The Kelly-Hopkinsville Case Gets a Festival

[Doc]

I remember reading about this case a long time ago. The witnesses were dead serious about the battle and fearing for their lives or their children being taken.


Celebrating an 'alien' invasion

TIM GHIANNI Last updated 12:40 19/08/2013

HARRISON MCCLARY / Reuters
DISSECTED: Jacob Martin tours an alien autopsy tent at the Kentucky festival.



MYSTERIOUS: A clipping from the 22 August 1955 Kentucky New Era newspaper.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/oddstuff/9060...alien-invasion




A farm family's gunfight nearly 60 years ago with suspected alien invaders is being celebrated by hundreds gathered near a replica of their flying saucer said to have landed in rural Kentucky.


At the Little Green Men Days Festival near the site of the incident on August 21, 1955, adults this weekend sang gospel songs as kids got their faces painted to look like space invaders.


"There was hysteria all over the place," Geraldine Stith, daughter of one of the earthly combatants, recounted her father telling her of the night-long fight at their now-demolished farmhouse.


Newspapers at the time reported a bizarre story of a gun battle erupting between the farmhouse occupants and as many as 15 little men who had landed a spaceship in the southern Kentucky town of Kelly amid corn and soybean fields along Route 41.

Descriptions in 1955 newspaper articles provided blueprints for the 11.6-meter-diameter, 2-1/2-ton flying saucer parked on Saturday at the entrance to the festival grounds as well as for the 60-cm-tall stuffed alien dolls on its ramp and in the cockpit.

"All I can say is something happened," said Joann Smithey, country store proprietor and festival committee co-chair. "What? I don't know. It's a big universe."


The festival's website takes no sides in the incident, which was ignored for many years by the village of 200 people but is now embraced as a way to build unity while funding a planned community centre with a computer lab for school tutoring, a firehouse and an anti-bullying campaign.

The festival inevitably turns into a debate over whether the battle in which seven people used firearms to fend off aliens trying to swarm their farmhouse is fact, fiction or a mixture of both.


"We may not know exactly what happened that night, but we are determined to celebrate the occurrence," says a statement on the website of the festival, now in its third year and located on pastureland close to the site of the farmhouse.

[Marvin]

If memory serves me correctly… this is the incident that spawned the term “little green men” in association with extraterrestrials, especially when used as a jest or to poke fun at a sighting. I remember reading about this case back in the 60’s. I am happy to see this incident being revisited and its memory kept “alive.”

Unfortunately, there wasn’t any physical evidence left to investigate (other than the holes from the shooting… and they too are long gone). The Newspaper article suggested “alcohol” was not a factor in the sighting, but skeptics have usually claimed that alcohol was the reason for the incident. Something caused these people to believe their lives were in danger and obviously they experienced something they could not explain. As to what happened, that is up to the reader to decide.


M

[Marvin]

Here's a link to the incident (and Newspaper article):


http://www.kellyky.com/kellyincident.html


M