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Kelly / Hopkinsville (Kentucky) 'Goblins' Incident (1955)

Ronnie Jersey said:
I don't know if you can get the 'UFO Witness' series over there, with Ben Hansen investigating some older cases.
Season 1 Episode 4 'Close Encounters' was absolutely riveting, Hansen went to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and spoke to townspeople who had knowledge of the incident, and actually found the landing site.
And found out many new details.
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ooh... please, continue. :D
 
marhawkman said:
ooh... please, continue. :D
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Ben Hansen is a former FBI agent who became a paranormal investigator, and when I saw this episode of his 'UFO Witness' series I was really intrigued.
He went out to the site and interviewed neighbors and family members of witnesses to this incident, which is way out in the country. With their help he found the alleged landing site of the craft and I recall he used a metal detector, which picked up something in the trees there. With all the shooting that was supposedly done that evening in 1955, Hansen thought perhaps it was bullets lodged in the trees, but it was getting too dark to investigate.
I was hoping he would return to do more checking, it doesn't seem complete. But thoroughly interesting.
'UFO Witness' first became available on our Discovery Channel, I only happened to catch it in reruns on the Travel Channel a few weeks ago.
 
What has puzzled me is a very small piece of information from Wikipedia.

In this very small town of Kelly, Kentucky, 4 city policemen, 3 county deputy sheriffs, 5 state patrolmen, and 4 military police came 30 miles from Fort Campbell Army Base to investigate an event that was called a hoax because it was horned owls in the trees.

Military Police usually don’t go off base to investigate because they have no jurisdiction.

I am suspicious that military police drove 30 miles unless it was important.

Also city police described this family as originally being very scared when they contacted the local police quite out the character of the these family members.

What really happened ?
 
charliebrown said:
What has puzzled me is a very small piece of information from Wikipedia.

In this very small town of Kelly, Kentucky, 4 city policemen, 3 county deputy sheriffs, 5 state patrolmen, and 4 military police came 30 miles from Fort Campbell Army Base to investigate an event that was called a hoax because it was horned owls in the trees.

Military Police usually don’t go off base to investigate because they have no jurisdiction.

I am suspicious that military police drove 30 miles unless it was important.

Also city police described this family as originally being very scared when they contacted the local police quite out the character of the these family members.

What really happened ?
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Seems like Fort Campbell is no stranger to odd happenings.
 
marhawkman said:
ah, cool :D Time to check youtube.
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I've been looking for the 'UFO Witness' shows, Hansen did 2 seasons, but I can only find it streaming on Discovery, and has to be purchased.
Waiting for it to come back in reruns on tv, which it will at some point.
Extremely popular series as he delves deep into these old cases.
 
Discovering more obscure facts is that Project Blue Book basically took the notes the from four military police from Fort Campbell Army Base and not really looking into this situation themselves.

This whole affair would have died and gone away except in 1956 a ufologist named Isabel Davis really believed Mrs.Lankford’s story and kept perusing this event.

Ms.Davis turned in her findings to the Center for UFO Studies to be preserved.

Ms.Davis’s opinion was this was not a hoax, but a honest UFO event.

Ms. Davis claimed this was not a cover up but no one at the time had any interest in investigating what really happened.
 
Blake Smith has written a two-part article on the Kelly Hopkinsville goblin incident.
It is not going to make certain Wikipedia skeptics happy because they have made a mess of this incident.
Well worth a read for some new info on a clarifying experiment.

https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2024/01/...-happened-during-the-kentucky-alien-invasion/
https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2024/01/...asion-putting-to-bed-the-myths-and-mysteries/

Nothing about this story is made clearer by trying to reduce it to the drunken rambling of a family of struggling farmers, or to say “it was
just owls.” The real explanation isn’t any one thing, it’s the complicated web of culture, perception, society, narrative, and psychology.
 
Sharon Hill said:
Blake Smith has written a two-part article on the Kelly Hopkinsville goblin incident.
It is not going to make certain Wikipedia skeptics happy because they have made a mess of this incident.
Well worth a read for some new info on a clarifying experiment.

https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2024/01/...-happened-during-the-kentucky-alien-invasion/
https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2024/01/...asion-putting-to-bed-the-myths-and-mysteries/

Nothing about this story is made clearer by trying to reduce it to the drunken rambling of a family of struggling farmers, or to say “it was
just owls.” The real explanation isn’t any one thing, it’s the complicated web of culture, perception, society, narrative, and psychology.
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This is quite correct in terms of finding Nickell's explanation facile. At this point I'd like to doff my virtual hat to @Comfortably Numb and the much-missed @EnolaGaia for their incredible work on this thread in terms of digging out sources, testing hypotheses and showing that the case was very much more complex than often assumed these days. I do wonder if Smith has read this thread; it's a real goldmine.

Personally I think the 'owls' explanation is blown out of the water by the fact that it's predicated on the birds defending a 'nest' they'd probably have long lost interest in by that point of the year, but there are plenty of other reasons for disregarding it.
 
the aspect of the case that redefined my understanding of it is when I realized just how few of the several people involved actually claimed to have seen one of the intruders. That... really changed things.
 
BS3 said:
This is quite correct in terms of finding Nickell's explanation facile. At this point I'd like to doff my virtual hat to @Comfortably Numb and the much-missed @EnolaGaia for their incredible work on this thread in terms of digging out sources, testing hypotheses and showing that the case was very much more complex than often assumed these days. I do wonder if Smith has read this thread; it's a real goldmine.

Personally I think the 'owls' explanation is blown out of the water by the fact that it's predicated on the birds defending a 'nest' they'd probably have long lost interest in by that point of the year, but there are plenty of other reasons for disregarding it.
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Meh.
I find the owl factor not unreasonable. As Blake notes, it ticks many of the boxes. We'll probably never know for sure. But we're never going to definitively show it was "paranormal".
 
Sharon Hill said:
Meh.
I find the owl factor not unreasonable. As Blake notes, it ticks many of the boxes. We'll probably never know for sure. But we're never going to definitively show it was "paranormal".
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In fact, we're never going to definitively know what happened at all.
 
marhawkman said:
This is unfortunate, but true. There exists a "right" answer to the question of what happened, but we're not gonna find it with the evidence we have. We can move in that direction, but not quite get there...
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I think we can get very close indeed, and the evidence points in a certain direction.

There's the enigmatic comment by the local minister that "they" scared Lankford "half to death", as well as other inferences by locals that there was some understanding the incident was a hoax at some level.

There's the fact that after analysing the newspaper sources and drawings the descriptions of the creatures seem to be largely driven by three people: Lucky, Taylor and Alene. J C wasn't sure what he saw or was shooting at and Lankford was careful to say she saw only a static, shiny 'object'.

There's the fact that despite later assertions to the contrary, immediately prior to the events Lankford seems to have been very worked up over a Pentecostal church pamphlet featuring a small silver 'spaceman' figure (a well known hoax photograph).

There's the fact that there was a strong motive for a hoax aimed at Lankford by some members of the family, and it seems quite possible that this hoax got a bit out of hand, badly frightened people, and got the police / press involved.
 
BS3 said:
I think we can get very close indeed, and the evidence points in a certain direction.

There's the enigmatic comment by the local minister that "they" scared Lankford "half to death", as well as other inferences by locals that there was some understanding the incident was a hoax at some level.

There's the fact that after analysing the newspaper sources and drawings the descriptions of the creatures seem to be largely driven by three people: Lucky, Taylor and Alene. J C wasn't sure what he saw or was shooting at and Lankford was careful to say she saw only a static, shiny 'object'.

There's the fact that despite later assertions to the contrary, immediately prior to the events Lankford seems to have been very worked up over a Pentecostal church pamphlet featuring a small silver 'spaceman' figure (a well known hoax photograph).

There's the fact that there was a strong motive for a hoax aimed at Lankford by some members of the family, and it seems quite possible that this hoax got a bit out of hand, badly frightened people, and got the police / press involved.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that does seem like a likely possibility.

You hit on what I mentioned earlier: one of the most salient details is that despite there being multiple "witnesses" to the event, there are very few descriptions as most of the so-called witnesses were actually too busy hiding from the monsters to actually SEE the monsters. and didn't really know what they were hiding from.

And then you have the question of why did the locals think it was a hoax... IMMEDIATELY? It doesn't make sense for there to be an immediate NOPE. response to whether it was real by the locals as a whole.... unless they knew something.

And yeah, if it indeed was a hoax, obviously the matriarch of the family was the victim of the hoax, and not the perpetrator... the perpetrators seemingly including her own family.

But it's not fully realized as an image yet. Too many missing or imprecisely defined details.
 
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