Earlier this year, I received an email from another author asking about a photo I’d used for one of my Freaky Friday posts. She was writing a book about the same topic and was interested in the photo I’d used. After a couple of emails back and forth, I discovered that she was Geraldine Sutton Stith and that she had an incredible legacy.
This is from her Amazon Author page: “My name is Geraldine Sutton Stith. Just a country girl with an incredible legacy that was given to me. I am a direct descendant of an incredible event that happened to several of my family members in 1955 in the small community of Kelly, Kentucky.
My dad, grandmother, and several aunts and uncles had a terrifying visit by what we call today “little green men!” This visit caused a great commotion in Kelly, and the world found out that there are little beings that are apparently visiting our world.
I have written a couple of books on the topic “Alien Legacy” and “The Kelly Green Men,” along with a children’s book “A Strange New World” to let the world know what happened that night. The Kelly Green Men, also known as the Hopkinsville Goblins, are well-known and well-loved around the world. Today, I live a quiet life with my husband in Brandenburg, KY. I also speak about the little visitors of that night and try to help others understand that it could happen to you!”
So, of course, when we were traveling a few weeks ago, I just had to drive through Hopkinsville and Kelly, Kentucky, just to get a “feel” for the neighborhood. And to learn a little more about the visit that happened in 1955.
The Kentucky New Era printed the story above the fold on August 22, 1955 – the headline read, “Story Of Space-Ship, 12 Little Men Probed Today.” “Kelly Farmhouse Scene Of Alleged Raid By Strange Crew Last Night; Reports Say Bullets Failed to Affect Visitors.”
Atlas Obscura.com has this to say about the event: “The story comes to us from the local newspaper, Kentucky New Era, which, on August 22, 1955, reported strange goings-on the previous night, eight miles north of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. At about 11:00 pm, two cars arrived at the local police station, blasting out of the night filled with at least five adults and several children, all of whom were highly agitated. “We need help,” they told the police. “We’ve been fighting them for nearly four hours.”
Once they’d calmed down enough to talk, they unfurled a strange story. One of the men, Billy Ray Taylor, had been visiting from Pennsylvania. At one point, he went outside to fetch water from the farm’s well. As he walked through the failing light, he saw a circular-shaped object hover through the air before coming to rest in a nearby gully.
Concerned, Taylor retreated inside and returned with a shotgun to investigate. As he walked into the gloom, a strange, goblin-like thing with glowing eyes appeared and moved toward him. It had “huge eyes,” and hands out of proportion with its body, and looked to be wearing some kind of “metal plate.” Taylor retreated to the house yet again and grabbed a .22 caliber pistol, while Lucky Sutton grabbed a shotgun and joined him.
A creature—whether it was the same one, they didn’t know—appeared in the window, and Sutton unloaded his shotgun at it, blowing out the window screen. When they went outside to see if they’d hit anything, Taylor felt a “huge hand” reach down from the low roof above and grab his hair. He pulled away, and the two men went looking for their quarry. They found one creature in a tree and another on the roof of a nearby house. Sutton fired another shotgun blast at one, which knocked it down but didn’t appear to have done serious damage. At that point, the goblins, as the family described them, disappeared. Barricaded inside once again, the families waited for a chance to escape, at which point they drove like hell for the police station.
The police who arrived on the scene found no goblins, no footprints of anything goblin-like, no flying saucer full of goblins, no evidence that anything had landed nearby. They found just a screen with a shotgun hole in it.”
In an article covering the “Kelly Little Green Men Days Festival,” Country Living.com reported that more happened after the officers left. “At 3:30 in the morning, after a fitful nap that never entered deep sleep, Glennie Lankford, the owner of the house, awoke to the sight of one of the little men on the other side of her bedroom window. She called out to Lucky, her son, who is Geraldine’s father, who was dozing on the couch in the living room. He and Billy Ray, a friend of Lucky’s, spent the next couple of hours watching guard with their guns. The creatures left just before daybreak, they say, the last the family would ever see of them.”
But that certainly wasn’t the end of the story. In the days that followed the 1955 incident, dozens of “UFO fanatics” converged on the small farm, hoping to get a peek at any possible evidence left behind by the so-called men from outer space. The family got so sick of being harassed and then having their integrity questioned that they moved away.
Glennie had been so traumatized by the encounter that she sold the farmhouse and moved into an apartment in town.
Unfortunately, in those days, even when the government was aware of UFOs, they weren’t about to let the public know. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer and UFO researcher highly regarded for his work with the U.S. Air Force, called the Kelly-Hopkinsville case “preposterous” and offensive to “common sense.”
Others said the little men were actually monkeys Billy Ray and Lucky had brought back from the carnival, while others thought the family had mistaken great horned owls for aliens. Kentucky moonshine was blamed, even though authorities found none on the premises that night.
Fourteen years after the event, Lucky brought his daughter, Geraldine, and her siblings back to the old farmhouse and told them the story. He was able to show them strange circular impressions in the ground where he thought the spacecraft must have landed.
Geraldine discovered that many people had the facts all wrong about the encounter, so she chronicled her family’s experience in the books “Alien Legacy” and “The Kelly Green Men: Alien Legacy Revisited.”
In the Country Living article, Geraldine said, “My family went through something, whether it be paranormal or extraterrestrial, that changed their lives forever. I just want people to realize the terror they went through that night.”
Terrifying indeed!
Happy Friday!!!