The Curious Case of the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter

We’re going to talk about aliens in Kentucky. I’ve tried to come up with some justification for why anyone in Nashville should care about aliens in Kentucky 67 years ago, but there is none. It’s just a fun, weird thing that happened, and it happened close enough that I could drive my parents up to see where it happened.

I’m pretty agnostic about aliens. The universe is big. It’s likely there’s life out there. If there’s life out there, it could possibly have gotten here by now. But here’s the thing that I don’t understand about our concept of aliens: Why do we assume aliens would contact us? 

Imagine it from the other side. We get to a planet obviously teaming with life. How would we decide who was in charge? Is it the beings who have the most territory? Seventy percent of Earth is covered in ocean. Why wouldn’t alien life search for “earthlings” there? Maybe they’ve already made contact with, oh, I don’t know, octopuses, and they have a series of trade agreements already hashed out. OK fine, maybe they're obviously going to look for the beings with the most advanced technology — i.e., us.

But remember, these are entities that have never seen people before. They have no framework for understanding us. We look at ourselves and understand an individual as, well, an individual human with eyes and teeth and skin and a brain and, you know, all the junk we consider as defining a human. But each of our bodies is teeming with microorganisms. According to the NIH, your body has 10 microorganisms for every one human cell. How would an alien look at you and know that the thing that only makes up 10 percent of the thing is considered the whole thing? Aliens could meet you and assume communication should happen with the microorganisms that are the most of you. Maybe that already has happened and you were left out of the conversation because you didn’t seem to matter.

All our assumptions about alien contact start from aliens somehow recognizing that we are the things on this planet worth contacting. I just don’t know how we know that’s how aliens will see it.

Anyway, Kentucky, Sunday, Aug. 21, 1955, just after sunset, the Sutton family is sitting around their farmhouse in village of Kelly. Even now, Kelly seems to be little more than a church, a handful of houses, and a train crossing about 15 minutes north of Hopkinsville on Highway 41A. One of the Suttons goes out to get some water from the well, and he comes back with a story of seeing something weird in the sky. His compatriots blow him off. And then the house is attacked by a number of small, weird-looking humanoid creatures with sporks for hands. After a two-hour gun battle, the family gets into their cars, drives down to Hopkinsville and reports to the police that they have been attacked by aliens.

Whatever else we might say about what happened that night, the police who took the initial report and then went back to the house with them said the family was genuinely shaken. Something had happened to them. 

A large amount of police accompanied them back to the two-room farmhouse — the Hopkinsville police, some Christian County sheriff’s deputies, the state police, and military police from Fort Campbell.

The Center for UFO Studies has a whole casebook on the event up on its website. The Kentucky New Era has the news story they ran about the event the day after it happened up on its website. You can go down a very deep rabbit hole here.

So last week, I loaded my parents in the car and we drove up 41A to Kelly, Ky. As you know, one of my favorite things about living here is that you can just go see stuff. So there we are, driving and reading the Wikipedia page about the event, and we are seeing stuff for ourselves. Except that when we got to Kelly and we went to make the turn that would take us from 41A to the old Madisonville Road, we couldn’t get to it because there was a train stopped on the train tracks waiting for another long, long freight train to go by. We could, we thought, see the empty space where the Sutton house had once stood, but we couldn’t get to it.

Nothing I’d read about the Kelly encounter prepared me for just how close those folks were — and thus the “aliens” were too — to the railroad tracks. But those tracks are right on the other side of the road from the home site. There have been many explanations for the Kelly encounter, but none of the ones I’ve ever heard spend any time exploring whether and how the train tracks may have been involved.

My dad, though, immediately wondered if the family might have been being pranked by bored railroad workers who were stuck waiting like the trains we saw before us. But like I said, no one has looked into what, if any, role the train tracks may have played.

So I texted Carter Newton, the archivist at the Tennessee Central Railroad Museum, a copy of the sketch made from the description of the creatures the Suttons had given, and I asked him — is there anything railroad related this could be? He texted me back, “Could be an illuminated switch stand.”

If you Google those, they make for an interesting possibility. But it's not one Newton was sold on, since switch stands tend not to attack houses. There’s not a single report in the Tennessee Central archives of one behaving this way.

Newton’s favorite theory is mine as well, and the one most skeptics have settled on — that the Suttons were being attacked by a family of great horned owls, which they failed to recognize as owls because owls walking on the ground look weird as fuck. 

So that’s it. Nothing to see here. Nothing that would keep you wondering if something else was going on.

Oh wait. Why were the military police involved?

If you’ve driven 41A, you know that it’s quite a ways between Fort Campbell and Hopkinsville proper, about half an hour if you’re driving the speed limit. If we follow the timeline established by the Center for UFO Studies, the family fled the house at about 11 p.m. Even speeding, they would have arrived at the police station at around 11:15. The police began to call around to the sheriff and state police, and according to the center’s report, they all waited at the station for everyone to arrive before heading back to the house. They were back to the house around a half an hour after they’d either left the house or arrived at the police station — so somewhere between 11:30 and 11:45.

If this is the case, then the MPs did not come from Fort Campbell, because there wasn’t enough time for them to get from Fort Campbell to the police station before the group had already left to go back to the house. If the MPs were able to join the group and go up to Kelly with them, then they were already nearby. Why? Why would four MPs be up in Hopkinsville after 11 p.m. on a Sunday night? 

Let’s put on our tinfoil hats.

The skeptics have said that the sighting of the UFO that started the evening was probably just some weird-ass thing that didn’t actually have anything to do with the rest of the events of the evening. But as you’re flipping through the center’s report, note that the direction the weirdass thing came from was Fort Campbell.

Which suggests the next question we might ask: If the little men who attacked the house were actually disgruntled owls, why were they disgruntled? The Suttons weren’t any place they weren’t every day. And aside from that evening, they never had problems with owls. Presumably, then, something drove the owls up near the house.

What if the Army lost something (say a Hiller flying platform?) north of Hopkinsville and the MPs were up looking for it? What if it was the shiny “meteor” seen earlier in the evening? Apparently no one (that we know of) bothered to go into the ravine that night. They waited until the next day. That would have given the Army time to get into the ravine and retrieve whatever had been lost. (Here’s a 1955 road map of Christian County showing that there were backroads near the house that someone could have used to enter the ravine from the east side.)

The other thing that suggests there was still something going on nearby, even after the police left the scene, is that the Suttons saw the “little men” again later that night. If they were owls coming out of the ravine, something was keeping them from settling in back there that night.

But of course, this can’t be some proto-X-File without some shady government figure. For that we turn to the Evansville Press and a story that ran Aug. 22 in which it was reported that “Fort Campbell authorities today sent Major Albert Coren to the scene to investigate.” Except there doesn’t seem to be any Albert Coren in the military in 1955. It’s not a very common name, and the ones who made it into the Department of Veterans Affairs database all served in World War II and then went home.

Insert spooky music here. Except even this has a mundane explanation. Major Albert Coren was an owl. Ha, kidding. There was a major poking around — Major John Albert, who was a real guy who really was in the military at the right time, and he reported being at Kelly. I think the Evansville Press just got his name wrong.

Perhaps because their reporter was really an owl. Oooooooo.