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.

(It occurred to me, as I read, how much these “little men” sounded like the cinematic character E.T. in their description. But guess what? Steven Spielberg actually developed a film based on the Hopkinsville encounter, originally in the horror genre but ultimately gentler in nature and titled E.T. the Extraterrestrial. I’m gonna bet E.T.’s physical shape was a direct lift from the Hopkinsville reports.)

After the farmers’ anxious reports of attack, a dozen local police, state troopers, military police, and county deputy sheriffs went out to the farm. They found no aliens, just plenty of evidence of the family’s shooting out the windows (and supposedly an iridescent sheen where one of the creatures had allegedly been shot). The Suttons and Taylors did not go with them to investigate, saying they were too afraid to return.

“These aren’t the kind of people who normally run to the police for help,” police chief Russell Greenwell later said of the Suttons and Taylors. “What they do is reach for their guns.” The families’ fear convinced the police of a real threat, of a citizen gunfight if not of aliens.

After a few hours the police left the farm and told the family to go home, which they did — and the creatures returned at 3:30 am. Some of the family and friends were gone by morning. The rest left the farm later, whether from fear of the creatures or because of harassment from disbelieving neighbors and curious visitors. None ever retracted their story, and the three surviving witnesses refuse to speak of it today. The goblins, as they became known, have not been seen in the area since.

Project Blue Book lists the incident as a hoax in a single typewritten line, with no further explanation or comment, though it appears no official investigation was completed. However, Geraldine Sutton-Stith, daughter of Elmer “Lucky” Sutton who saw and shot at the creatures, says that a man knocked at her door to share his father’s deathbed confession of retrieving UFO wreckage for the federal government on that very night and just a few miles away. Of course, no evidence of this deathbed confession was provided.

Debunking the debunking

Modern psychologists and skeptics have concluded that drunken farm boys mistook some owls for space aliens, and this is clearly hogwash. No, not the farm boys’ story, but this debunking of it.

Rodney Schmaltz and Scott Lilienfeld wrote in 2014 that the Suttons and Taylors were probably intoxicated and mistook Great Horned Owls for aliens. This simply reeks of smug ivory tower professor dismissing those they consider intellectual inferiors. Sure, Billy Ray Taylor was just a carnie, and he had a stereotypical hillbilly name like Billy Ray Taylor, and it would be easy to make fun of him. But the professors need to keep in mind the following basic points about farm boys and owls:

• These were rural folk who had to go outside to get their water from a well. They knew their area and would have been familiar with owls.
• One of the creatures allegedly grabbed Billy Ray’s head as he crept onto the porch. A grab from an owl leaves a significant gouging mark; there’s a reason raptor caretakers use those heavy leather gauntlets. He would have received a lot more than a hair pull, and there would have been an injury for law enforcement to document, had it indeed been an owl fiercely defending a nest as suggested.
• Nothing described fits with normal owl behavior. The Suttons and Taylors described the creatures’ rolling gait with long arms and short legs (two men said they were first approached outside by an ambulatory “little man” with his skinny arms upraised). Owls don’t walk around vulnerable on the ground, especially not when defending a nest, and they don’t walk on the ground toward humans, and especially not during 4 hours of gunfire (and, the farm boys say, at least a few direct shots). Owls don’t repeatedly press their talons against window glass, and if they did, they couldn’t do it while looking inside as described. No owl would wait on the porch to grab Billy Ray’s head after being repeatedly shot at. And they certainly don’t tolerate 4 hours of gunfire and then come back later to start up again.
• The family emptied 4 boxes of .22 ammo at the creatures, plus an unknown quantity of shotgun slugs. (The men reported that bullets make a clinking metallic sound when they struck the silver-clad little men, which is very unlike shooting an owl, and that one little man was knocked from a tree but could not be found later.) The report doesn’t specify the size of the boxes, but .22s generally come in boxes of 100 or even 500. The smallest quantity I’ve seen is 50, and I cannot imagine that in mid-century rural Kentucky, where people used guns weekly for both varmint control and hunting for food, that the boxes were smaller. I find it unlikely that men who almost certainly hunted for their meals couldn’t kill a bird in several hundred close-range shots.
• The witnesses described the “little men” as “silver” and “shining.” It’s suggested that this was a confusion of the owls’ reflective eyes, but owl eyes don’t reflect silver. Nor do their bodies shine.
• The police, state troopers, military police, and county deputy sheriffs didn’t see any owls, silver or otherwise.
• Most key, the initial news report is quite specific that law enforcement found no evidence of drinking. While every skeptic’s take I’ve seen includes words like “intoxicated” or “moonshine,” all original reports disagree, and the only support I’ve found for this is that a later visitor to the farmhouse saw “a few beer cans” in the trash. A few beer cans, even consumed in one night, is not enough to work 8 adults into a panic, and there’s no evidence they were consumed that night. (There were plenty of curious visitors to the site later.) Law enforcement at the time said it was a respectable family without a history of absurd behavior, and the matriarch who’d owned the house for decades had a reputation for avoiding alcohol and disallowing liquor at home. This argument comes down to “of course they were drunk because they must have been drunk” and so is no argument at all.

Does this mean I believe they were aliens? Nope. I don’t have any evidence to say what happened that night, whether aliens or escaped silver-painted circus monkeys (another debunking explanation, somewhat weakened by the lack of local circuses or reported missing monkeys) or straight-up hoax. I only say that I find the owl explanation arrogant and insupportable.

Look, I live in the country myself, I’ve been startled by owls — a screech owl 15 feet over your head in the inky creepy midnight will definitely get your attention — and I knew each time within a second that it was an owl and I just had to wait for my heart rate to drop back to normal. That all these country-bred adults would be absolutely convinced for continuous hours that it was something else? I just don’t buy it.

Billy Ray wasn’t the only one to report lights in the sky that night. Were they meteors? Maybe. Or maybe Billy Ray and his friends successfully defended Earth from alien invasion, and we owe them a debt of gratitude for scaring off the extraterrestrials with cheap .22 ammo. May all invasions be so easily repelled.

Today, the close encounter is remembered in Kelly’s festive Little Green Men Days each August, but also in several geeky pop culture specimens. I’ve already mentioned E.T., and allegedly the Pokémon Sableye is also based on these creatures. And Paizo borrowed the name and concept for their goblin creature the Hobkins, which you may fight in the TTRPG system Pathfinder.

The (A)Eclipse Sale

To celebrate the 2024 total eclipse, enjoy a fantastic coupon on Æclipse Press products!

Use the coupon code ECLIPSE to save 33% off any book or boxed set in the site store, good April 5-9, 2024. Discount applies to ebooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, and audiobooks (sorry, no discount on sale items), with minimum cart of $10. Enjoy!