It's surprising how much can often be discovered about even the oldest and most familiar cases by going back and looking at early accounts, etc. Unfortunately "ufology" has suffered terribly from writers who simply repeat previous information without bothering to check (cf your previous comments about the real shape of the objects Kenneth Arnold saw, and its implications for the entire phenomenon).
Oh how you sing from the same page of our ufological Bible.
Way back, in my cover article for FT137, which offered a more prosaic explanation for Arnold's formative sighting, I wrote:
"Arnold described how those nine objects in formation resembled “the tail of a Chinese kite” blowing in the wind, or “speed boats on rough water”. Using an unusual simile, he added: “they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” In the media frenzy that followed, this phrase, intended to describe their motion, was misconstrued to be a description of how the objects looked. So ‘flying saucers’ were born and the true facts swept aside in the ensuing hysteria.
From these newspaper reports - before the ‘flying saucer’ mythology got a firm grip on popular imagination - we can locate Kenneth Arnold’s earliest expressions. He described the objects as “flat like a pie pan and somewhat bat-shaped,” according to Pendleton, Oregon, East Oregonian of June 26. They were “crescent-shaped planes”, stated the Oregon Journal on June 27, reporting Arnold as saying: “They looked like they were rocking. I looked for the tails but suddenly realized they didn’t have any. They were half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear.”
It’s clear that Arnold is not describing ‘flying saucer’ UFOs as we have come to picture them. In a formative radio interview for KWRC on 26 June, he confirms these odd details: “I couldn’t find any tails on ‘em. And, uh, the whole, our observation of these particular ships, didn’t last more than about two and a half minutes and I could see them only plainly when they seemed to tip their wing, or whatever it was, and the sun flashed on them. They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear.”
(End)
Absolutely, the earliest evidence tends to be more trustworthy.
Problem, of course, in the Kelly-Hopkinsville case, is that there's hardly any, just snippets of direct quotes and even these are questionably accurate.
The further issue which makes Kelly-Hopkinsville so difficult to analyse, is that we do have later evidential claims attributed, yet no background as regards where they originated.
This is a perfect example which has now come up.
There was a two page, Sunday feature article published by 'The Tennessean' on 13 October, 1957 - see my post #504.
In a reply - see post #510
@EnolaGaia explained the many apparent problems with this article's content.
However, I now note that therein, 'Lucky' Sutton is quoted as explaining about the creatures 'locomotion':
"They walked or ran with a curious floating motion, their feet touching ground "just every so often, if then"."
It's actually in keeping with what we have been discussing and again comparative with herons skimming. You can see this demonstrated in YouTube videos - their trailing legs do occasionally drop downwards "just every so often".
This looks like an exact quote, so where had it come from?
There was this guy once, who wrote about something similar...
"It's like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was"
Charles Fort, 'The Book of the Damned'
