Back in the early days of UFO investigation, at the beginning of the Air Force’s Project Sign, and on through its various incarnations, witnesses who reported seeing the occupants of the spacecraft were almost universally written off as having psychological problems or were virtually ignored with one-page entries. It seems that while the official investigators were quite willing to accept the testimony of strange craft seen at a distance in the sky, if that craft approached the ground or if the crew happened to be visible, then there was clearly something wrong with the witness’s ability to identify mundane objects and with his or her mental capabilities.
We’ve already looked at the very few cases in which these labels were not applied. Now we’ll take a look at a few cases in which they were applied and cases relegated to almost nonexistent entries because creatures were reported. I freely admit that some of these sightings are truly weird, but the witnesses seem to be sincere in what they say and what they claim—which, of course, doesn’t mean that the report is grounded in reality only that the witness or witnesses truly believe what they are reporting.
One of the first of the occupant or creature reports to reach Project Blue Book was made from Flatwoods, West Virginia, on September 12, 1952. The Air Force file on the Flatwoods case contains a project card, that form created at ATIC (Advanced Technical Intelligence Center) that holds a brief summary of the sighting, what the solution is if one has been offered, and other such easily condensed data and very little else. According to the project card, the Flatwoods sighting was solved by the meteor that had been reported over the East Coast of the United States on September 12. In fact, the only reference to anything suggesting a creature was on the ATIC Project Card where there is the note about the “West Virginia monster, so called.”1
All this presents a curious problem. Clearly the Air Force had heard of the case, and just as clearly had written it off as a very bright meteor. There is also a note that the meteor (or meteoroid, for those of a precise and technical nature) landed somewhere in West Virginia (becoming a meteorite).2 Apparently, the Air Force believed that the “landing” of the meteorite was enough to inspire local residents to imagine a creature on the ground. And, apparently, they believed that the meteorite would account for all the reports of physical evidence by the witnesses.
Ufologist and biologist Ivan T. Sanderson, writing in his UFO book, Uninvited Visitors, was aware of both the Air Force explanation and the meteorite that had been reported. Sanderson wrote:
[W]e met two people who had seen a slow-moving reddish object pass over from the east to west. This was later described and “explained” by a Mr. P.M. Reese of the Maryland Academy of Sciences staff, as a “fireball meteor.” He concluded—incorrectly we believe—that it was “traveling at a height of from 60 to 70 miles” and was about the “size of your fist.”...However, a similar, if not the same object was seen over both Frederick and Hagerstown. Also, something comparable was reported about the same time from Kingsport, Tennessee, and from Wheeling and Parkersburg, West Virginia.3
The whole story of the occupant sighting, as it is usually told, begins with several boys playing on a football field in Flatwoods. At about 7:15 p.m., a bright red light “rounded the corner of a hill,” crossed the valley, seemed to hover above a hilltop, and then fell behind the hill. One of the boys, Neil (or sometimes Neal) Nunley, said that he thought the glowing object might have been a meteorite. He knew that fragments of meteorites were collected by scientists and might be valuable, so he suggested they all go look for it.4
As they watched, there was a bright orange flare that faded to a dull cherry glow near where the object had disappeared. As three of the boys started up the hill, toward the lights, they saw them cycle through the sequence a couple of times. The lights provided a beacon for them, showing them where the object was.
They ran up the main street, crossed a set of railroad tracks, and came to a point where there were three houses, one of them belonging to the May family. Kathleen May came out of the house to learn what was happening and where the boys were going. Told about the lights on the hill, and that “a flying saucer has landed,” she said that she wanted to go with them. Before they left, May suggested that Eugene Lemon, a 17-year-old member of the National Guard (which has no real relevance to the story, but is a fact that is always carefully reported) went to look for a flashlight.
They found the path that lead up the hill, opened and then closed a gate, and continued along the winding path. Lemon and Nunley were in the lead with May and her son Eddie, following, and they were trailed by others including Ronald Shaver and Ted Neal. Tommy Hyer was in the rear, not far behind the others as they climbed the hill.
As they approached the final bend in the path, Lemon’s large dog, which had been running ahead, began barking and howling, and then reappeared, running down the hill and obviously frightened. Lemon noticed, as the dog passed him, that a mist was spreading around them. As they got closer to the top of the hill, they all smelled a foul odor. Their eyes began to water.
Some of them reported that they saw, on the ground in front of them, a big ball of fire, described as the size of an outhouse, or about 20 feet across. It was pulsating orange to red. Interestingly, although it was big and bright, not everyone in the tiny party saw it.
Kathleen May spotted something in a nearby tree. She thought they were the eyes of an owl or other animal. Nunley, who was carrying the flashlight, turned it toward the eyes. What they saw was not an animal, but some sort of creature, at least in their perception. The being was large, described as about the size of a full-grown man. They could see no arms or legs, but did see a head that was shaped like an ace of spades. That was a description that would reoccur with all these witnesses. No one was sure if there were eyes on the creature, or if there was a clear space on the head, resembling a window, and that the eyes were somehow behind that window and behind the face.
Lemon reacted most violently of the small party when he saw the object. He passed out. There was confusion, they were all scared, and no one was sure what to do. The boys grabbed the unconscious Lemon and then ran back the way they had come.
They finally reached May’s house. Inside, they managed to bring Lemon back to full consciousness. They called others, and a number of adults arrived at the May house. The group, armed with rifles and flashlights, headed back up the hill, to search for the strange creature. None of the men seemed to be too excited about going up the hill, and in less than a half an hour, they were back, claiming they had found nothing at all.
Still others, including the sheriff, eventually arrived at the house. Most didn’t bother to mount any sort of search that night, and the sheriff, who was clearly skeptical, refused to investigate further than talking to May and the boys. It is important to note here that the sheriff had been searching for a downed small aircraft reported to him earlier that evening. He found no evidence of an aircraft accident and no one reported any airplanes missing. The relevance of this will become clear later.
Two newspaper reporters, apparently from rival newspapers, did at least walk up the hill, but they saw nothing. They did, however, note the heavy, metallic odor that had been described by May and her group, which provided a partial confirmation of the story.
A. Lee Stewart, Jr., one of the editors of the Braxton Democrat, convinced Lemon to lead them back to the spot of the sighting. Given Lemon’s initial reaction, it says something about the kid that he agreed to do so. They found nothing and saw nothing but did smell that strange odor. Stewart returned early the next morning and found what he said looked like skid marks about ten feet apart heading down the hill. He said that a large area of grass had been crushed.5
The next day, there were follow-up investigations. During some of these additional trips up the hill, it was reported that they had found an area where the grass had been crushed in a circular pattern. Sanderson, who visited the scene a week later, said that he and his fellow investigators were able to see the crushed grass and a slight depression in the ground.6 No one bothered to photograph this reported physical evidence, which is one of the problems that seem to flow through UFO research. People don’t take basic steps to ensure evidence is preserved in some fashion, even if it is just a photograph.
Sanderson pointed out that the other physical evidence that had been reported—skid marks on the ground, an oily substance on the grass, and the foul odor—might have been part of the environment. The type of grass growing wild in that area gave off a similar odor, and the grass seemed to be the source of the oil. Sanderson said that he couldn’t find the skid marks and knew of no one who had photographed them.
Gray Barker, a UFO researcher, also arrived a week later and coincidently, on the same day as Sanderson, found others to interview. He talked with A.M. Jordan, Neil Nunley’s grandfather, who said that he had seen an elongated object flash overhead on the night of the landing. It was shooting red balls of fire from the rear and it seemed to hover before it fell toward the hilltop.7
Barker also interviewed Nunley, whose description of the craft disagreed with that of his grandfather, though he did say the object seemed to stop and hover before falling to the hill. I wonder if the disparity came from the different perspectives of the witnesses. Sometimes the angles from which something is viewed seems to change the shape of the object and the direction in which it appears.
When this story is reported, it always seems to end here, with the one group, led by May and Lemon, seeing the strange creature or entity. The investigations, carried out by various civilian agencies, always fail to find any proof. Many believe that if there was some corroboration—if someone else, not associated with May and her group, had seen the creature—it would strengthen the report.
Several years later that corroboration seemed to be found. A men’s magazine carried another story of the Flatwoods monster written by George Snitowski, as told to Paul Lieb. According to the article, George Snitowski was driving in the Flatwoods area with his wife, Edith, and their infant son, on September 13, 1952, when he saw the thing on the ground.8
Snitowski didn’t say anything about his tale until two or three years after the fact. He then told it to an officer of the civilian Flying Saucer Research Institute, who published the account in the magazine. Looking at it from that point of view—that is, a tale told long after the national publicity that was provided for May and the others—there certainly is the hint that Snitowski was influenced by those articles. There is no proof he was, only the very real possibility.
Snitowski was, according to his story, returning home with his wife and their baby when, near Sutton, West Virginia (not far from Flatwoods), his car engine stalled. He tried, but couldn’t get it to start. Because it was getting dark, he didn’t want to leave his wife and baby alone on the semi-deserted highway if he walked for help. He thought they would wait for morning, and then he would walk the 10 or 12 miles to the closest town, if someone didn’t come along to give them a hand before then.
Snitowski said that a foul odor began to seep into the car, making his wife cry and gagging the baby. Snitowski didn’t know what this odor was but suspected it might be from a nearby sulfur plant burning waste. It was then that a bright light flashed overhead. Both Snitowski and his wife were confused by it. He said later that, looking down into the woods after the light flew over, he could see what he thought of as some kind of dimly lighted sphere. He said that the light had a soft violet hue to it, and while soft, it was blinding to the eyes. He rolled down the window to get a better look when the odor they had noticed earlier became even stronger.
Snitowski finally got out of the car and started walking toward some woods where he believed the earlier light flash had originated. He said the odor almost stopped him as it became much stronger. He said that he then stopped, leaned against a tree, and threw up. Inside the tree line sat the sphere some 200 or 300 feet away. He couldn’t make out any details. He thought that it was floating above the ground rather than resting on it. There was no visual evidence of a landing gear.
As he moved deeper into the woods, closer to the sphere, he said that his legs began to tingle, almost as if they had gone to sleep. Still sickened by a foul odor, and barely able to walk, he began to retreat, stumbling back toward the car. He neared the road and stopped, again leaning against a tree.
His wife screamed then, and Snitowski yelled, “Edith, for God’s sake. What’s the matter?” He rushed toward the car and saw she was pale with fright.
She was unable to speak and Snitowski saw, leaning against the hood of the car, a strange creature. He couldn’t see it well because of the lack of lighting around the area, but he thought it was 8 or 9 feet tall, and was generally shaped like a human, with arms and a head attached to a bloated body. It was silhouetted against the violet glow of the sphere.
Snitowski reached the car, climbed in, and grabbed a kitchen knife that he had in the glove box. He forced his wife down to the floor and begged her to silence the crying baby. He didn’t know what to do and said that the odor was now overpowering. But then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the object, the sphere, beginning to climb erratically into the sky. It stopped to hover several times and eventually disappeared. Suddenly it swooped, then climbed upward in a bright, dazzling light, and vanished. When he looked outside the car, the creature had disappeared.
Not knowing why, Snitowski tried to start the car now that the object was gone. Without trouble the engine started. They drove away, found a motel, and checked in. The next morning, they heard about the sighting from Flatwoods, but neither wanted to tell authorities what they had seen several hours later. Snitowski said that he didn’t want his friends and neighbors to think that he or his wife was crazy. Besides, he didn’t have any evidence about the creature or the UFO, and they were far from home. There was only his story, corroborated by his wife but no other witnesses.9
If his report is true, and there is no way, today, to learn if it is, then it makes a nice corroboration for the Flatwoods case. The problem, however, is that the Flatwoods case was national news the day after it happened, and Snitowski had said he heard about the landing. At that point, the story was contaminated because an investigator could never be sure that Snitowski, or anyone else who came forward with a report, hadn’t been primed by the story as published in the newspapers, heard on the radio, or even seen on television.
These two reports, by Snitowski and by those in Flatwoods, were not the only ones made about that strange, tall, smelly, creature. About a week earlier, according to an investigation conducted by two Californians, William and Donna Smith, a 21-year-old woman who lived about 11 miles from Flatwoods said that she had seen the creature that gave off the horrible odor. She was so upset by the encounter that she was hospitalized for three weeks. Like Snitowski, she wasn’t interested in publicity at the time, so when the report from Flatwoods made the news, she elected to remain silent. There was no corroborating tales to support her.10
As happened with the Zamora sighting, continued research produced others who said they had seen something strange that night. Alice Williams said that about 7:00 p.m. she saw a slow-moving, glowing object at a low altitude west of Charleston, West Virginia. She, along with Clarence McClane and his wife, said they saw ashes falling to the ground as the object seemed to come apart in the sky.11
Woodrow Eagle, who was nearing Sutton, West Virginia, not all that far from Flatwoods, said that he had seen what he thought was a small airplane crash into a hillside. He turned around and then stopped at a service station to call the sheriff. The sheriff drove to the site, but he didn’t find the downed aircraft.12 This was the case the sheriff was investigating before he headed out to May’s house.
The trouble here is that both these witnesses—Williams and Eagle—were apparently members of a group that included Sanderson, and Sanderson had called others in that group to investigate the Flatwoods landing. Given that, a good case for cross-contamination can be made. It doesn’t mean that there was any confabulation involved, only that these witnesses were not completely independent of other another as it seemed before those connections were made.
Years later, in the mid-1990s, Kathleen May Horner was interviewed about the sighting. She told investigators that the two men who everyone thought were newspaper reporters were, in fact, government agents. She also remembered that a local reporter received a letter from some unidentified government agency that revealed the creature was some sort of rocket experiment that had gone wrong that day. There had been four such “rockets” and all of them fell back to earth.
The government agents were able to recover all but one, and that one had been seen in Flatwoods. It must be noted here that there is no corroboration for this story of government intervention and that it did not surface until 40 years later.13
There are few points of corroboration for this tale, even among those who were together that night. The descriptions of the craft in flight sound more like a bolide—that is, a very bright meteor. Newspapers from other communities in the region report on just such a meteor. P.M. Reese from the Maryland Academy of Sciences suggested the red fireball was relatively slow moving and 60 to 70 miles high.
And we know that meteors can seem to climb, though that is an optical illusion, that they can seem to hover briefly, and that they can seem to maneuver, again optical illusions. The witness testimony here is not sufficient to reject a meteor, especially when it is remembered that the object was seen over a large region, suggesting something that was very bright and very high. People looking up into the night sky are simply unable to judge height and speed with any degree of accuracy. A meteor of sufficient size and brightness was seen that night.
Even if we reject, for whatever reason, the theory that any of the Flatwoods witnesses saw a meteor, we can look at the descriptions and how they vary. Even those who trekked up the hill report things differently, from the color and shape of the craft to even whether anything was sitting on the ground. Sanderson reported that the object was black but glowing red and shaped like the ace of spades, but Barker said it was spherical and some of those he interviewed said they hadn’t seen it at all.
Jerry Clark reported that the witnesses stuck to their stories but that doesn’t mean what they saw was grounded in our shared reality. That they were truly frightened only suggests they were telling the truth about what they thought they saw, but not that they saw an extraterrestrial being.
After I reviewed the literature on this, I am struck by the disparity of the witness descriptions and how these sorts of things can be overlooked. I am surprised that there are descriptions of physical remains, but there is little to document any such evidence. I am struck by the number of witnesses who said they saw the bolide and that the bolide was what everyone saw. And yes, many believe that a bolide has landed close by when it has either burned out and not touched down or it landed hundreds if not thousands of miles away. In fact, several bolides have been reported to authorities as aircraft accidents, just like the one the sheriff investigated that night.
This case seems to be the result of the bolide and the hysteria brought on UFO sightings that were headline news around the country, including the impressive sightings from Washington, DC. It seems that those who climbed the hill, believing they were going to find a landed flying saucer, talked themselves into the hysteria, and when they saw something in a tree with eyes that glowed in the light of their flashlights, convinced themselves they had seen an alien creature.
No, this isn’t a perfect resolution. It makes too many assumptions. But the evidence for a UFO sighting and a landing with an alien creature, or maybe some sort of an alien robot, is very weak at best. Given the timing of the sighting, given the lack of physical evidence, given the conflicting witness statements, and given the well-known bias of the original investigators, there isn’t much left here.
In the end, the terrestrial explanation is more likely the correct one here. I’m not completely sold on it, but it seems that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that. Until something changes, that’s probably where it is going to stay.
On August 21, 1955, the Sutton family in the Kelly-Hopkinsville area of southern Kentucky reported that their farm house had been assaulted by small alien entities. The attack lasted through most of the night, with the men shooting at the aliens with their shotguns, rifles, and pistols. Eventually the family was driven from the farm and headed to the Hopkinsville Police Station in two cars. They said that it all started around 7:00 p.m., when Billy Ray Taylor had gone out to the well for a drink of water. He ran back into the house to say that as he was bringing up the bucket, he had seen a flying saucer, saying he thought it had landed in a gully behind the house.14
Illustration of the creature seen by the witnesses during the night siege at Kelly-Hopkinsville. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.
According to various sources, including the Project Blue Book files and Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher, at about 8:00 p.m., one of the dogs started acting up, barking loudly. Taylor and Lucky Sutton went to the back to see what had disturbed the animal. As they got there, the dog ran under the house and wasn’t seen again until the next morning. They saw a small figure approaching from the fields behind the house, something that was glowing and about 3 1/2 feet tall. It had an oversized head, floppy, pointed ears, and glowing yellow eyes that were bigger than those of a human. It looked as it was made of silver, and had long arms that ended in talons and reached almost to the ground.
The two men ran inside for weapons, one grabbing a .22 caliber pistol and the other seizing a shotgun. When the creature neared to within 20 feet, both opened fire. The being, apparently struck more than once, flipped over backward and then ran to the side of the house as if to get away. Not long after that another creature, or maybe the same one, appeared at a side window. J.C. Sutton shot at it through the screen with a 20-gauge shotgun and it reacted in the same fashion. When struck by bullets, it did a flip and disappeared.
Sutton and Taylor decided they needed to go back outside to see if they had actually hit anything. As Taylor stepped off the porch, the others saw a claw-like hand reach down. Sutton pushed past him into the yard and opened fire with his shotgun, knocking the creature from the roof.
Taylor yelled that there was another one in the tree. Both men fired at it, knocking it out of the tree. Rather than falling, it seemed to float to the ground. When it landed, it jumped up and ran off. Another, or maybe one of those that had been on the roof, came around the corner of the house, and still another appeared. It became clear that their weapons had no real effect on the creatures and the men retreated to the house. When they heard a tapping up on the roof, they stepped into the backyard, again firing at the creature. It was hit but rather than falling to the ground, it floated to the fence, where it perched for a moment.
There followed a period of calm during which there were no more sightings and no more attacks on the house. But the creatures returned periodically, almost as if teasing those in the house to see if they would be shot at again. The creatures seemed to be playing some kind of game, but the purpose was lost to those in the house. Finally, at about 11:00 p.m. everyone in the house abandoned it and headed for the Hopkinsville Police Station.
The reaction of the law enforcement officers at the station wasn’t the typical reaction of those confronted with a story of creatures from a flying saucer. All of them seemed to take the report seriously. The Hopkinsville police radioed the Kentucky State Police, which ordered its officers on patrol to head out to the Sutton farm. The chief of police, Russell Greenwell, at first thought it might be a joke played by his officers, but was quickly convinced it was not.15 Other police officers involved at some point were named T.C. Gross, Dorris Francis, and Gray Salter. All of them, along with Greenwell, eventually drove to the farm.
Though it seemed that the sighting might have been limited to those at the farmhouse, just as the Zamora sighting seemed, at first, to be limited to Zamora standing on a ridge overlooking the arroyo, there were witnesses to other strange things. One of the state troopers said that he had been 2 or 3 miles from Hopkinsville and had seen several “meteors” fly over with a sound “like artillery fire,” which is not all that uncommon with big, bright meteors. He did see two of those meteors as they passed over heading in the general direction of the Sutton farm. The trooper said that the objects, whatever they were, hadn’t been like any meteors he had ever seen.
Once everyone had arrived back at the farm (that is, the Sutton family and the law enforcement officers), the police conducted a thorough search of the house. The Suttons refused to enter the building until the search had been completed and were told that there were no one and nothing inside. Chief Greenwell would later say that he had looked for signs that everyone had been drinking but found no evidence of that. Years later, an Air Force officer, Lieutenant Colonel Spencer Whedon, would hint that drinking had been a major factor in the case.
The search turned up little in the way of evidence. There were holes in the screens made by the bullets, and law enforcement officers did find a luminous patch of material near the fence where one of the creatures had landed after being shot. According to the newspaper story, the Suttons and Taylor claimed to have fired more than 100 rounds of .22 caliber ammunition at the creatures, assuming they were talking about the standard 50-round boxes.16
One of the policemen involved in the search said that he had seen greenish light in the distance, in the woods near the house. Other officers were sent in search of the light but found nothing extraordinary. According to the newspaper, the only excitement was when one of the MPs (military police) stepped on a cat’s tail while inside the Sutton house.17 This suggests the involvement of the Army in the initial investigation; however, the military men could have been Air Force. That point is not clarified in the newspaper, and anyone in a green fatigue uniform would be considered Army by almost everyone.
The attacks, or rather the visitation, didn’t end there. Glennie Lankford, part of the Sutton clan, said that sometime after 2:30 a.m., she had seen one of the little men with its hand on the window screen. The glow from the creature had alerted her to its presence. She called to other members of the family and Lucky entered the room. He fired at the being but missed. The creatures reappeared several times over the next few hours, the last time being just before the sun came up.18
Because a UFO had been seen, and because the creatures were apparently alien, there were those who believed that Project Blue Book would be involved in the investigation. Those at Blue Book apparently had no real interest in the sighting, although the files do contain documents that suggest one active duty officer, and possibly more, did some sort of investigation but all of that was unofficial. No real, “official” investigation began until two years later, and that seemed to be in response to an article that was going to be published in a national magazine that featured the case.
Without any sort of physical evidence except for the bullet holes in the house and the window screens, and the luminous puddle found by law enforcement, there wasn’t much proof that the Kelly-Hopkinsville tale was true. Most of the people who heard about it were quite skeptical. The press, which included the radio news reports, reflected that attitude. The Air Force did issue a statement about it not long afterward, telling all who would listen that they were not investigating and that there was no basis for investigating. In other words, the case was so unimportant that the Air Force wasn’t going to waste its time or limited resources on a family of “drunken hicks” who thought that alien beings had landed near their farm house and attacked them throughout the night.
Some two years later, in a letter from ATIC at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, to the commander of Campbell Air Force Base and available in the Project Blue Book files, Wallace W. Elwood wrote: “This Center requests any factual data, together with pertinent comments regarding an unusual incident reported to have taken place six miles north of Hopkinsville, Kentucky on subject date [21 August 1955]. Briefly, the incident involved an all-night attack on a family named Sutton by goblin-like creatures reported to have emerged from a so-called ‘flying saucer.’”19
Later in the letter, Elwood wrote: “Lacking factual, confirming data, no credence can be given this almost fantastic report. As the incident has never been officially reported to the Air Force, it has not taken official cognizance of the matter.”20
And that sort of says it all for the Air Force and its investigation. If there is no official report, even if it is aware of the case, it has no obligation to investigate and, in fact, can ignore it. Carmon Marano, who was an officer with Blue Book, confirmed this attitude in a 2017 interview.21 Over the course of Project Blue Book, it did collect information from a variety of “unofficial” sources, such as newspapers and private UFO group newsletters, but other than sticking the information in a file folder and labeling it, did nothing with it unless pressed to do so by adverse publicity or some sort of official inquiry from those higher in the chain of command.
Another witness, whose name has been redacted from the file, might have seen a similar object in the sky several months earlier. A letter dated September 17, 1957, adds another note to the story. According to that letter, signed by Captain Robert J. Hertell:
Briefly, Mr. [name redacted] and a negro handy-man [who was not named] employed by him had observed an unidentified object streak across the sky, perform several abrupt changes of course, and finally disappear in the direction of Bowling Green, Kentucky. They observed this object for several minutes. I think that another witness or two present that were guests of Mr. [name redacted] at the time. Since Mr. [name redacted] was a very prominent citizen of the area, and the senior member of the largest local law-firm, and since the description of the object and its maneuvers was very accurate, some credence was lent to the story. We therefore reported this incident in accordance with AFR 100-1, by Confidential Message.22
Whatever the Air Force opinion or policy, the Kelly-Hopkinsville matter was assigned to First Lieutenant Charles N. Kirk, an Air Force officer at Campbell Air Force Base. He apparently conducted a six-week investigation before sending the reports and interview transcripts on to ATIC on October 1, 1957. He researched the story using the Hopkinsville newspaper from August 22, 1955, to September 11, 1955.23 He also had a letter from Captain Hertell, a statement from Glennie Lankford [the matriarch of the Sutton family and who had been there throughout the night] and a statement given to Kirk by Major John E. Albert [who unofficially investigated the case in 1955] and a copy of an article or statement written by Glennie Lankford.
Although it has been suggested that there is no evidence that any military personnel were involved with the exception of the MPs, Hertell, in his report, wrote, “As for the report that the affair was investigated by two Air Force Officers from Campbell Air Force Base, I don’t beleive (sic) that there is any fact in this.”24 Then, as if to contradict himself, he wrote, “I beleive (sic) that a couple of our officers may have gone down-on their own—to view the place, as I heard some talk of this at the time, but Colonel Donald McPherson, the Base Commander certainly never ordered any official investigation, to the best of my knowledge.”
To further complicate this, Hertell continued, “I seem to remember Captain Bennett saying something about going down to see the spot, but since he is still stationed there, surely you have already questioned him regarding this matter.” There is nothing in the files to suggest that this was the case, that is, no one at ATIC ever questioned Bennett about what he might have seen at the Sutton farm.
And then, to contradict what he had written earlier, Hertell said, “The only other officer who may have looked into this matter was the Deputy Base Command, Major Ziba B. Ogden.... I remember the two of us talking about the incident, and he could possibly have been sent to the scene by Col. McPherson, in an unofficial capacity, without my knowing about it.”
This unofficial investigation and statement provided some interesting information about the case. The Air Force was claiming that the case had not been officially reported and therefore the Air Force was not obligated to investigate. It seems that here we get lost in the semantics of the situation and the question that begs to be asked is: Why not, because it seems that some sort of report had been sent to the Air Force given the documentation in the Blue Book files?
Or is that the case? Lieutenant Kirk, in his report in 1957, sent a copy of the statement made by Major John E. Albert on September 26, 1957, to ATIC. The very first paragraph seems to suggest that notification was made to Campbell Air Force Base, which should have, according to regulations in effect at that time (1955), qualified as a report in official channels. The regulation is quite clear on the point and it doesn’t matter if anyone in the military believed the sighting to be a hoax, a hallucination, or the real thing, regulations required an investigation, now that it was in official channels.
In the statement, Albert said:
On about August 22, 1955, about 8 A.M., I heard a news broadcast concerning an incident at Kelly Station, approximately six miles North of Hopkinsville. At the time I heard this news broadcast, I was at Gracey, Kentucky on my way to Campbell Air Force Base, where I am assigned for reserve training. I called the Air Base and asked them if they had heard anything about an alleged flying saucer report. They stated that they had not and it was suggested that as long as I was close to the area, that I should determine if there was anything to this report. I immediately drove to the scene at Kelly [for some reason the word was blacked out, but it seems reasonable to assume the word is Kelly] Station and located the home belonging to a Mrs. Glennie Lankford [name redacted], who is the one who first reported the incident. (A copy of Mrs. Lankford’s statement is attached to this report).
Albert’s statement continued:
Deputy Sheriff Batts was at the scene where this supposedly flying saucer had landed and he could not show any evidence that any object had landed in the vicinity. There was nothing to show that there was anything to prove this incident.
Mrs. Lankford was an impoverished widow woman who had grown up in this small community just outside of Hopkinsville, with very little education. She belonged to the Holy Roller Church and the night and evening of this occurrence, had gone to a religious meeting and she indicated that the members of the congregation and her two sons and their wives and some friends of her sons’, were also at this religious meeting and were worked up into a frenzy, becoming emotionally unbalanced and that after the religious meeting, they had discussed this article which she had heard about over the radio and had sent for them from the Kingdom Publishers, Fort Worth 1, Texas and they had sent her this article with a picture which appeared to be a little man when it actually was a monkey, painted silver. This article had to be returned to Mrs. Lankford as she stated it was her property. However, a copy of the writing is attached to this statement and if it is necessary, a photograph can be obtained from the above mentioned publishers.
There are a number of problems with the first couple of paragraphs of Albert’s statement, but those are trivial. (For example, it wasn’t Glennie Lankford who first reported the incident, but the whole family who had traveled into town to alert the police. They drove two cars so that no one was left behind with the creatures still in the area for all they knew.) The third paragraph, however, is filled with things that bear no resemblance to reality. Lankford was not a member of the Holy Rollers, but was, in fact a member of the Trinity Pentecostal Church. Neither she, nor any of the family, had been to any religious services the night of the “attack.” She couldn’t have heard about any article on the radio because there was no radio in the farm house. And there was no evidence that Lankford was ever sent anywhere for any kind of article about flying saucers and little creatures. In other words, Albert had written the case off almost before he began his “investigation” because of his false impressions and the false information. He provided no source for the allegations about the Langford’s activities that night. Apparently, he was only interested in facts that would allow him to debunk the case and was not interested in learning what had happened during the night. He had no official standing, at least according to the statements that appear in the Blue Book files, he was not acting on specific orders by a higher authority but only a rather vague suggestion, and he had just interjected himself into the case by calling Campbell Air Force Base with the information he’d heard on the radio which, ironically and as mentioned, put the case into official channels.
Further evidence of this is provided in the next paragraph of his statement:
It is my opinion that the report Mrs. Lankford or her son, Elmer [Lucky] Sutton, was caused by one of two reasons. Either they actually did see what they thought was a little man and at the time, there was a circus in the area and a monkey might have escaped, giving the appearance of a small man. Two, being emotionally upset, and discussing the article and showing pictures of this little monkey, that appeared like a man, their imaginations ran away with them and they really did believe what they saw, which they thought was a little man.
It is interesting to note that Albert is not suggesting that the witnesses were engaged in inventing a hoax. Instead, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, Albert invented the tale of an escaped monkey that fooled the Sutton clan. That does not explain how the monkey was able to survive the shots fired at it by the terrified people in the house, especially if it was as close to the house as the witnesses suggested. With shotguns, pistols, and rifles being fired at the “little man,” someone should have hit it and reported that they had, in fact, hit it, but there was apparently no injury to the creature.
But Albert wasn’t through with the little monkey theory. According to him:
The home that Mrs. Lankford lived in was in a very run down condition and there were about eight people sleeping in two rooms. The window that was pointed out to be the one that she saw the small silver shining object about two and a half feet tall, that had its hands on the screen looking in, was a very low window and a small monkey could put his hands on the top of it while standing on the ground.
The final sentence of Albert’s account said, “It is felt that the report cannot be substantiated as far as any actual object appearing in the vicinity at that time.” It was then signed by Kirk.
What is interesting is that Albert and then Kirk were willing to ignore the report of the object because there was nothing to substantiate it. But, they were willing to buy the monkey theory, though there was nothing to substantiate it, either. They needed a little man for the family to see and shoot at, and they created one because a monkey might have escaped from some mythical circus in town.
Glennie Lankford might have inspired the little monkey story with her own statement provided to authorities. In a handwritten statement signed on August 22, 1955, she wrote:
My name is Glennie Lankford age 50 and I live at Kelly Station, Hopkinsville Route 6, Kentucky.
On Sunday night Aug 21, 55 about 10:30 P.M. I was walking through the hallway which is located in the middle of my house and I looked out the back door (south) and saw a bright silver object about two and a half feet tall appearing round. I became excited and did not look at it long enough to see if it had any eyes or move. I was about 15 or 20 feet from it. I fell backward, and then was carried into the bedroom.
My two sons, Elmer Sutton aged 25 and his wife Vera age 29, J.C. Sutton age 21 and his wife Aline age 27 and their friends Billy Taylor age 21 and his wife June, 18 were all in the house and saw this little man that looked like a monkey.
The Air Force seized on her description and turned it into a possible solution, suggesting, with no justification, that the Suttons had been attacked by a monkey that was immune to shotgun and rifle fire. They postulated a nonexistent circus for it to have escaped. They overlooked the evidence of the case, dispatched someone to look into it unofficially, and then denied that they had investigated it at all. The best way to debunk something was to offer any solution to it no matter how ridiculous that solution might be. To their way of thinking, any solution is better than no solution and people would only remember that the case had been solved though they might remember the tale of the monkey. They rarely remembered what that solution might have been.
Skeptics have attacked the case in the decades since the event. They have suggested that there was no military there the next day, but it is clear from the documentation that Albert was there the next day and, given his statement, he arrived fairly early in the morning. They have said that neighbors heard no more than four shots and that there was evidence of only two shots fired inside the house. But, of course, if the men were outside, then the bullets would have been lost in the distance. There is evidence of shots being fired through screens, and Davis and Bloecher reported a bullet hole in one of the window casings. The number of shots fired, according to the newspaper the next day, would have been in excess of 200 but that seems to be a little high.
Skeptics have also said that the little man, or men, was, or were, barn owls. Such owls, according to the skeptics, are nearly as big as the little men reported. But according to various bird-watching guides, they aren’t nearly as big as the creatures reported by the Suttons, and it doesn’t seem that they would have stayed around if they were being shot at. In fact, given that a shotgun was used and the distance to the target wasn’t all that great, there should have been remains of one or more of the owls for the police or sheriff to find.
This is one of those bizarre cases that involves some very disturbing information that isn’t easily explained. However, there is no real evidence to support the case other than the testimony of those involved and the observations of the law enforcement officers who were on the scene later.
In a case that had originally been explained in the Blue Book files as an “astro,” in this case Venus, we now found it later changed to “psychological.” Someone had scratched out the original explanation on the project card and penciled in the new conclusion. The file consisted of the standard Blue Book form that has been filled out by the witness, Jerry Townsend, and a teletype copy of a newspaper article that appeared in the St. Paul, Minnesota, newspaper.
According to J. Allen Hynek, on October 23, 1965, a radio announcer was driving near Long Prairie, Minnesota (though the Air Force mislabeled it as Lone Prairie) at about 7:15 p.m., when he rounded a bend in the road and spotted a rocket-shaped object sitting on the pavement. He said that it was 30 or 40 feet tall, 10 feet in diameter, and sitting on its fins just as all the rocket ships ever shown in movies or on television have been. As he approached his car engine died, the radio faded, and the headlights dimmed. He said that he tried to start his car but failed. Then, according to the report he filed with Project Blue Book:
I then got out of my car with the idea to go up to it and try to rock the center of gravity and topple it over so that I would have the evidence right there in black and white. I got to the front end of my car and stopped with no further interest in going further because three little “creatures” came from about behind and stood in front of the object. I think they were looking at me.... I was quite fascinated with what I saw.... I felt that if they could stop my car, they could surely do something worse to me and I wanted to live to tell the story so that the people of the United States would know that there were things of this nature. I can safely say that we “looked” at each other for about three minutes. Then they turned and went under the object and a few seconds later, the object started to rise slowly. After it was about one quarter mile high (this is only a guess), the light went out and my car engine started to run again (I did not have to tough the starter), and my headlights came on. I looked at the area that it had been sitting on over and could see no evidence that it had been on the ground. I then drove to the Todd County Sheriff’s Office [Sheriff Jim Bain and police officer Lavern Lubitz] and reported what I had seen to the sheriff. He went back out to the spot and could not find anything on the road that would show they were on the ground. That is what happened.
Hynek said that he personally investigated the case “via the telephone.” He said that there were confirming witnesses to the object’s take-off. Several raccoon hunters, according to the sheriff, had seen “a light in the sky” at the time the object took off.25 There were apparently four other witnesses who might have seen the object take off. Although there was no radar confirmation of the craft, other witnesses in nearby towns had seen it, including the sheriff in Anoka.
Hynek’s account does not describe the creatures, but several others did. According to Coral Lorenzen, who spoke to Townsend in the days after the sighting, “When he got to the front of the car three little creatures which looked like tin cans on tripods and about six inches tall, came from behind the object. They had no discernible features. Townsend stopped in front of his car with no intention to go closer. He said that although he could detect no features, he felt the creatures were watching him.”26
Although Hynek reported that there had been nothing found on the road, that was not confirmed by Lubitz: “The only thing we found were three strips of an oil-like substance on the road.... They were about a yard long and four inches apart, all parallel with the road. I don’t know what they were and I’ve looked at a lot of roads and never saw anything like them before.”27
Other, named witnesses were also located. Ray Blessing, who was 14 at the time and using his reflector telescope that night, said that at about 7:00 p.m. he had seen a “Buck Rogers-like thing” fly by. This was about 15 minutes before Townsend saw a similar shaped craft on the road.28
Jim Bain, whose father had been the sheriff in 1965, provided some interesting detail. In an email written on October 15, 2015, Bain said that he was the son of the sheriff and his father would get together with another sheriff, John Stack of Morrison County. Bain said that he had been in the sheriff’s office on the night that Townsend came in with the tale of seeing a spaceship. His immediate reaction was one of disbelief, but according to what he wrote later:
My father went out to the site but he called the civil defense director at the time to ride with him.... The director said he would bring his Geiger counter. When they got to the site the marks were visible and distinct and highly radioactive.... A couple of weeks after this siting [sic] a gentleman from the government came and was talking to my father.... This was not unusual for me to just walk in his office...if my father wanted me to leave he would say so but on this night he had so [sic] reason for me to leave. The conversation was basically over this space ship landing however in the conversation my father brought up another gentlemen [sic] who had directly seen the space ship but would not let his name be used. After bring[ing] this up they called the second individual and he agreed to speak to [the] government investigator.... When we got to the home [where the witness lived we found] the hunter, his wife, son and investigator... [he said]. “We had just let the dogs out and they took off across the field when this space ship came over them and lite up the ground like it was day.29
Though there isn’t much in this account, it does put a government investigator into the story who was obviously not from the Air Force. An Air Force investigator would have been in uniform, and nothing in the Blue Book suggests any real Air Force investigation. It does mention a space ship but gives no detail. It happened on the same night as Townsend’s encounter, near that location and time.
Although it seems that the original idea—that there was a single witness—doesn’t seem to be borne out, just as happened in the Zamora case. The investigation turned up other witnesses to an object in the sky, to lights near the ground, and even to a sighting of a similar object in the sky about the time of the original sighting. It would have been better for the witnesses to be located prior to the publicity, but the fact they reacted to that publicity doesn’t render their testimonies completely moot. It does suggest possible contamination, and all who look at the story need to acknowledge that fact.
It is clear from the documentation available that by the time of the Zamora sighting the Air Force did not accept the idea of alien visitation. It worked very hard to ignore sightings in which alien creatures were reported, often labelling witnesses as having psychological problems without bothering to interview them. In some cases, it sent its standard forms to witnesses, and if the seven-page document was not completed and returned, it was another excuse not to investigate the case or label it as “Insufficient Data for a Scientific Analysis,” which is no explanation at all. It does keep the report out of the “unidentified” category.
We also see that the Air Force has attempted to hide its interest in a case by failing to officially investigate. Instead, it relied on the services of other officers, sometimes in other branches of the military, who, it could be suggested, were operating on their own. Though reports were furnished to Blue Book, because there was nothing to show an official investigation, the Air Force could avoid dealing with the case.
Finding the witnesses wouldn’t have been difficult, had the Air Force wanted to interview them. Local newspapers published the names and details of the sightings. Rather than dispatch an officer from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to learn the facts, it just collected the newspaper clippings, decided that the witness had psychological problems, and let it go at that. The Air Force had a solution, one that many would believe, simply because “everyone” knows there is no alien visitation and anyone seeing a flying saucer has to be a little bit nuts.
If that didn’t work, they could always invent a solution as shown in the Kelly-Hopkinsville sighting. Glennie Langford said the creatures they had seen were about the size of a monkey, and the creatures then became monkeys from some mythical circus.
Important here, however, are the descriptions of the creatures. They are not those you would expect as portrayed in science fiction, though the 1957 film Invasion of the Saucermen seems to have been inspired by the descriptions offered by the Suttons. They are not the greys that would become the standard in later years. These were truly weird little beasts that only vaguely resemble humans, which is to say that had two arms, two legs, and two eyes on one head.
Just like in Socorro, there is an impression that the sightings are single witness. But they are not. For those who paid attention, the names of other witnesses and documentation were available. As happened all too often, the ridicule factor inhibited if not actually prevented a proper investigation.