Did aliens land here?
Fifty years later, the people of Kelly, Ky., are still debating that. The Little Green Men Festival pays tribute to the story that put this little town on the map
By TIM GHIANNI
Senior Writer
HOPKINSVILLE, Ky. — Lonnie Lankford says his mom never drank "alky-hall."
"A good Christian woman," she was never one to lie. That's why he has no doubt that aliens visited the family farmhouse in Kelly, Ky., on the night of Aug. 21, 1955.
"Mama told me about it," is his to-the-point answer when asked about the "alien invasion" that's the stuff of both legend and laughter in the Hopkinsville area.
"I don't remember much about it," he says, sitting in his living room in a neighborhood tucked behind Western State mental hospital, the sprawling Civil War-era complex that, in a less enlightened time, was referred to as "The Lunatic Asylum."
Lankford's mother, Glennie, a stern, no-nonsense woman who died Oct. 9, 1977, is the heart and soul of the alien invasion that's being celebrated at the "Little Green Men Festival" in Hopkinsville Aug. 19-21.
The gathering marks the 50th anniversary of the close encounter. Late on that night a half-century back, Glennie Lankford was startled by what she swore was an alien at the window. Her screams triggered a one-sided gun battle in which her sons blasted away at the creatures. What really happened? One thing's certain: The incident terrified the matriarch and also made her family the subject of scorn.
Believers and skeptics
Hopkinsville Police Chief Russell Greenwell, who responded to the call a half-century ago, was not a "believer."
But Christian County historian William T. Turner, a lifelong Hopkinsville resident, notes "Chief Greenwell said that whenever he talked with (Glennie) about the landing, there was a deep fear in her eyes that made him think that something happened here."
Turner, 14 at the time of the incident, says the alien report has been "part of the community conversation" for 50 years. "I've told the story to various history classes," he says, during a visit that takes him to the family plot where Glennie is buried, within eyeshot of the spaceship landing site.
Turner says the Kelly incident, as researched by UFO authorities and government agencies, likely didn't happen. But "I learned early on as a history teacher to make it more interesting. You never let the truth stand in the way of a good story."
Then he smiles. "My opinion is that they'd been dippin' into what we in the local vernacular call 'Panther Juice'." Perhaps, but lawmen quoted in the earliest newspaper reports all said they found no evidence of drinking.
Aunt Glennie, as she's known to many of the folks residing in hills and hollers in and around Hopkinsville, didn't capitalize on the incident. According to reports published in the local Kentucky New Era newspaper, the family wanted nothing to do with Hollywood's interest in the alien invasion.
Reportedly, because the family didn't want to participate, the tale was moved elsewhere and modified, combined with other alien invasion reports, eventually morphing into a movie about a stranded alien who is adopted by a little boy who believes: E.T.
The celluloid image of the lovable "E.T. phone home" beast sticks pretty closely to descriptions Glennie gave press and UFO investigators. The aliens had big heads, round eyes and webbed feet and hands and stood about 3 feet tall.
And despite the fact that legend refers to them as the Kelly Green Men, Lonnie insists on one thing: "They wasn't green. They was silver. Silver suits." The "green man" tag apparently was supplied by the media. Locals speculate that the mass media depiction of Martians and other-worldly creatures as "green men" was born in Kelly.
The story they told
Whatever their color, the dozen extra-terrestrials who landed behind the widow Lankford's Old Madisonville Road home have shadowed Lonnie Lankford's life.
He doesn't recall specific events. He was only 12 and "Mama put me and my little brother (Charlton) and little sister (Mary) beneath a bed." He does remember "the commotion."
"I do know what Mama told me," he says, recalling the details supplied by the woman who had been widowed twice. Lonnie's pop, Oscar Lankford, a World War I veteran, died a year before the aliens attacked.
"A house full of people," including Lonnie's siblings, friends and cousins, had just attended a revival up the hill at Kelly Holiness Church, where one of Glennie's great-nephews still pastors.
"We was all sittin' around eatin' supper," says Lonnie. "One of my brother's friends, Billy Ray Taylor, had to go to the bathroom. We didn't have no plumbing, so he went outside.
"When he came back in he said he saw something round, with lights all around that blinked" in the sky. The gathering dismissed his flying saucer report, because "Billy Ray was known as a joker."
Eventually everyone went either home or to bed, which was where the widow was when she saw a big-eyed alien at her window.
"She sat right up in bed. Screamed. My half-brother ('Lucky' Sutton, a carnival worker who had that nickname tattooed on his fingers) had a double-barrel shotgun, so he came in there and shot through the window. According to Mama, it didn't hurt the creatures."
Glennie put the younger children beneath her bed while the older boys ran outside, "Lucky" blazing away with his shotgun. "My brother stuck his head out the door and one reached over and grabbed him by the hair," Lonnie continues. "There were several of them on the roof. He shot at them. After that we was pretty scared."
The aliens, who in various reports either floated or at least were very light on their webbed feet, were only stunned by the gunfire.
"Mama told me that a bunch of us went in the car and went to town" to get help, says Lonnie, adding that state, city and county officers as well as Fort Campbell MPs and investigators responded. "They had machine guns, rifles, pistols. All walking around and someone stepped on a cat's tail and everybody hit the dirt."
Lawmen interviewed for this story recall that incident, if only because when the cat wailed, they feared the guy with the machine gun might be trigger-happy.
According to Lonnie — and he has no reason to question his mom — the next day "authorities went out and seen a great big round spot in the field."
In a separate interview, Lonnie's cousin, Gail Cook, who grew up in Kelly, living for a time in that same house after Aunt Glennie moved, notes that "I remember there was a big, burnt spot out there where nothin' would grow."
Doubters like Turner say that if there was a depression in the now-overgrown field, it could easily have been a sinkhole, hardly uncommon in Western Kentucky.
A second visit
Cook scoffs at skeptics, because "they came back. In 1997, I seen a ship come over my restaurant in Kelly."
That restaurant later became Spanky's Game Room, owned and operated by David Brasher, Cook's brother-in-law. Now it is home to the Brasher family. Brasher doesn't believe green men ever visited.
But Cook — who now operates Gail's Full Circle restaurant, a meat loaf and chocolate pie comfort food joint in nearby Crofton — points to the sky over Kelly and describes the 1997 celestial visit.
"About 25 of us actually seen it. It was in August, too. Not sure if it was the exact date or not. It was muggy like this, though. There was this ship that come flying over. My sister lived upstairs in an apartment over the restaurant. She called and said there was a spaceship. I said 'Oh, it ain't!' but I got over there.
"It was like a dusty dawn. We saw these lights. It was there for about 2½ hours. We sat and watched this ship. . . . It would come up, and the frogs and crickets would get quiet."
She says the spaceship, "round with a bunch of lights," let out at least one passenger, a creature in a black veil that was seen standing at the roadside the next morning. That veiled creature quickly vanished into thin air or dark space.
Brasher, a long-haul trucker temporarily sidelined by kidney stones, says there may have been meteors, but that's about it. "Something happened, but it got blown all out of proportion."
He is amazed by the UFO enthusiasts who come calling at his house, the most visible residence/business on U.S. 41 in "downtown" Kelly.
"I've had people here from England. I've had people here from France," he says, firing up a smoke. "I don't know how they find out about somethin' like this all the way over there. I get eight or 10 a year who just come up here and knock on the door."
Recently some asked to pay to camp on his property. He declined. "Why take their money when they can camp anywhere around here for free," he says, scanning a horizon of vacant, untilled fields.
Although he finds their passion amusing, Brasher sometimes takes the foreigners the few hundred feet to the landing site, now occupied by Dorris McCord, Cook's brother. "He's got a double-wide there now," says Brasher.
"I don't believe in UFOs. I don't believe in space monsters. I do believe there's probably intelligence out there. But they did not come to Kelly."
And that opinion is reinforced by veteran state trooper R.N. Ferguson, 75, among the first responders.
"I'm about the last one left that was there. I was home asleep when I got the call. It was late. I was not feeling good, sick.
"At any rate I debated with the dispatcher about going up there. When you get a call that comes to you that says a spaceship landed with little people running around the house, that is far-fetched in the first place. (But) you get a call and you got to go. I didn't really have too much stock in what I was going to see."
He was among the 20 or so lawmen and gun-toting GIs who walked the perimeter of the property looking for aliens. He laughs at the recollection. "Let me put it this way: You have the knowledge to travel interstellar space with the equipment that it would take you to do it and you find a place like Kelly, Ky., to land in?
"No, I don't think so. Not when you've got Washington, London, Moscow. Hell, they could have gone to Nashville. They certainly would have seen more."
No easy answer
Ferguson, now a Kentucky park ranger, jokes that in the half-century since he got the call that aliens landed in the darkness at the edge of town, he's kept his eyes open.
"I still haven't seen that danged spaceship," says the proud Scot by ancestry, a fellow known for wearing kilts while accompanying his local newspaper columnist wife to society events.
Ferguson has developed into the "face" of the Kelly incident. He calls himself "the voice of authenticity" when folks like the History Channel or A&E come calling. He writes off the events of Aug. 21, 1955, as so much swamp gas proliferated by the very real terror of the twice-widowed woman and the tales of some young men he says had been drinking.
There's no easy answer, no CSI-like proof. "You get a call to a shooting, and you find a weapon, cartridges that have been expended, even a body," says the former trooper. "Oh, it did happen. It is a part of history. It's just what happened that is being arbitrated."
Among those tromping the fields with Ferguson that night was Chief Greenwell. He retired in 1973 and died in 1979 without ever really finding out if aliens had visited.
"When he got that call, I went with him," says his widow, Rachel Greenwell. "I drove our car. He rode. . . . We got down there, it was after 12. We didn't see anything, but there was an eerie sort of atmosphere around the place."
Mrs. Greenwell didn't go into the farmhouse. "But my husband did. He talked to an elderly lady that was there and he said to me 'I don't know whether the lady had really seen something or the people there had scared her, but she was really sincere in what she thought she had seen.' ''
The chief's wife was driven by curiosity. "I thought I was going to maybe see a comet or something that had fallen." No comet. No crop circles in the field. And she saw no aliens. Still, she's not going to completely dismiss the stories. "I don't know. I just quit thinking about it. I don't try to make it bigger by saying that I thought I saw something. But it was amazing how fast and how far that story went. It just bloomed out."
Truth or science fiction? "Nothing bad came of it," she shrugs. Her annual family reunion is being held during the festival period so her kin can participate.
"The Little Green Men put us on the map," she says.
While not a "believer," historian Turner is philosophic. He says that if the family is convinced "they experienced it, then it is so. Who am I to say it wasn't so?"
Turner's "Panther Juice" theory is one of many things that sadden Lonnie Lankford.
"My brothers drank some, but my Mama never allowed it in the house. There was no alky-hall there that night.
"That's what Mama told me." That's good enough for him and he figures it ought to be good enough for anyone. His life has been plagued by ridicule because of the story. "Mama tried to protect us . . . She didn't talk about it much."
Despite his quiet anger at his family's treatment, he finds mirth in one published theory.
"The circus was in town and supposedly a bunch of monkeys escaped. They said these was the aliens. These simply was not monkeys. Monkeys don't wear silver suits."
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