• Seventy years ago, a group of people reported an encounter with small, unusual beings near Hopkinsville, Kentucky.
• The incident, later known as the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter, continues to fascinate and has been marked by festivals in the area.

On an August night 70 years ago, two carloads of people showed up at the Hopkinsville Police Department and gave a breathless account of an extraordinary incident they had just survived at a nearby farm.

“Spokesmen for the crowd told of how something resembling a space ship or flying saucer had landed at the back of the house,” reported Hopkinsville’s Kentucky New Era newspaper the next day. “Men, who appeared to be about 4 feet tall, got out of the ship and came to the house and done battle with the occupants.”

One was in a tree. Another was on top of the house. One pushed its face against the window.

They had big heads and long arms, with eyes out of proportion to their bodies.

Men at the farmhouse responded by blasting away with guns, expending boxes of ammunition to no effect.

When law enforcement went to the farm, they could not find evidence proving or disproving the event, which quickly made headlines across Kentucky and the country.

It even inspired Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film E.T.

Seventy years later, the Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter — as it came to be known — is still a big deal in Western Kentucky and beyond.

What happened in Kelly, Kentucky, in 1955?

The event in the tiny community of Kelly reverberated across the nation.

“SPACEMEN TAKE KENTUCKY” blared a headline in the New York Daily News.

The Los Angeles Times carried the news on its front page alongside stories about French troops battling insurgents in Morocco and a California wildfire.

In even more distant Hawaii, it made page 2 of the Honolulu Advertiser.

There were also skeptics. An Associated Press story at the time cited “an unidentified male resident of Hopkinsville” who "suggested" a bunch of monkeys escaped from a passing circus truck around the time of the incident.

A year after the extraterrestrial run-in, Hopkinsville’s police chief told The Courier Journal he had received letters from “all 48 states, as well as France, Mexico and several South American nations” inquiring about the aliens.

A decade after the encounter, a columnist for the Kentucky New Era newspaper wrote “scarcely a month passes” where the paper doesn’t receive a phone call or a letter asking about the little men.

“Few happenings in Christian County have given the community so much publicity, good and bad,” columnist Joe Dorris wrote in December 1965. “And few things have been remembered half as long.”

To some, the creatures that purportedly visited Kelly — about eight miles north of Hopkinsville — became known as goblins.

The area’s tourism arm hosted a 50th anniversary celebration in 2005 and then, starting in 2011, there was an annual festival held in Kelly.

However, that festival —the Kelly Little Green Men Days Festival — stopped a few years back.

This year, Hopkinsville is hosting its first ever GoblinCon on Oct. 17-18, which will mark the 70th anniversary of the alien encounter while also looking at other paranormal phenomena.

“We don’t want to just be UFOs, as you kind of cut your audience down,” said Eric Freeman Sims, GoblinCon’s event coordinator, who also runs a paranormal podcast. “So, we have speakers that will be talking about UFOs, alien encounters, but also cryptids like Big Foot and Dogman in Land Between the Lakes, as well as ghosts and ghost hunting.”

Revitalizing 'Little Green Men' festivals

Amy Rogers is the executive director of Visit Hopkinsville, the area's tourism arm, which is sponsoring GoblinCon.

“I have to be honest: I am a believer. I do not think we’re alone in this world,” said Rogers, who added she has the “X-Files” theme song set as her ringtone. “And I, just like other people, am very drawn to UFOs, the paranormal. And I was like: ‘I so want this to happen.’”

After the once-annual Kelly Little Green Men Days Festival stopped a few years ago, Rogers wanted to take the opportunity to “revitalize” it.

Ahead of GoblinCon, Visit Hopkinsville will host a kick-off event featuring "food trucks, games, and plenty of photo ops with some very special visitors" at Hopkinsville's visitor center on Aug. 23, just days after the anniversary of the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter.

But even outside of the anniversary season, aliens feature heavily at the visitor center, which sells alien-themed souvenirs and features an alien-themed photo stand-in.

While Hopkinsville brands itself as the “Batter Capital of the World” — claiming all flour used in McDonald’s biscuits east of the Mississippi comes from Hopkinsville — it’s finding a foothold in the paranormal as well.

“If people don’t have that look on their face like ‘why is there a batter bowl here?’ they gravitate towards the alien stories,” Rogers said, referencing the giant batter bowl at the visitor center that tourists can pose with.

'My dad was very adamant'

One of the featured speakers at GoblinCon will be Geraldine Sutton Stith, the daughter of one of the men present at the Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter and the author of several books about the incident.

She was born after the incident, but grew up with family stories of what happened.

Part of the reason she wrote books, she said, was to address the inconsistencies that she saw printed in newspaper accounts.

First of all, there wasn’t a dozen or so aliens like papers reported.

“My dad was very adamant it was only three or four,” she said. “It was the same three or four that were coming out all the time — they just weren’t dying.”

And second, they weren’t little green men.

“They said they were like a gunmetal gray,” she said. “The term ‘little green men’ came from a reporter because he just stuck together “Kelly green” — and there is a color Kelly green — and they became the Kelly Green Men.”

Stith said her family did, however, coin the term “goblin” to describe the aliens.

“The goblin thing came from my grandmother,” she said. “She was a really religious person, and her first thought when she started seeing these things was they were something the devil brought forth.”

To Stith, that night in Kelly, Kentucky, in 1955 has firmly cemented its place in UFO history.

“It’s a great story. I mean, it’s a fantastic story. It’s a legacy. In the UFO world, it’s a major, major story — it’s the granddaddy of UFO stories,” she said.