The Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter

A report from August 1955, from a farmhouse at Kelly, near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, where the family said small beings attacked them for hours.

Joe Nickell, in Skeptical Inquirer in 2006, says eleven people were in the Sutton family farmhouse at Kelly that Sunday evening, August 21, 1955: widowed Glennie Lankford and three of her children, two grown sons and their wives, a relative, and a visiting couple from Pennsylvania. Rodney Schmaltz and Scott O. Lilienfeld, in Frontiers in Psychology in 2014, summarize what the eleven said: silver beings about four feet tall, with claws and thin legs, that seemed to float, arrived a little after 8 p.m. and harassed the family until midnight, when some of them went for help.

Brian Dunning, on the Skeptoid podcast in 2012, describes two cars reaching the Hopkinsville police station around 11 at night carrying five adults and some children, who said they had been fighting the beings for almost four hours. The Kentucky New Era's story of 22 August 1955 spoke of a ship with a crew of 12 to 15 small men that landed and fought the people in a farmhouse. Wikipedia says city police, state troopers, deputy sheriffs and military police from Fort Campbell, sixteen officers in all, went to the farmhouse. They found smashed windows and screens with holes in them, possibly from gunfire, and no other evidence.

Schmaltz and Lilienfeld use the case to teach scientific thinking. WKMS reported in 2016 that Hopkinsville holds the Little Green Men Days Festival every year, that year's being the sixth. Its headline credits the story with inspiring a musical and a Pokémon.