J Allen Hynek, PhD, professor of astronomy
and a specialist in stellar evolution at Ohio State University, probably wasn’t
thinking about a small town called Hopkinsville in the neighboring state of
Kentucky as he sat down to dinner in the early evening of August 21, 1955...
Dr Hynek had no idea that a visitor from
Pennsylvania, one Billy Ray Taylor, would be stepping outside at 7 PM to get a
drink from a hand pump because the Suttons, his hosts, did not have running
water inside their modest home in Kentucky’s backwoods not too many miles from
Hopkinsville...
For his part, Billy Ray Taylor probably
didn't know J Allen Hynek was a consultant to the United States Air Force investigation
into Unidentified Flying Objects. And he
almost certainly had no premonition that Hynek would be credited with coining a
term-- "high strangeness"-- many years later when he no longer worked
with military men who were trying to figure out what people saw in the sky when
they saw things that ought not be seen in the sky...
 |
| J Allen Hynek makes a cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind |
High Strangeness is a good way to describe
what happened to Billy Ray Taylor and his hosts about an hour after the
Pennsylvanian got his drink of water. He
told the others that he'd just seen a flying saucer in the western sky. Its lights had all the colors of the
rainbow. The Suttons chuckled, amused by
Billy Ray's vivid imagination, and told him he should recognize a shooting star
when he saw one...
What happened next is well-known to any
serious student of the UFO phenomena. At
roughly 8 PM, the Sutton hound began barking and howling and soon crawled under
the house where he hid until the next morning.
Being good rural sorts, Billy Ray and Elmer "Lucky" Sutton
decided to get a shotgun and a deer rifle to investigate the ruckus. They stepped outside and promptly opened fire. Moments later, the men rushed back inside,
claiming they’d seen something floating in the air near the tree line...
The "something" was humanoid, roughly
three feet tall. It had huge ears that
pointed up and spindly limbs that reminded the Suttons of a hospital patient
with atrophied legs and arms. Claw-like
talons seemed to be the best way to describe the creature's hands. It had a silvery glow. Most disturbing to Billy Ray and Lucky was
the fact it seemed to be impervious to bullets.
A shotgun blast would hit the critter and it would gracefully tumble
backwards through the air in slow motion and then resume floating toward the
house...
 |
| Biologist Ivan T Sanderson, who had a strong interest in unusual phenomena, poses with a model of the Hopkinsville Gremlin in an undated Polaroid photograph. |
Eventually, the gremlin-- as the Suttons
called it-- and several more like it reached the Sutton house, where (still
floating in the air) they peered in through the windows and clambered on the
roof, scaring the tarnation out of kids and adults alike. Billy Ray and the Suttons fired at the
creatures through the glass and walls for several hours. Every bullet had the same effect: the
gremlins floated away unharmed and then returned to be shot again so they could
float away unharmed and then return...
Neighbors down the road heard gunshots from
the Sutton place and wondered what in the world could be going on. None called the sheriff, figuring it was the
Sutton’s affair if they were shooting at someone…
After a couple hours, the goblins (a term
often used by modern researchers) appeared to tire of the game and disappeared. Billy Ray and Lucky and the rest of the
household piled into the family car and burned asphalt to nearby Hopkinsville
where they reported what had happened to Police Chief Russell Greenwell...
Greenwell and twenty other lawmen including
Kentucky State Troopers investigated the Sutton home that night. The chief and his officers didn't know what to
make of the crazy tale they heard when the Suttons invaded his station. But they knew a look of genuine terror when
they saw it and they saw it in the eyes of every man, woman, and child who
stood before them. What made this
troubling was that a State Trooper had radioed in a report of a strange object
in the skies near Hopkinsville. What
made this more troubling was that the Sutton family enjoyed a good reputation
in Christian County-- hardworking, devout and regular churchgoers, honest, and
not inclined to sample moonshine...
What do we do with a case like the
Hopkinsville Goblin Incident…
 |
| United States Air Force investigators opined the Suttons mistook a Great Horned Owl for silver-clad "gremlins" floating in the air. |
Do we ignore it? Do we attempt a ludicrous explanation such as
one offered by Major John Albert of the Air Force two years after the
incident-- the gremlin was an escaped circus monkey painted in silver? Do we nod sagely and agree with those who
opine Billy Ray and the Suttons misidentified Great Horned Owls defending their
nests? This latter is perhaps more
ridiculous than Albert's escaped monkey explanation. Country folk know owls and educated fools
when they see them...
Seven years before the Sutton incident, J
Allen Hynek was, by his account, a skeptic when it came to UFOs.
He was a man with solid academic credentials and he'd been teaching at a
major state university since 1936 with the exception of the World War II years
when he worked as a civilian scientist for the Navy as one of the developers of
a radio proximity fuze. In 1948, newly
hired as a part-time consultant to the Air Force's Project Sign, Hynek was
confident he would learn people who saw flying saucers had misidentified known
objects or were unreliable witnesses. He
considered the whole subject "utterly ridiculous"...
 |
| J Allen Hynek would become infamous in the early spring of 1966 for suggesting Michiganders were seeing "swamp gas" and not flying saucers. |
The official attitude that everything about
unidentified aerial phenomena could be easily explained away as
misidentification of conventional objects began to trouble Hynek who basically
initially believed the same thing...
As a scientist, he had difficulties with his
own willingness to jump to conclusions without a thorough analysis of the
data. His review of information
available to him suggested that the subject of UFOs was more complex than he
initially thought. Another thing that
bothered Hynek was that many reports coming across his desk were made by
trained observers such as military pilots.
These were not men who were prone to jeopardizing careers by signing
their names to a prank incident log...
Hynek would eventually found his own Center
for UFO Studies in 1973. His studies of
the subject never led him to any definite conclusions but he increasingly
placed a high value on the strangeness of some reports. It is one thing to see an unknown light zip
across the night sky in a straight line at a speed ten times greater than the
fastest plane made by men. But it is
another thing if this object comes to an abrupt halt, changes shape,
disappears, then reappears to resume a
zigzag journey across the heavens...
 |
| Hopkinsville, site of the infamous
Gremlin attack, was also home to the
Sleeping Prophet, Edgar Cayce, said
by many to be a worker of miracles.
|
[Jacques Vallee, another scientist who has
investigated the high strangeness of some UFO reports, originally supported the
possibility of an extraterrestrial origin for some of these unusual aerial
events. His study of the phenomenon
caused a shift in thinking for the co-developer of NASA's first computerized
mapping of Mars. He now suspects the UFO
phenomenon is associated with a non-human consciousness that can manipulate
time and space. In Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
Vallee served as the model from the French researcher Lacombe who was played by
noted film director Francois Truffaut. J
Allen Hynek also appears briefly in Spielberg's movie in a non-speaking role as
the bearded pipe-smoking man who witnesses the alien disembarkation towards the
end of the story.]
As for the Suttons, Chief Greenwell and the other lawmen accompanied them back to theirhome around midnight. The police officers and troopers saw walls filled peppered with gunshot and broken windows. Each witness was interviewed separately and told basically the same story. Neighbors were tracked down and they told the cops they'd heard lots of gunshots from the Sutton place. Late in the night, the police left, unsure of exactly how to report the incident, but convinced something strange had happened...
After the law had gone, a lone floating
gremlin returned at around 4:30 AM to the small house between Kelly and
Hopkinsville. Billy Ray Taylor grabbed
the shotgun, fired, and shattered one of the home's few unbroken windows as the
little troublemaker playfully vanished...
 |
| The Sutton family's experience was not the only unsettling "contact" between humans and small humanoids during the 1950s. A little more than two years after the Hopkinsville incident, a Brazilian farmer claimed to have been forced into a sexual encounter with an alien female. |
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CREDITS
Note:
All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia,
without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: still of
J Allen Hynek cameo appearance from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977, directed by Steven Spielbergl undated
Polaroid of Ivan T Sanderson with model of Hopkinsville Goblin from
johnkeel.com;
Great Horned Owl from ksbirds.org; Antonio Vilas-Boas article from
webelieveinaliens.com. Research for topics covered in this essay consists
primarily of information from readily available sources such as Wikipedia and
the Encyclopedia Britannica except as noted: none
