- Late on a warm summer night in 1955, 11 terrified people arrived at the police station in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

They told police that something terrifying had surrounded their farmhouse.

They'd been shooting at it for hours, and whatever it was, they said, their bullets couldn't stop it.

(siren wails) More than a dozen assorted officers, including state and military officials, went with them to investigate.

What they found and what they didn't find would turn this into one of the strangest alleged alien encounters in American history.

But almost everything you might have heard about the Kelly Hopkinsville encounter came later.

So what actually happened that night?

(spooky music) At around 7:00 PM Sunday, August 21st, Billy Ray Taylor stepped outside of the Sutton Farmhouse to get water.

As he was drawing from the well, a bright light streaked across the sky and disappeared below a distant tree line.

Billy Ray ran inside, telling the others he thought he had seen a flying saucer.

The story was waved away until about an hour later, when the family dog started barking.

(dog barks) Billy Ray and family friend Lucky Sutton ran outside to investigate.

After a moment of observation, Lucky and Billy Ray, glimpsing what appeared to be a small humanoid creature darting by, ran inside to grab a 22 rifle and a shotgun.

Outside, they fired at a large-headed, big-eyed silvery creature with clawed hands, but it ran off seemingly unharmed, flipping over backwards before running into the woods.

Billy Ray and Lucky returned to the house, thinking they had scared off something, when suddenly the face of another creature appeared in the window.

They fired at the creature through the window.

Billy Ray bolted outside, apparently hoping to get a better look, when a massive clawed hand reached down from the roof and grabbed his hair.

Lucky rushed out after him and they both fired at what looked like a small creature perched on the roof.

Moments later, they spotted another figure that seemed to float down from a nearby tree.

For the next three hours, the men continued to fire off rounds at the creatures while the others barricaded themselves inside the house.

Glennie Lankford, the homeowner and family matriarch, hid her three younger children under a bed while Billy Ray's wife, Lonnie, cowered in fear as sounds of scratching moved around the roof.

Four boxes of 22 shells later, the group decided to escape.

The group piled into their vehicles and drove to the Hopkinsville Police Station to report the incident.

Some officers did initially suspect the adults had been drinking, but the reports were taken seriously enough that more than a dozen officers, including the local sheriff and military police, followed them back to the house.

(siren wails) Officers arrived at the Sutton Farmhouse sometime after 11:00 PM.

They searched the house, yard, and surrounding property, but found no physical evidence of strange creatures, no spacecraft, no bodies.

The only evidence was a single hole in one of the window screens.

By 2:00 AM, the police called off the search and left.

For the first time in hours, the farmhouse was quiet, but that wasn't the end.

Soon after the police disappeared down the road, Glennie screamed, "They're back."

The creatures attacked the farmhouse again, eventually driving the humans away.

By the next morning, the strange story was already spreading fast and the hasty reporting led to inaccuracies.

Early newspaper reports claimed that 12 to 15 little men descended on the farmhouse, but according to the witnesses, they never saw anything close to that.

At most, they reported seeing two creatures at the time.

Headlines also ran that Kentucky had been visited by little green men, but the witnesses never described the creature as green.

They said they appeared gray or silver.

Just a day or two after the incident, the versions appearing in newspapers were beginning to drift away from the eyewitnesses' accounts.

The numbers and physical description weren't the only things misreported.

Another misconception that quickly took hold, the group had been drinking.

A Georgia paper linked the Kelly Hopkinsville encounter to one of the alcoholic events plaguing the country.

Many locals and eventually people across the country, as the story spread, chalked up the incident to a bunch of backwoods folks who had indulged in a little too much moonshine.

It was an easy one to believe, a group of rural Kentuckians who maybe had a bit too much to drink and were maybe firing guns into the night, but contemporary reports tell a different story.

One newspaper explicitly noted that all officials appeared to agree that there was no drinking involved.

Still, the accusation stuck.

The Suttons were portrayed as drunk, gullible, or simply lying, despite the fact that reporters who'd met the family came away with a much different impression.

One wrote that he and his photographer were struck by the sincerity of Glennie and her daughter Mary's account of the event.

The dismissal of the Kelly Hopkinsville encounter by the public impacted all 11 people on the farm that night, but not everyone in the group seemed eager to disappear from the spotlight.

Billy Ray, who had first reported seeing the strange light in the sky, embraced the attention.

He enthusiastically gave interviews, offered detailed descriptions of the alleged extraterrestrials and even drew pictures of what he had seen, and before long, people wanted to see the farmhouse for themselves.

So many people crowded the property that state police were brought in to control traffic.

By Tuesday morning, just a day after the first newspaper reports, no trespassing signs had gone up.

Then another sign was posted.

Visitors could enter the property for a 50-cent admission.

This, of course, added to the whispers.

For skeptics, that looked suspicious.

Had the family found a way to cash in on their sudden fame?

But whatever money they made, the attention quickly became more trouble than it was worth.

The family was mocked, harassed, and overwhelmed by people descending on the farm.

Soon after the encounter, the Sutton family moved away.

In the years that followed, most of them wanted little to do with the story at all.

While some people latched onto the story of an extraterrestrial visit, primed by the flying saucer craze and the absolute deluge of alien movies on the big screen, others dismissed the possibility completely.

Was the family trying to profit from an elaborate story or were they frightened witnesses who briefly tried to make the best of an unwanted spectacle?

One popular ufologist, Dr.

J. Allen Hynek, looked into the Kelly Hopkinsville encounter and he claimed it to be preposterous.

If the Suttons weren't lying, there is another possibility.

They really did see something.

One of the most common explanations is that the creatures were great horned owls and the comparison does seem surprisingly convincing.

Great horned owls can stand nearly two feet tall.

They have enormous yellow eyes, powerful talons, and fly almost silently.

Perched in a tree at night, their bodies can appear strangely humanoid, and when they take flight, they can appear to glide, but the Suttons described figures three to four feet tall and they saw them at close range.

Skeptics are quick to point out that a family living in a rural area and on a farm would be unlikely to mistakenly identify great horned owls as otherworldly beings.

Could the darkness, fear, and expectation that something strange was outside have transformed a common owl into something more frightening?

Stranger things have happened.

Another rumor claimed it was a few monkeys that had escaped from either a zoo or a traveling circus.

Circuses of the day would often stop their journey at night to let their animals out to exercise and a circus truck had passed Hopkinsville on the same night of the encounter.

King Circus rolled through town on August 21st, but their route was in a different direction from the Sutton Farmhouse.

The animals they exercised were the horses and camels, not monkeys, so that explanation falls apart pretty quickly and I think disappointingly.

As more people attempted explanations, the story accumulated details, some speculative and some were just plain made up, and while there are plausible ways to explain pieces of what the witnesses reported, no single explanation neatly accounts for the entire night.

None of the eyewitnesses changed their story or recanted over the years, but that didn't mean they embraced their infamy.

The family was so eager to distance themselves from the encounter that Lucky's daughter Geraldine didn't hear the story until she was an adult.

According to Geraldine, the remaining living family members refuse to speak about it.

Whether the family encountered aliens or misidentified animals, the event became inspiration for fictional alien invasion stories.

Steven Spielberg famously considered turning the story into a movie, even writing a script called "Night Skies".

The movie never happened, but two other very famous ones, "E.T."

and "Gremlins" did, both of which had roots in the "Night Skies" script.

"E.T."

makes sense, but you're probably wondering, "Gremlins"?

How?

The etymology of the word gremlins brings us to goblins, and for a goblin connection to the Kelly Hopkinsville encounter, we have to go back to the news stories and the regional lore of Kentucky.

Goblins come from a long European tradition and are tiny humanoid creatures often living underground.

Kentucky just so happens to be home to the longest known cave system in the world, Mammoth Cave.

The use of goblin likely comes from older lore about subterranean paranormal encounters, a staple of the coal mining region in Kentucky.

There is one important rumor I keep running into, that Project Blue Book investigated Kelly Hopkinsville.

Project Blue Book was a covert government program set up to investigate unidentified flying objects.

Carried out by the United States Air Force, it aimed to identify real aerial threats from those that could cause unnecessary panic, but as I went looking for that investigation's reports, there was a problem.

There doesn't appear to be any.

The day after the Kelly Hopkinsville encounter while traveling to Campbell Air Force Base, Major John E. Albert heard a broadcast about the supposed sighting.

He called the base and asked if they heard reports of a flying saucer.

They hadn't, but since Albert was nearby, he decided to take a look.

When he arrived at the farmhouse, local Deputy Sheriff Batts told him there was no evidence that an object had landed in the area.

The Air Force denied an official investigation the next day.

While Kelly Hopkinsville does appear in the Project Blue Book archives referencing the incident and an independent officer who gathered information, I couldn't find evidence that the incident itself was ever formally opened as a Blue Book case.

Whomp, whomp.

But later Blue Book investigators were certainly aware of the incident, since it's referenced multiple times in other reports.

Major Albert did report a strange bit of information he picked up while checking out the farmhouse scene.

According to a source whose name was later redacted, members of the family attended an emotionally-charged service at a local church.

The service reportedly put them all into a frenzy.

Later that night, they had apparently been discussing an article that included an image of a monkey painted silver.

Even after digging through reports and articles, I'm not sure we'll ever understand what actually happened that night at the Sutton Farmhouse, but I think we can still say something about what happened afterward.

The witnesses described a handful of strange silver or gray creatures, but the story turned into 12 to 15 little green men.

Officials found no evidence that they had been drinking, yet rumors persisted that the family was drunk, plus no escaped monkeys.

From the first reports, information from the encounter became muddy.

Reporters, skeptics, UFO enthusiasts, and eventually pop culture contributors were all adding to the story, and once that happens, it can be even more difficult to separate fact and fiction.

It tells us something strange about ourselves.

Once a story becomes part of public conversation, truth and fiction do become hard to distinguish.

It's something we see all the time in the media today.

Witnesses become characters held up for scrutiny.

One night becomes the backdrop for other stories and the whole thing just spirals.

Maybe the Sutton saw owls.

Maybe fear and expectation transformed something ordinary into something terrifying or maybe it was something that just couldn't be explained, but whatever happened that night in 1955 has been buried beneath 70 years of storytelling.

The creatures may have vanished, but the story never did, and if a story can change every time we tell it, how much of the monster are we really seeing and how much are we manufacturing?