When Goblins Attack!

It could happen to you…

History is a text-based discipline. There are of course ancillary fields like archaeology and linguistics and stratigraphy and such, but at its heart, the past comes to us through consciously created records of human thought. History is the interpretation of those thoughts, a product created through the careful weighing of truth claims, motives, and possibilities. Most of the time, things make sense, or at least as much sense as they can make given the vagaries of the human condition- fallen creatures being analyzed by other fallen creatures. But sometimes, well, things get a bit weird. I’ve written about this sort of thing before, but, inspired by the great recent work of

Yakubian Ape

, I thought I might plunge once more into one of the odder corners of the past, one which begs a simple question- WTF?

As this documentary shows, the entities described by Yakubian Ape were most likely involved in an inter-dimensional plot involving necromancy, metal balls, and topless women for the purpose of something-something which would give the Tall Man something. Just go with it.

There have been a few recent books that have taken up the issue of how to interpret the weirder things that linger in the recorded past. There is Carlos Eire’s They Flew: A History of the Impossible, which focuses primarily on case studies of two Catholic ascetics from the Renaissance Era who- in front of sometimes hundreds of witnesses in broad daylight- were seen to levitate and fly. There is also How to Think Impossibly by Jeffrey Kripal, which takes a broader view of paranormal phenomena. Each of these books is a work of epistemology which interrogates assumptions of positive science and the legacy of Enlightenment-era rationalism and empiricism and posits a world more odd than we know, or can know. But rather than get too deep into big-picture concerns, I thought it might be useful to explore the issue of what can be believed through a more recent and strangely ambiguous example. This is a story about goblins.

No, not this guy.

I mean actual goblins, not the internet kind. Or at least, I think I do. The entities I’m talking about didn’t describe themselves as goblins, nor did the people who encountered them. That appellation came later, more on that . . . later. Nor do I mean the goblins that are a lamentable but routine part of life in Zimbabwe, where they represent the second biggest public menace after the government itself.

The article tactfully notes that they goblins are female- no homo. The same cannot be said for the ones in Zanzibar.

One could easily get the impression from the many, many articles like this that- in the modern world at least- goblins are mainly a third-world problem, like unstoppable giant crocodiles that kill people for fun. But America is not immune to goblins and such- far from it. In the shadowscapes of modernity, in the lonely and forgotten places, they exist, waiting to spring out at inconvenient moments to disabuse us of our grasp on our misbegotten certainties. And the terror that they can evoke is no less real for their being relegated to the edge of possibility.

This particular story begins on August 21st, 1955 in a rural area between Kelly and Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The Sutton Family- brothers Elmer and John, their mother, Glennie Lankford, and John’s wife Vera, Elmer’s wife Alene, and her brother O. P. Baker were entertaining guests Billy Ray Taylor and his wife, June. Between the two families there were seven children of various ages. Billy Ray was from Pennsylvania, and he and Elmer knew each other from their mutual employment as carnies. The house belonged to Glennie, and by 1950s standards was a bit primitive, lacking running water and electricity. No account describes why they had gathered there that night in the first place, but it seems to have been a routine social occasion.

At the mention of rural Kentucky one’s imagination naturally fills with images of Appalachian mountain hollers, but Kelly and Hopkinsville are in the western part of the state. There the geography is that of a forested prairie, complete with large networks of caves. There’s a history of weird happenings in the area- Bigfoot sightings, the Pope Lick Monster (which isn’t what it hilariously sounds like), UFOs, and cursed fried chicken that enchants perfectly reasonable people into murderous violence. It’s one of those sorts of places that are otherwise unremarkable, save for the fact that for one brief moment in time, fate chose to unleash a night of inexplicable uncanniness into the lives of ordinary people there.

At 7:00 PM, Billy Ray went to the well to draw water for the gathering, when he noticed a bright object in the evening sky. Running back to the house, he told the others he’d seen a flying saucer, which seemed to be on course to descend nearby. The others paid him no mind, at least at first. But as darkness fell, things would get considerably and terrifyingly more strange.

At around 8:00, the family dogs started barking madly. Going outside to check out the issue, Billy Ray and Elmer were shocked to see a short, humanoid figure with large, glowing yellow eyes and pointed ears approaching the house. It was a gleaming, metallic silver in color. Its long arms ended in clawed hands, which were upraised, and it seemed to float rather than walk. Also, it wasn’t alone.

This is a witness drawing from the report published by the Center for UFO studies, run by J. Allen Hynek, formerly of Project Blue Book.

The pair ran back inside just long enough to grab firearms- a .22 pistol and a 20-gauge shotgun. They may not have known quite what was going on, but as Americans, they understood two things immediately. One, it was weird, and two, it was trespassing. Therefore, there was really only one fitting response.

However, this proved less effective than they anticipated. When hit, the creatures simply floated back toward the tree line, sometimes flipping over backwards before righting themselves. I say creatures: while the witnesses estimated there were between 12-15 of them, there were never more than two seen at any one time, so it’s unclear where that number came from. However many there were, they kept coming, and however futile it was, the men kept shooting.

What Grok thinks happened. Like the rest of us, it wants Nicholas Cage to be involved somehow.

It should be noted that the creatures never actually attacked anyone, strictly speaking. At one point, Billy Ray stepped onto the porch and one of them grabbed at his hair, but at no time did they do anything overtly harmful to anyone. They just kept walking over, hands extended overhead, getting as far as peering into the windows before they ate lead and turned somersaults. Glennie seems to have counseled restraint, pointing out that they seemed more curious than anything. Elmer and Billy Ray took that under consideration while continuing to shoot them, which produced a sound akin to hitting a metal bucket on impact.

After about three hours of this, the household sensed a lull and ran for their cars, the lot of them bursting into the police station in nearby Hopkinsville to tell the night shift officer what had to have been the oddest story he’d ever heard. Nonetheless, he seems to have taken them seriously. They were all clearly terrified- one of them had a pulse rate of 140- and they weren’t the sort that normally showed up at the station in the middle of the night. So he called for backup, including military investigators from nearby Fort Campbell, and they all made their way back to the farm. They found nothing unusual, apart from casings and windows shattered by bullets, and thus after a few hours the authorities departed.

Then the creatures came back. The family returned to their unearthly combat with whatever was besieging them until dawn, when they again left in hurry. But by then curious neighbors and the police had spread the word, and a media circus descended on the rural homestead. Once more they were under invasion, this time by something even more frightening- journalists.

He’s not wrong.

The newspapers fell over themselves exaggerating the circumstances, giving the impression of moonshine-swilling hillbillies blazing away at little green men- despite their witnesses being uniform in describing them as silvery. The mentions of ‘goblins’ start to creep in later, for some reason becoming more common than the simple appellation of alien. The parties involved, by all accounts, were also stone-cold sober (in fairness, this can only be said definitely of the humans). All the hype obscured the fact that this represented an extraordinary event, one which was perhaps better documented than any other otherworldly encounter. Nearly a dozen witnesses observed the entities for around six hours of total time, often within arms’ distance. The stories they told were consistent in all particulars. Had they been describing anything else, no one would have doubted them.

But of course, it couldn’t be what it seemed. Extraordinary events demand extraordinary evidence, and apart from the eyewitness testimony, there really wasn’t any. Thus, the skeptics moved right in to that empty space and began deboonking right away, with the general tenor being represented by this explanation by Skeptoid, referencing earlier work by Joe Nickell from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry:

The first widely published skeptical work on the episode was done in preparation for the town of Hopkinsville's 50-year anniversary of the event, at their Little Green Men Festival in 2005. The town's chamber of commerce hired full-time paranormal investigator Joe Nickell from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry to give a talk on the strange episode. Joe did his homework, spending a number of days interviewing surviving witnesses and going through the town's old records and newspaper archives. In addition, the Kentucky New Era newspaper published a special 12-page supplement titled "It Came from Kelly" that included all the paper's past reporting of the event along with some retrospectives.

Nickell's skepticism was well justified, in my opinion. One of the first things that struck me about this case is that there has never been any plausible reason to connect the bright light streaking overhead with the creatures. According to the 1955 reporting of the event by Kentucky New Era's Joe Dorris, Billy Ray Taylor only told the Suttons he saw a bright shooting star; only in later retellings of the story by various authors did the element appear of Billy Ray watching a spaceship come down and land.

But that latter point isn’t true. This is from the original article from the paper they mention, published the day after the incident.

The Skeptoid piece follows Nickell in positing that the best explanation for the incident was a pair of great horned owls, probably defending their brood from humans, who mistook them for aliens in the darkness of rural Kentucky.

It was owls. Also, get the vaxx!

But of course, for that to be true, the people involved would have to be primed to mistake owls for aliens in the first place, and if Billy Ray only saw meteors that night, why would they have done so? Furthermore, why would large owls build their nest basically on the Sutton’s doorstep, then brave a hail of gunfire to glide slowly across the ground, presumably upside down (the only way the ‘claws above their heads’ posture makes sense) to scare off the humans who were there when they built their nest in the first place? Why was there no evidence of their presence noted by multiple investigators (were the owls suddenly worried about being arrested?) and why did they attack that night and that night only? Furthermore, why would these country people ever mistake an animal they had to have been familiar with for something totally and terrifyingly different?

For historical context, 1955 represented the middle of the golden age of UFO lore in America. Beginning with Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting that gave the world the term ‘flying saucer,’ the period also saw the phenomenon of abduction (Betty and Barney Hill in 1961) and a vast array of contactee stories- people who claimed to be receiving messages from alien entities. Something about the Atomic Age unmoored people from traditional understandings of strange phenomena; what would previously have been understood in supernatural terms now became scientific speculation, which involved a new clergy of credentialed experts explaining to the credulous masses what was acceptable to believe. The framing was certainly there for the interpretation that followed- Billy Ray claimed to see a flying saucer of a type already well-known in the media of the day- alien creatures showed up and did alien things, and the proper authorities performed their role by assuring the public that such things were impossible. But are they? The notion that extraordinary events demand extraordinary evidence begs the question of what counts as extraordinary. Do we live in the sort of world where goblins are possible? If so, they’re not especially extraordinary, just unusual (other than in Zimbabwe and Akron, Ohio). If not, apart from autistic science bros, we were all conned by a pair of literal carnies. But that question is one of metaphysics before it’s one of epistemology. It’s a question we fear to answer.

Like with the Joe Simonton space pancakes, the very weirdness of the whole thing militates against its believability, while at the same time, paradoxically, it becomes more of a stretch to believe the alternatives. Yet the latter is what we reach for, because, as the Skeptoid piece implies, to accept the former is to admit something about both ourselves and our universe that is profoundly unsettling.

Could it really have been just owls? Well, of course we'll never know. It's certainly one possibility, and seems consistent with the reports. Another possibility is that strange creatures with unprecedented superpowers, never before or since sighted in the vicinity, with no evident motive, toyed with the Sutton clan one night in 1955. No evidence was found either way. This is one for the folklore files.

Folklore, indeed. Reaching back into that realm would allow one to deadly make sense of the encounter, as familiarity with that realm equips one with a great store of bizarre stories of strange beings in lonely places, their presence and motives inhuman, best avoided, or perhaps not even spoken of save to warn. I mentioned in my previous work on Simonton that- following Seraphim Rose- I thought the whole thing simply demonic. You may disagree. You may prefer the owls. That is, right up until the goblins show up at your doorstep some haunted night…

And don’t get me started on the leprechauns…