On August 21, 1955, a group of panicked people showed up at the Hopkinsville Police station claiming that they not only saw a group of extraterrestrials, but had battled them as well.
One steamy summer night in August 1955, 11 terrified people suddenly flooded into the police station in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. They immediately began blabbering frantically about something that had happened on their farm in the nearby town of Kelly.
“We need help,” one man cried to the alarmed yet confused policemen who were working the night shift. “We’ve been fighting them for nearly four hours.”
And when the man said “them,” he meant aliens — little men who had allegedly landed on their farmhouse in the dead of night, terrifying the group with their glowing eyes, silvery skin, and utter indifference to the bullets that the group began firing at them. And though the police who soon descended on the farm found no evidence of aliens, they did find plenty of shell casings and bullet holes, confirming that the people at the Kelly farmhouse had been convinced that something was lurking in the darkness nearby.
According to the terrified witnesses, Billy Ray Taylor and his wife were visiting Lucky Sutton and his family on their farm when Billy Ray noticed something “real bright, with an exhaust all the colors of the rainbow” in the sky while he was outside getting water. He ran inside to tell the Suttons, who laughed him off.
YouTubeWitnesses recount the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter.
Soon, however, the dogs started barking, and Billy Ray and Lucky spotted a three-and-a-half-foot-tall humanoid figure outside. More aliens appeared, and the men started shooting, but the creatures seemed impervious to bullets. That’s when all eight adults and three children in the home piled into the car and drove straight to the police station.
Ever since that night, the so-called Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter has held a crucial place in UFO lore, both because the purported alien invasion was witnessed by so many people — people who told eerily similar stories and steadfastly stood by them — and because it helped establish the very idea of “little green men.” Steven Spielberg has even cited the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter as an inspiration for both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.
And while the chilling incident that unfolded in Kentucky on that hot August night may be one of the most infamous extraterrestrial encounters ever reported, there are plenty of others like it in the annals of modern history. But first, learn more about that summer night in Kentucky in 1955, when a group of people claimed that “little men” with glowing eyes landed near their farmhouse.
Discover the full story behind the Kelly-Hopkinsville UFO incident. Then, explore the next entry in our UFO series: The Lake Michigan Incident of 1994.
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