Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Hopkinsville Goblins: Little Green Men on a Kentucky Farm
On a hot Sunday night in August 1955, a caravan of cars pulled up outside the Hopkinsville, Kentucky police station. Inside were eleven people from a small farm community called Kelly, just north of town. Some were crying. One man’s pulse was racing. They told the officers on duty that “little men” had come out of a glowing object in the field, crept up to their windows, and refused to leave no matter how many times the family shot at them.
Before the night was over, city police, Kentucky state troopers, county deputies, and military police from nearby Fort Campbell would converge on the Sutton family farmhouse outside Kelly. They found shell casings, shattered window screens, and a family who seemed genuinely shaken, but no bodies and no clear physical trace of any visitors. Within a day, the story of the “Kelly incident” was on wire services and in big city papers. Within a few years, it was being linked to a new phrase in American pop culture: “little green men.”
Today, nearly seventy years later, historians, skeptics, and believers still argue about what happened that night. What began as a police call in rural Christian County became one of the most debated close encounter stories in American folklore, with roots in local memory and branches that reach all the way into science fiction, tourism, and skeptical classrooms.
A farmhouse between Kelly and Hopkinsville
The Sutton family home stood along a country road near Kelly, an unincorporated community in Christian County, western Kentucky. In 1955 the house was a simple three room structure, unpainted and without running water or a telephone, much like many farmhouses in the region.
Living there were widow and matriarch Glennie Lankford, her children from two marriages, and their spouses. On the evening of August 21, 1955, Glennie shared the house with her older sons Elmer “Lucky” Sutton and John Charley “J. C.” Sutton, their wives Vera and Alene, three younger children, Alene’s brother O. P. Baker, and visiting friends Billy Ray and June Taylor.
It was a typical summer Sunday. The adults talked and played cards while the children drifted in and out of the rooms. Around dusk, Billy Ray stepped out to the backyard well for water. Looking up, he later said he saw a bright, metallic object move silently across the sky, hover above the farmhouse, and then drop toward a low spot in a nearby field.
When Billy Ray rushed back to tell the others he had seen a flying saucer, most of the family dismissed it as a shooting star or his imagination. A few hours later, the dog began to howl and crawl under the house, and the night on the Sutton farm took a different turn.
“Little men” at the window
Alerted by the nervous dog, Lucky Sutton and Billy Ray went to investigate the yard. As they moved toward the back of the house, they saw a glow near the edge of the farm and, within it, a small figure walking toward them.
In later interviews, witnesses described the beings as three to four feet tall, with large round heads, long arms that seemed to reach almost to the ground, pointed ears, and hands that ended in claw like fingers. Their eyes appeared oversized and yellowish, shining in the dark. The bodies looked silvery, either because of their skin or because they were wearing something that caught and reflected the light like metal.
According to the family, one of the creatures approached the back door with its arms raised, as if in surrender or curiosity. Frightened, the men grabbed a twenty gauge shotgun and a .22 rifle and fired. The figure flipped backward, then scrambled away into the darkness. Shortly after, another small figure appeared at a side window. When the men shot through the screen, they said it tumbled away, apparently unharmed.
For the next several hours, the Suttons insisted, the “little men” moved around the outside of the house. Witnesses recalled seeing them peering in the windows, crouching near the eaves, and even seeming to float toward the roof or drop from the overhang above the porch. In one of the more famous moments of the story, Billy Ray stepped out under the small porch roof and felt a clawed hand reach down and touch his hair before relatives yanked him back indoors and fired upward toward the roofline.
The family later told investigators they fired repeatedly and could hear the sound of bullets striking something hard, “like a metal bucket,” yet none of the beings fell or left obvious blood or bodies.
Police, troopers, and soldiers in the yard
Shortly before 11 p.m., after hours of this strange siege, the entire group decided they had had enough. Piling into two vehicles, the adults and children drove into Hopkinsville and went straight to the police station. The officers on duty later told reporters and investigators that the group appeared genuinely terrified. The Suttons were not known for running to authorities for help. In the words of one local officer quoted years later, these were the kind of people who usually “reached for their guns” instead.
Fearing there might be some kind of armed conflict in the countryside, Hopkinsville’s police chief called for backup. Before long, four city policemen, five state troopers, three deputy sheriffs, and four military police from Fort Campbell were heading out of town toward Kelly, accompanied by at least one local reporter and a photographer from the Kentucky New Era newspaper.
When they reached the Sutton farm, the law officers fanned out around the property. They found shotgun and rifle shells scattered around the yard, bullet holes in the window screens and in parts of the house, and nervous family members reluctant to go back inside without them. They did not, however, find any small bodies, tracks that they could clearly connect to nonhuman visitors, or a scorched landing site. Contemporary accounts emphasized that there was no sign of heavy drinking that night; Glennie Lankford told investigators she did not allow liquor in her home.
One oft repeated detail is that some officers and later visitors noticed a faint glowing patch along a fence line or on the ground near the house, sometimes described as a “luminous spot.” Later researchers pointed out that decaying wood in rural Kentucky often carries foxfire, a pale green bioluminescent fungus, which can glow on warm nights.
After about two hours of searching, the officers left, telling the family there was little more they could do. According to the Suttons, the goblins returned in the early morning hours and continued to peer at windows and scratch at the house until near daybreak, then disappeared for good.
From police call to national headline
The next day, the Kentucky New Era ran a front page story with the memorable headline “Story of Space Ship, 12 Little Men Probed Today,” introducing the Hopkinsville region and the wider country to the Kelly incident.
Within days, the story had moved beyond western Kentucky. Wire services, metropolitan newspapers, and radio programs picked it up. Some retellings inflated the number of beings circling the farmhouse to a dozen or more. Others turned the metallic silver color described by witnesses into “little green men,” a phrase that would soon become shorthand for playful or cartoonish aliens in American popular culture.
Crowds of curiosity seekers descended on the Sutton farm, many of them treating the family more as a roadside attraction than as neighbors. After enduring ridicule and trespassing, the family posted signs and eventually charged small admission fees for visitors who wanted to see the property or ask questions. Critics seized on this and accused the Suttons of staging the entire encounter for money, even though the attention seems to have brought them more stress than profit.
As the story spread, it also began to merge with other mid century UFO and “space man” reports, further blurring the line between what the Suttons originally said and what popular culture remembered.
Case files, investigators, and the Blue Book verdict
Although the United States Air Force did not mount a full, on site investigation, the Kelly incident did find its way into Project Blue Book, the Air Force program responsible for cataloging UFO reports. It was listed under case number 10073. The Blue Book card briefly summarized the event and ultimately classified it as a hoax or misidentification, while other internal comments suggested that reports involving “creatures” were generally regarded as unreliable and placed in a marginal “crackpot” file.
Outside official channels, however, the case attracted a great deal of attention. In the late 1950s, radio man Bud Ledwith interviewed the adult witnesses, created sketches based on their descriptions, and mapped their movements around the house. In 1978, researcher Isabel Davis, working with the Center for UFO Studies founded by astronomer J. Allen Hynek, published an extensive report titled Close Encounters at Kelly and Others of 1955. Her account assembled police statements, family interviews, diagrams of the house, and a survey of similar reports.
Davis concluded that she could not easily explain the event as a deliberate hoax, a simple misidentification, or a case of group hallucination. She was especially impressed by the consistency of the witnesses’ descriptions and by the demeanor of Glennie Lankford, whom she described as a serious woman with little interest in publicity.
By contrast, skeptical investigators later argued that there were more mundane explanations. In a widely cited 2006 article in Skeptical Inquirer, researcher Joe Nickell suggested that the goblins were likely great horned owls, large night active birds with round heads, prominent ear tufts, large yellow eyes, and a habit of aggressively defending their nests. In the dim light of a summer night, under stress and primed by an earlier report of a meteor or fireball in the sky, he argued, panicked witnesses might have interpreted owls landing on the house and moving through the trees as small alien beings impervious to bullets.
Psychologists have also used the Kelly story to teach critical thinking, labeling it an “extraordinary claim” and inviting students to weigh the family’s testimony against the lack of physical evidence and the possibility of heightened emotion or intoxication.
Goblins on posters, screens, and festival banners
Whatever actually moved around the Sutton farmhouse that night, the Kelly incident quickly stepped out of the case file and into American folklore.
Writers and filmmakers have pointed to the story as an influence on science fiction and horror projects ranging from unproduced scripts by Steven Spielberg to the 1986 film Critters, in which small, dangerous creatures terrorize a rural family. Designers of the Pokémon character Sableye have acknowledged that its wide eyes and pointed ears are based on drawings of the Hopkinsville goblins.
In western Kentucky, the story has become part of local identity. In recent years the Kelly community has hosted “Little Green Men Days,” a summertime festival with food, music, and alien themed art that celebrates the 1955 encounter. In 2025, on the seventieth anniversary of the incident, media coverage once again revisited the story, interviewing descendants of the Sutton family and promoting new events like “Alien Invasion Day” and Goblin themed conventions in nearby Hopkinsville.
A story that once embarrassed the family and brought gawkers to their front yard now brings visitors in a different way. Tourists stop in Hopkinsville and Kelly to pose with alien cutouts, buy goblin themed souvenirs, and stand near the spot where a farmhouse once stood.
Owls, fear, and the work of folklore
So what do we do with a story like this in an Appalachian and Kentucky context.
On one level, the Hopkinsville goblins fit perfectly into a long regional tradition of strange lights, tall tales, and things that come walking out of the dark at the edge of a field. Like tales of the Brown Mountain Lights or the Grafton Monster, the Kelly incident anchors a global fascination with the unknown in a very specific place. It is not just a UFO case. It is a story about one farm, one extended family, and one hot night in 1955.
On another level, the case sits at the crossroads of several twentieth century anxieties. The encounter happened during the Cold War and the atomic age, when Americans were thinking about the sky in new ways. Flying saucer stories filled magazines and movie theaters. Air Force projects like Blue Book tried to reassure the public by explaining away strange sightings, while also quietly monitoring them. When the Suttons said that something had landed near their home, it was easy for neighbors and reporters to plug that story into a much larger pattern of fear and fascination running from Roswell, New Mexico, to rural Kentucky.
Folklore also reminds us that the meaning of an event often matters more than its provable details. For the Sutton family, the night in question was remembered as an attack or at least an unwanted visitation that upended their sense of safety in a familiar landscape. For skeptics, it is a cautionary tale about the limits of eyewitness testimony under stress. For the town of Kelly, it has become a piece of local color that brings people together for a festival and gives a tiny community a place on the map.
Whether the beings at the Sutton farmhouse were owls, visitors from somewhere else, or a story that grew out of fear in the dark, the Hopkinsville goblins now belong to the same mountain and borderland imagination that tells of phantom riders, ghost lights, and creatures along lonely roads. In that sense, they have already done the work that folklore always does. They have taken a single summer night and turned it into a story people still tell, argue over, and build new meanings around generations later.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky New Era. “Story of Space-Ship, 12 Little Men Probed Today.” Hopkinsville, Kentucky, August 22, 1955. Reprinted as “Archives | Story of space-ship, 12 little men probed today,” Kentucky New Era, August 20, 2017. https://www.kentuckynewera.com/eclipse/article_fecf69ce-8611-11e7-beaf-0ffce93df895.html.
Davis, Isabel, and Ted Bloecher. Close Encounters at Kelly and Others of 1955. Evanston, IL: Center for UFO Studies, 1978. http://www.cufos.org/books/Close_Encounter_at_Kelly.pdf.
Project Blue Book. “Case 10073: Kelly, Kentucky.” U.S. Air Force, 1955. Reproduced in “Project Blue Book and the Kelly–Hopkinsville Case,” UFOs at Close Sight. https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/htm/kelly55blu.htm.
Janssen, Volker. “How the ‘Little Green Men’ Phenomenon Began on a Kentucky Farm.” History, January 2, 2020. Updated May 28, 2025. https://www.history.com/articles/little-green-men-origins-aliens-hopkinsville-kelly.
Nickell, Joe. “Siege of ‘Little Green Men’: The 1955 Kelly, Kentucky, Incident.” Skeptical Inquirer 30, no. 6 (November–December 2006). https://skepticalinquirer.org/2006/11/siege-of-little-green-men-the-1955-kelly-kentucky-incident/.
Schmaltz, Rodney, and Scott O. Lilienfeld. “Hauntings, Homeopathy, and the Hopkinsville Goblins: Using Pseudoscience to Teach Scientific Thinking.” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014): 336. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00336/full.
Ferguson, Adam. “70 Years Later: Revisiting the Kelly–Hopkinsville Encounter.” WBKO, August 21, 2025. https://www.wbko.com/2025/08/21/70-years-later-revisiting-kelly-hopkinsville-encounter/.
Phillips, Betsy. “The Curious Case of the 1955 Kelly–Hopkinsville Encounter: Let’s Put on Our Tinfoil Hats.” Nashville Scene, September 6, 2022. https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/the-curious-case-of-the-1955-kelly-hopkinsville-encounter/article_c1d554a0-2b09-11ed-aa3e-4fc763972068.html.
Null, John. “A Hopkinsville Alien Tale Has Inspired a Yearly Festival, a Musical and Pokémon.” WKMS, August 19, 2016. https://www.wkms.org/arts-culture/2016-08-19/a-hopkinsville-alien-tale-has-inspired-a-yearly-festival-a-musical-and-pokemon.
Smith, Daniel. “History Lesson: Goblins of Hopkinsville.” Courier & Press (Evansville, IN), August 21, 2017. https://www.courierpress.com/story/life/columnists/2017/08/21/history-lesson-goblins-hopkinsville/104796526/.
Potter, Laura. “The Kelly Little Green Men.” Kentucky Educational Television (KET), October 27, 2019. https://www.ket.org/living/the-kelly-little-green-men/.
Carter, Megan. “The Eerie Story Behind the Small Town Everyone Is Flocking to for the Eclipse This Summer.” Country Living, July 21, 2017. https://www.countryliving.com/life/a44064/eclipseville-hopkinsville-ky-history/.
“Kelly–Hopkinsville Encounter.” Wikipedia. Accessed January 13, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly%E2%80%93Hopkinsville_encounter.
“Kelly–Hopkinsville Case, 1955.” UFOs at Close Sight: The Kelly–Hopkinsville Case. Accessed January 13, 2026. https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/htm/kelly-hopkinsville55.htm.
“Legend of ‘Little Green Men’ Invading Kelly, Kentucky Continues.” Daily Yonder, October 22, 2021. https://dailyyonder.com/legend-of-little-green-men-invading-kelly-kentucky-continues/2021/10/22/.
“Tales from the Path of Totality: 62 Years Ago Today, They Say ‘Little Green Men’ Invaded This Kentucky Farm Town.” Washington Post, August 21, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/21/tales-from-the-path-of-totality-62-years-ago-today-they-say-little-green-men-invaded-this-kentucky-farm-town/.
Author Note: I wrote this piece because the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter sits where folklore, fear, and local memory all collide. My hope is that laying out the sources clearly helps readers enjoy the story while also seeing how historians evaluate extraordinary claims.