country’s longest totality. (See the photos on the original post.)
I’m sad to be missing the eclipse this year, but at least I got to experience it in 2017!
Little Green Men
That eclipse trip prompted me to look up details on the alleged alien invasion in that area decades before.
On August 21, 1955 — yes, the 2017 solar eclipse date was an anniversary — 8 adults and 3 children reported an assault on their farmhouse by “little men” they claimed were extraterrestrials. (The color green was added in later media reports, and this may be the trope-namer for the phrase.) They fled to the Hopkinsville police station to ask for help, saying they’d been fighting the creatures for 4 hours.
The whole affair started when one of the men went out to retrieve water from the well. He saw a bright rainbow-colored light which he described as a flying saucer shoot overhead and land beyond a nearby treeline, hissing. He went inside and reported it to the family, who laughed at his tale — until not long after when the little men, with gangling arms, stumpy legs, and a swaying gait, approached the house and began to peer in through the windows.
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