# The Little Men of Kelly [View on uap.fun]() CASE FILE 032 · 1955 Published: September 27, 2026 A Kentucky farm family said small silver figures with glowing eyes and talons stared through their windows for hours while shotguns rang uselessly. Then eleven people fled to the police at once. ![Illustration of a small lamp-lit Kentucky farmhouse at night with a silhouetted figure in the doorway, a dark maple tree, a fence line and one faint pale glow at the edge of the yard.]() Not a real photo. Original illustration of the reported setting; it is not a reconstruction of the farmhouse, the witnesses or any creature. ## AT A GLANCE - **DATE:** August 21–22, 1955 - **LOCATION:** The Sutton farmhouse on the Old Madisonville Road, Kelly, Christian County, Kentucky - **REPORT TYPE:** Close encounter - **ENCOUNTER KIND:** [Third kind (CE3)]() — Based on the household’s report of small, glowing, humanoid-like figures at arm’s length over most of a night. The classification records what the witnesses described, not what caused it. - **RECORD STATUS:** Unresolved; Air Force card says unidentified, owls proposed ## The story ### A farmhouse with no telephone Kelly was a community of about 150 people strung along the Old Madisonville Road, a little-used gravel turnpike running beside U.S. 41 some seven miles north of Hopkinsville, and the Sutton place stood a few hundred yards east of the highway. Isabel Davis, who walked the property in 1956, recorded a house with electric lights and a small refrigerator but no radio, no telephone and no running water; cooking was done on a kerosene stove and water came from a well in the back yard. The windows ran almost to the floor, with sills no more than eighteen inches off the ground. Eleven people were inside on the hot Sunday evening of August 21, 1955: Glennie Lankford, a fifty-year-old widow; her sons Elmer “Lucky” Sutton, twenty-five, and J.C. Sutton, twenty-one, with their wives Vera and Alene; her younger children Lonnie, Charlton and Mary, aged twelve, ten and seven; Alene’s brother O.P. Baker; and Lucky’s friends Billy Ray Taylor and June Taylor, twenty-one and eighteen. Lucky and Billy Ray had come off a traveling carnival that summer. Lucky’s nickname was tattooed one letter per finger across his left hand. Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Story of space-ship, 12 little men probed today]() ### Billy Ray at the well About seven o’clock Billy Ray Taylor went out to the well for a drink and came running back with what the family took for one of his stories. As he brought up the bucket, he said, a silvery object, “real bright, with an exhaust all the colors of the rainbow,” had come silently toward the house from the southwest at thirty or forty feet, run level down the fields, stopped in the air and dropped straight into the forty-foot gully at the far end of the property. Nobody believed him. They told him he had seen a shooting star, laughed it off and went back inside. Nobody walked out to the gully. A neighbor a quarter mile north later said that between 7:30 and 8:00 he had noticed lights moving in the fields behind the Sutton house and assumed the pigs had gotten loose. “I thought maybe I ought to go and help them,” he said. “But I’m glad I didn’t—I might have been shot.” Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Story of space-ship, 12 little men probed today]() ### The glow in the fields Around eight the dog began barking wildly, then put its tail between its legs and crawled under the house, where it stayed until morning. Lucky and Billy Ray went to the back door and saw a glow approaching from the fields. As it came closer it resolved into a small figure about three and a half feet tall: an oversized, almost perfectly round head, arms that reached nearly to the ground, huge hands ending in talons, and eyes far larger than human eyes that glowed yellow and sat halfway around the sides of the face. The whole body seemed to be made of silver metal that gave off an eerie light in the dark, “like the light from the radium dial on a watch.” Its hands were raised, “as if someone had told him he was about to be robbed,” and it was walking slowly toward the door. Lucky took the 20-gauge shotgun and Billy Ray the .22 rifle. When the thing was within twenty feet they both fired. It somersaulted backward, “did a flip,” scrambled upright and scurried into the darkness at the side of the house. Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Kelly Encounter]() ### A hand from the roof Minutes later a second face appeared at the living-room window. J.C. Sutton, standing by the fireplace, fired the shotgun through the screen from a foot or two away; Taylor fired the rifle from across the room. Again the figure flipped and vanished. The men went to the front door to see whether they had hit anything, and Taylor stepped out first under the small overhang. From the hallway the others watched a clawed hand reach down from the roof and touch his hair. They screamed. Alene grabbed him and hauled him back inside while Lucky pushed past, turned the 12-gauge upward and blew the creature over the ridgepole. “There’s one up in the tree, too,” Taylor said, pointing to the maple at the right of the house. Both men fired and knocked it off the limb, but instead of falling it floated to the ground before scuttling into the weeds. Almost at once another rounded the corner of the house, and Lucky fired point-blank. It sounded as if the shot had hit a metal bucket. The thing flipped over, got up and ran off unhurt. When a direct blast from a 12-gauge had no effect, Lucky decided to leave the things alone. Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Story of space-ship, 12 little men probed today]() ### How the little men moved The strangest details in the family’s account concern movement. Approaching the house, the figures walked upright, slowly, hands raised. Knocked off a roof, a limb or the back fence, they did not fall but drifted down. Knocked over on the ground, they dropped their hands to the earth and “ran” at great speed, arms doing most of the work while legs “as spindly as broom handles” swung stiffly beneath them, never seeming to bend at a knee. Their glow brightened whenever someone shot or shouted, as though noise fed the light, and under a light the shine dulled to a flat metallic look. They made no sound except a faint scraping on the tin roof, like talons dragged across it. They never retaliated and never tried to enter; they simply stood at a door or window and looked in. The newspapers counted twelve or fifteen of them. Davis concluded that only once were two seen at the same moment, and Glennie Lankford insisted to her that no more than one was ever seen at a time. Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Kelly Encounter]() ### ‘Like a five-gallon gasoline can with a head on top’ For two hours the women assumed the men were fooling around in the yard. Around ten, by Mrs. Lankford’s reckoning, Alene came in white and shaking, saying she had seen one of the little men. The family turned out the lights, and Glennie Lankford crouched in the hallway beside Billy Ray, about three feet from the screen door, to see for herself. “Wait and you’ll see,” he told her. Twenty minutes later one came up to the screen. “It looked like a five-gallon gasoline can with a head on top and small legs,” she said in 1959. “It was a shimmering bright metal like on my refrigerator.” Her legs had gone stiff from crouching; trying to back away she lost her balance, fell with a thud and shrieked, and the thing jumped back into the yard as Billy fired through the screen. She was the calmest person in the house all night. The creatures approached slowly with their hands up, she reasoned, as if they wanted to communicate. “I kept telling them to come into the house and shut the doors,” she told Davis. “The things weren’t doing us any harm.” Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() ### ‘A spaceship has landed at Kelly’ Lucky later said the creatures “came up to the house six times.” By eleven o’clock the shooting had stopped nothing, the children could not be kept in bed and one was screaming so hard it had to be carried to the car. Eleven people piled into two automobiles and drove to the Hopkinsville police station as fast as the cars would go. The desk sergeant telephoned Chief Russell Greenwell at home: “A spaceship has landed at Kelly.” Greenwell told him that if this was a joke it was not his idea of one. The sergeant said the state police were already sending units. The chief drove out at seventy or eighty miles an hour behind a trooper with the siren screaming. On the way, near the Shady Oaks restaurant, another trooper heard what he took for meteors passing overhead “with a noise like artillery fire” and saw two of them descending toward the Sutton farm. One officer with medical experience rode out beside one of the men, probably Billy Ray Taylor, noticed the pulse beating in his neck and counted it: 140 a minute, twice normal. “Something scared those people,” Greenwell said afterward. “Something beyond reason—nothing ordinary.” Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Story of space-ship, 12 little men probed today]() ![Colorful 1951 large-letter postcard reading Greetings from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, Gateway to Kentucky Lake, with small town scenes inside each letter.]() Hopkinsville as it sold itself four years before the Suttons drove in: a 1951 Curt Teich large-letter postcard. Scan by Steve Shook, CC BY 2.0. [Image source]() [CC BY 2.0 · Steve Shook]() ### Pistols and a cat’s tail Within the hour the farmyard was lit like a Roman candle by headlights and flashlights. The Kentucky New Era named Chief Greenwell and three city officers, State Troopers R.N. Ferguson Jr. and G.W. Riley, Deputy Sheriff George Batts and four military policemen, who Davis established had come from Fort Campbell; a Madisonville reporter, the New Era photographer and his wife also turned up. When the photographer demanded to be shown “the roof where this little man is supposed to have been sitting,” one of the Suttons snapped back: “Supposed, hell! He was sitting there!” Nobody in the family would re-enter the house until it had been searched. The officers found the square hole in the living-room screen, a few shotgun shells in the yard that no one collected, and nothing else: no footprints on the drought-hardened ground, no spaceship, no little men. A Hopkinsville officer saw a greenish light in the woods; a search found nothing. Then someone stepped on the cat. “You never saw so many pistols unholstered so fast in your life,” Greenwell said. One thing did catch his eye. From inside the back fence, several men saw a luminous patch a foot or two across on the grass where a creature was said to have been knocked down. It showed from one angle only and vanished at close range. The chief quietly checked for drinking and found none. By about 2:15 a.m. the last car had gone. Sources: [Story of space-ship, 12 little men probed today]() · [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() ### The second visit Half an hour later, with the lights off and the family trying to sleep, the little men came back. Glennie Lankford lay in bed with her head toward the north window and became aware of a glow. One of the figures seemed to have come around the chimney. It put its small clawed hands up on the screen and stared silently into the room. “I turned my head three different times, because I thought maybe my eyes were fooling me,” she told Davis. “But every time I turned my head back, there he was.” She called softly to the others. Lucky was on his feet at once with the gun. “For God’s sake, don’t!” his mother told him. “Mama,” he answered, “I’m goin’ to shoot that little man,” and fired. Greenwell later dug pellets out of the window frame; the shot did nothing to the visitor. In the statement she signed for an Air Force officer the next morning, Mrs. Lankford put this at about 3:30 a.m.: “a small silver shining object about 2½ feet tall that had its hands on the screen looking in. I called for my sons and they shot at it and it left.” The last one was seen about half an hour before sunrise, which came at 5:15 on Monday, August 22. Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Project Blue Book record card and Hynek memorandum, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, August 21–22, 1955]() ### Sketches on a scarred table By 11 a.m. everyone at radio station WHOP was greeting Bud Ledwith, its engineer-announcer, with the same question: “Have you seen the little green men yet?” Ledwith had studied art, and he drove out with the station owner’s son as a witness to draw the creature the way police artists build a face. He worked first with the three women, refusing to suggest any feature and letting them correct him. Eyes “like saucers,” yellow and glowing, set six inches apart and halfway around the head; ears large, floppy and pointed “like a piece of wrinkled leather”; a bald, egg-like head; no neck; arms almost twice the length of the legs; hands with talons; no feet seen. When the sketch was done, Glennie Lankford took one look, said he had not missed a thing, and asked him to take it away. Billy Ray Taylor came in from hunting at 1:45, saw the drawing on the bed and shouted, “That’s it, that’s it, that looks just like it!” Lucky came back from Evansville that afternoon to find cars lined up for half a mile and strangers in his yard. He came in “like a bear,” saw the women’s drawing, sat down and corrected the shape of the face, and he and J.C. and O.P. Baker then built their own sketch from the women’s. Taylor, meanwhile, was adding antennae, a cone-shaped nose and suction-cup feet for an eager soldier who had come to draw his own version, and he retracted the nose when Lucky was in the room. Seven witnesses, questioned in separate groups, had given Ledwith nearly the same picture. Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() ### Tubmen, admission signs and two thousand sightseers Monday’s Kentucky New Era carried the story of a “space-ship” and “12 little men” and noted that “all officials appeared to agree that there was no drinking involved.” The Evansville Press posed Lucky, J.C. and O.P. Baker demonstrating how the saucer had come down. Then came the crowds: cars jammed the Old Madisonville Road, strangers opened the doors and walked through the house, and Mrs. Lankford wept from exhaustion while asking them to leave. A No Trespassing sign did nothing, so the family posted another: fifty cents to enter the grounds, a dollar for information, ten dollars to take pictures. Davis found that no money was ever collected, but the sign cost the Suttons what sympathy they had. The newspaper photographer, poking along the fence on Tuesday, held up a scrap of aluminum foil: “Look—there’s your ‘little man.’” The Madisonville Messenger headlined “EARTHMEN PROFIT—See Where the ‘Tubmen’ Landed; Only 50¢ Per,” after someone likened the craft to an egg-shaped washtub, and reported some two thousand people at the roadside in a single day. The family set out for a married daughter’s home in Michigan, turned back to guard their belongings from souvenir hunters, and by October the two carnival men had rejoined the show. “The lies they told about us,” Mrs. Lankford said the next summer. “Said we were drinking… like saying there were twelve or fifteen of them.” The witnesses never called their visitors green; the phrase that stuck was already circulating in Hopkinsville by Monday morning, and Davis opened her report by noting that they were not green, not men and not at Hopkinsville. Her granddaughter says “goblin” was the family’s own word: Glennie Lankford, a devout woman, first took the visitors for something the devil had brought forth. Sources: [Story of space-ship, 12 little men probed today]() · [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [‘The granddaddy of UFO stories’: 70 years after the Kelly little green men]() ### The file the Air Force said it did not have On the Tuesday the Air Force told the press that there had been no official investigation and no basis to the report. Its own file, released in 1975, tells a stranger story. A reserve officer, Major John E. Albert, heard a radio news report on his way to Fort Campbell, phoned the base and was told to go and see. He wrote out a statement for Mrs. Lankford to sign that refers to the “little man that looked like a monkey,” a comparison Davis noted she never made in her own words, and two years later wrote that she belonged to a “Holy Roller Church,” had been “worked up into a frenzy” at a revival meeting, and had probably seen an escaped circus monkey or a magazine photograph of a monkey painted silver. Davis checked each claim: the family had attended no meeting, there was no radio in the house and Mrs. Lankford’s church was the conventional Trinity Pentecostal. In 1956 J. Allen Hynek reported to Blue Book that MPs and a private from Fort Campbell had been at the farmhouse, that two men from an unidentified agency in Louisville had made inquiries, and that the state police held a case report and sketches at Frankfort. Captain George Gregory’s undated memo worried that the case “may cause some embarrassment if suddenly submitted ‘cold’” and floated the circus monkeys too. In August 1957, hearing that a magazine article was coming, Air Technical Intelligence Center wrote Fort Campbell for “factual data” about “an all night attack on a family named Sutton by goblin-like creatures,” while admitting the incident “has never been officially reported to the Air Force.” Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Project Blue Book record card and Hynek memorandum, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, August 21–22, 1955]() ![Typed U.S. Air Force Project 10073 record card for Hopkinsville, Kentucky, dated 21–22 Aug 55, with the summary LITTLE MEN. SEE CASE FILE. and the conclusion Unidentified.]() The Project Blue Book record card for Hopkinsville: ground-visual, civilian source, “sketch” under photos, and a two-line summary, “LITTLE MEN. SEE CASE FILE.” The conclusion box reads Unidentified. U.S. Air Force, ATIC Form 329; public domain. [Image source]() [Public domain · U.S. federal government work]() ### ‘Little men. See case file.’ The Air Force record card is the case’s most quoted document and its most misread. Under Project 10073 it lists a ground-visual sighting by a civilian source between 21 and 22 August 1955, multiple objects, a sketch in place of photographs, and a two-line summary: “LITTLE MEN. SEE CASE FILE.” The conclusion typed in is “Unidentified.” Hynek later wrote that the case “is carried in Blue Book files as ‘Unidentified.’” Brian Dunning found it listed among hoaxes in Blue Book lecture notes, and the case is often said to have been classified a hoax. Kevin Randle, checking the master index, found it filed among “Additional reported sightings not cases,” outside the official count altogether. His answer to both camps: was it labeled unidentified by the Air Force? “No.” Was it labeled a hoax? “Again, the answer is, ‘No.’” The truth is that the Air Force never investigated, then built a file to prepare for the questions it feared, and wrote “Unidentified” on the card. Sources: [Project Blue Book record card and Hynek memorandum, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, August 21–22, 1955]() · [Chasing Footnotes: The Kelly-Hopkinsville Edition, part two]() · [The Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter]() ### Owls, meteors and a monograph Davis spent four days in Hopkinsville in June 1956 interviewing Mrs. Lankford, Alene Sutton, the chief, the deputy, three troopers and the reporters, and Bud Ledwith gave her his notes and sketches. Her 1978 monograph weighed hoax, hallucination, aluminum foil and the monkeys, found each one worse than the story it was meant to replace, and concluded that “only the ‘truth’ theory makes sense.” A different explanation has grown since. Renaud Leclet in France, from 1996, and Joe Nickell in the United States, in 2006, proposed that Taylor’s saucer was a bright meteor from the late-August showers and that the little men were great horned owls: round heads, yellow eyes, tufted “ears,” talons, silent flight, aggressive defense of a nest, and wings that could read as long dangling arms in the dark. Nickell’s article ends: “What a hoot!” Davis had already compiled the meteor reports herself, including a neighbor’s fireball at 6:30 and a red streak before dawn, and allowed that they might have been very belated Perseids. Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Siege of ‘Little Green Men’: The 1955 Kelly, Kentucky, Incident]() · [Kelly-Hopkinsville (U.S.A.)]() · [The Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter]() ### ‘If Mama saw it, it was there’ The family never budged. Greenwell told Davis that Mrs. Lankford was “the type of person who wouldn’t tell a lie if her life depended on it,” and her son Tillman, who lived in town and had taken the first reports for a joke, put it more simply once he heard his mother had seen them too: “If Mama saw it, it was there.” In 2003 the retired chief said he was still convinced they saw something. Lonnie Lankford, twelve in 1955 and hidden under a bed, remembered “the commotion and the hollerin’ and screaming” and said the visitors were “silver, not green.” Lucky’s children asked the New Era to call it a fantasy or group hysteria if it liked: “Just don’t call it a lie.” His daughter Geraldine Sutton Stith has written books about the night, says her father was “very adamant it was only three or four” of the same beings returning, and spoke at the first Kelly “Little Green Men” Days festival in August 2011, a fundraiser with a costume contest, a 1955-style baking contest and a gospel sing named for her grandmother. The farmhouse has since been demolished, but the town has not let go: in October 2025 Hopkinsville launched GoblinCon, a UFO and paranormal convention with a cosplay contest and a scavenger hunt for three-foot alien figures. Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Kelly Green men story won’t die]() · [The Kelly ‘commotion’]() · [1st annual Kelly ‘Little Green Men’ Days festival]() · [‘The granddaddy of UFO stories’: 70 years after the Kelly little green men]() · [70 years later: Revisiting the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter]() · [Hopkinsville’s little green men inspire first GoblinCon]() ### From a Kentucky yard to Night Skies The little men traveled further than the family did. J. Allen Hynek told the story to Steven Spielberg while consulting on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and when Columbia wanted a sequel, Spielberg answered with Night Skies, a horror treatment about malicious aliens besieging a farm family. John Sayles wrote the script in 1980, cutting eleven creatures to five, and Rick Baker built an expensive prototype of the leader. Spielberg lost his taste for it while shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark; the script’s one gentle alien, left behind on Earth, became E.T., its horror elements fed the suburban haunting of Poltergeist, and the idea of a kind creature among cruel ones resurfaced in Gremlins. The phrase that followed the family was older than any of this. Newspapers had written of “little green men” since the early twentieth century, but the Kelly coverage welded the words to visitors from a flying saucer, and they stuck to creatures the witnesses insisted were silver. Sources: [Night Skies]() · [Little green men]() · [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() ![Digital painting of a small silver-gray humanoid with a round bald head, pointed leathery ears, large yellow eyes, long arms and clawed hands, beside a small human silhouette for scale.]() How the Kelly visitor is pictured today: a 2016 artist’s impression by Tim Bertelink drawn from the witnesses’ descriptions, with a human figure for scale. Not a witness sketch or evidence. CC BY-SA 4.0. [Image source]() [CC BY-SA 4.0 · Tim Bertelink]() ## The evidence ### Ten witnesses, seven descriptions, one artist The core evidence is testimony. Of eleven people in the house, ten said they saw the figures; June Taylor refused to look. Within a day Bud Ledwith had interviewed the women, then Taylor, then the three men separately, and produced three sketches that agree on height, the round bald head, the huge yellow eyes set toward the sides, pointed leathery ears, long arms, taloned hands and no visible feet. The men added heavy shoulders and webbing between the talons; only Taylor supplied antennae and a nose, and he withdrew the nose. The agreement is strong, but the witnesses had spent the night and morning together and could have harmonized their memories before Ledwith arrived; he judged that the men’s independent corrections argued against rehearsal. Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Kelly Encounter]() ### What the officers found About a dozen city, county, state and military police searched the house, yard, fields and gully that night and again by daylight. They found a hole in the living-room screen consistent with a shot fired from inside, shotgun shells in the yard, a splintered window frame and a luminous patch on the grass that several men saw from one angle and could not find up close. They found no footprints on the hard ground or on the dusty roof, no landing marks, no blood, no bodies, no craft. No one roped off the yard, collected the shells, examined the screen for pellet spread or brought a Geiger counter. A neighbor said he heard about four shots; the family said far more. The physical record proves that guns were fired inside the house and nothing else. Sources: [Story of space-ship, 12 little men probed today]() · [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() ### The Blue Book paper trail The Air Force file holds an August 1957 request for information, Fort Campbell’s reply, Captain Hertell’s recollection that no official investigation was ever ordered, Major Albert’s 1957 statement with its monkey theory, Mrs. Lankford’s one-page statement of August 22, 1955, Hynek’s 1956 memo, an anonymous sketch and Gregory’s memo about avoiding embarrassment. The record card reads Unidentified; the master index lists the report outside the case series. The documents establish that officers from the base were at the farm, that the family’s fright was noted by every investigator, and that the Air Force reached its public dismissal without having gathered evidence. They do not establish a landing, a creature or a hoax. Sources: [Project Blue Book record card and Hynek memorandum, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, August 21–22, 1955]() · [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Chasing Footnotes: The Kelly-Hopkinsville Edition, part two]() ### Interpretations Hoax theories foundered for Davis on motive and on Glennie Lankford: the admission signs went up only after the crowds arrived, no money changed hands, and no investigator thought the terror was acted. The monkey story requires an unrecorded circus truck, silent hairless monkeys and shotgun blasts that drew no blood. The owl hypothesis fits the anatomy of a great horned owl unusually well and explains why nothing was found in the morning; its weaknesses are the witnesses’ insistence on metallic skin, stiff legs and hands raised in the open yard, a farm family that would have known the local owls, and repeated point-blank shots that never brought one down. Taylor’s object is best explained as a meteor. The visitors remain a report of remarkable internal consistency with no physical trace, which is why every side still claims them. Sources: [Siege of ‘Little Green Men’: The 1955 Kelly, Kentucky, Incident]() · [Kelly-Hopkinsville (U.S.A.)]() · [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() ### Classification and evidence note This archive classifies Kelly as a reported close encounter of the third kind because the household described small humanoid-like figures at close range over several hours. The label describes the account, not its cause. The evidence consists of contemporary police involvement, a same-day newspaper report, Ledwith’s next-day sketches and notes, Davis’s 1956 interviews, a signed 1955 witness statement and the 1957 Air Force correspondence; the decisive limits are the absence of any trace, photograph or independent observer outside the household. Sources were reviewed September 27, 2026; review again by September 2028 or when the Kentucky State Police case report or the Fold3 Blue Book frames become openly available. Sources: [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() · [Project Blue Book record card and Hynek memorandum, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, August 21–22, 1955]() · [Story of space-ship, 12 little men probed today]() ## Timeline - **21 AUG 1955 · ABOUT 7:00 PM:** Billy Ray Taylor, drawing water at the well, reports a bright silvery object with a rainbow exhaust settling into the gully behind the fields. The family laughs it off. - **7:30–8:00 PM:** A neighbor a quarter mile north sees lights moving in the Sutton fields and assumes loose pigs are being rounded up. - **ABOUT 8:00 PM:** The dog hides under the house. A glowing figure with raised hands approaches the back door; Lucky Sutton and Taylor fire at twenty feet and it flips and runs. - **8:00–10:30 PM:** Figures appear at the window, on the roof and in the maple tree. A clawed hand touches Taylor’s hair; a point-blank shotgun blast sounds like hitting a bucket. - **ABOUT 10:30 PM:** Glennie Lankford, crouched by the screen door, sees a shimmering figure “like a five-gallon gasoline can with a head on top.” - **ABOUT 11:00 PM:** Eleven people flee in two cars to the Hopkinsville police station. The desk sergeant tells Chief Greenwell: “A spaceship has landed at Kelly.” - **11:00 PM–2:15 AM:** City, county and state police and four Fort Campbell MPs search the farm; they find a hole in a screen, a luminous patch on the grass and no tracks. - **22 AUG 1955 · ABOUT 3:30 AM:** The figures return. Mrs. Lankford sees one with its hands on her window screen; Lucky shoots through it over her objection. - **ABOUT 4:45 AM:** The last figure is seen roughly half an hour before sunrise. - **MORNING:** WHOP broadcasts the story; Major John Albert takes Mrs. Lankford’s signed statement; sightseers begin arriving. - **11:00 AM–10:30 PM:** Bud Ledwith draws the creature from separate descriptions by the women, Taylor and the three men, producing three closely matching sketches. - **AFTERNOON:** The Kentucky New Era prints “Story of space-ship, 12 little men probed today” and notes officers agree no drinking was involved. - **23–24 AUG 1955:** The Air Force denies any investigation; admission signs go up; the Madisonville Messenger reports two thousand sightseers and mocks the “Tubmen.” - **12–15 JUN 1956:** Isabel Davis interviews the witnesses, police and reporters in Hopkinsville. - **10 SEP 1956:** J. Allen Hynek briefs Blue Book on Fort Campbell’s presence at the farm and the state police file at Frankfort. - **29 AUG–1 OCT 1957:** Air Technical Intelligence Center asks Fort Campbell for facts; the reply includes Major Albert’s circus-monkey theory and Mrs. Lankford’s statement. - **MAR 1978:** Davis and Bloecher publish Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955 with the Blue Book documents. - **1996–2006:** Renaud Leclet and then Joe Nickell propose that the little men were great horned owls and the saucer a meteor. - **20 AUG 2011:** Kelly holds the first “Little Green Men” Days festival, with Geraldine Sutton Stith speaking about her father. ## Sources & interviews - [Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955]() — Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher · Center for UFO Studies · March 1978 · field interviews of June 1956, Bud Ledwith’s notes and the Project Blue Book file - [Project Blue Book record card and Hynek memorandum, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, August 21–22, 1955]() — U.S. Air Force · ATIC Form 329 and September 10, 1956 memo · scans reproduced by Patrick Gross - [Story of space-ship, 12 little men probed today]() — Kentucky New Era · Hopkinsville · August 22, 1955 · republished without edits in 2017 - [Kelly Encounter]() — Allan Hendry · The Encyclopedia of UFOs, edited by Ronald Story · 1980 · NICAP archival copy - [Siege of ‘Little Green Men’: The 1955 Kelly, Kentucky, Incident]() — Joe Nickell · Skeptical Inquirer 30(6) · November/December 2006 - [Kelly-Hopkinsville (U.S.A.)]() — Renaud Leclet · CNEGU · the great horned owl hypothesis, first proposed in 1996 - [Chasing Footnotes: The Kelly-Hopkinsville Edition, part two]() — Kevin D. Randle · A Different Perspective · August 18, 2021 · how Blue Book indexed the case - [The Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter]() — Brian Dunning · Skeptoid episode 331 · October 9, 2012 - [Kelly Green men story won’t die]() — Cecil Herndon · Kentucky New Era · January 8, 2003 - [The Kelly ‘commotion’]() — Jennifer P. Brown · Kentucky New Era · August 13, 2005 · Lonnie Lankford’s recollections at the fiftieth anniversary - [1st annual Kelly ‘Little Green Men’ Days festival]() — Bowling Green Daily News · August 19, 2011 - [‘The granddaddy of UFO stories’: 70 years after the Kelly little green men]() — Josh Wood · Louisville Courier Journal · August 10, 2025 · syndicated copy · interview with Geraldine Sutton Stith - [70 years later: Revisiting the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter]() — Adam Ferguson · WBKO · August 21, 2025 · the site today and the anniversary events - [Hopkinsville’s little green men inspire first GoblinCon]() — Spectrum News 1 Kentucky · October 2025 · the convention’s program and organizers - [Little green men]() — Wikipedia · history of the phrase before and after 1955, with its cited newspaper uses - [Night Skies]() — Wikipedia · the unproduced Spielberg film built on the Kelly story, with its published sources ## Connected files - [The Phantom on the Flatwoods Hill]() — Three years earlier, another fireball, another flashlight glimpse and another figure that skeptics later handed to an owl. - [The Tape Behind the Door]() — Two frightened men in a police station describing impossible beings while officers listened for a slip—Kelly’s closest cousin in the archive. - [The Socorro Arroyo]() — A lone officer’s report of a landed object and two small figures that Blue Book left unidentified, with the physical traces Kelly never produced. - [The kinds of close encounters]() — Why a night of reported occupants makes Kelly a third-kind case, whatever stood in the yard. ## A NOTE ON EVIDENCE Unidentified describes a limit of the available information. It doesn’t identify an origin. [NEXT CASE FILE: The Landing at Trans-en-Provence]()