Regular Episode
#137 – AMERICAN GOBLINS—PART 2
In 2005, fifty years after the events at the Sutton family farm near Kelly, Kentucky, Joe was invited to investigate the case on the ground. This episode covers his findings in depth — and his preferred hypothesis may surprise people who expect skeptics to simply cry “hoax.”
☄️ Starting With What’s Real: The Perseid Meteor
Joe’s methodological first step is to suspend both belief and disbelief and look for a verifiable nucleus at the core of the story. He finds one immediately: the fiery object the Sutton family reported streaking across the sky that night almost certainly was a Perseid meteor. The August Perseid shower was active, other witnesses in the region reported meteors that same evening, and the witnesses’ description — “a big fireball” that appeared to land just over in a nearby gully — matches a well-documented perceptual illusion in which the apparent proximity of a bright meteor makes it seem to have touched down just out of sight beyond a tree line or hill.
For Joe, this matters methodologically: a fabricated story has no reason to include an independently corroborated astronomical event. The meteor’s existence lends the account an authentic nucleus and makes a pure hoax less plausible from the outset.
🦉 The Great Horned Owl Hypothesis
The heart of the episode is Joe’s detailed case that the “goblins” — the small, large-eyed, long-armed, claw-footed creatures that terrified the Sutton household for hours — were in fact a pair of great horned owls (Bubo virginianus). He has catalogued at least 25 points of similarity between witness descriptions and the known characteristics of that species. Among the most striking:
– Size: Family matriarch Glenny Lankford — whom Joe considers the most sober and reliable observer — described the figure as about two and a half feet tall. A large great horned owl can reach 25 inches, just over two feet.
– Head and “ears”: Witnesses consistently described a large round head with no visible neck and pointed, triangular projections on top — a near-perfect description of the owl’s prominent ear tufts and compact, neckless silhouette.
– Eyes: Large, apparently immobile, and described as glowing or shining yellow. Great horned owls cannot move their eyes in their sockets and display distinctive yellow eyeshine — distinguishing them from, say, the barred owl (which Joe has linked to Mothman sightings) with its bright reddish eyeshine.
– “Arms” and “hands”: Witnesses said the creatures had long arms ending in large, multi-fingered hands that they raised above their heads before “floating.” Viewed from the front, an owl spreading its wings presents exactly this silhouette — and the primary feathers at each wingtip produce a striking set of finger-like projections, roughly five per wing.
– Gait: Described as awkward, stilt-like, on spindly legs like broom handles — a precise description of an owl walking on the ground.
– Flight: The creatures reportedly “floated” silently, including one account of gliding forty feet from a rooftop to a fence. Owls are famous for near-silent flight due to their uniquely structured feathers.
– Behavior: The entities repeatedly perched — on the roof, on a maple tree limb, on a fence post — retreated from light toward dark areas, and were described as persistent and fearless. All of this is consistent with territorial great horned owls hunting for field mice around the homestead at night.
– Number: Despite claims of a horde, Glenny Lankford and at least one other witness acknowledged that no more than two creatures were ever visible at once. Great horned owls are monogamous and often hunt in established pairs on shared territory.
🔬 Hoax, Aliens, or Owls? Weighing the Hypotheses
Joe lays out three competing explanations and applies Occam’s razor to choose among them. His framework is what he calls the “preferred hypothesis” — the explanation with the fewest unwarranted assumptions and the most corroborative detail:
– Extraterrestrial: Requires assuming an entire class of alien beings that happen to look and behave remarkably like owls, arriving in a spacecraft for which there is no physical evidence. Fails on parsimony.
– Hoax: Joe is emphatic — and notably more emphatic here than many skeptics — that the evidence argues against deliberate fabrication. The story has too many moving parts and internal contradictions of the type generated by genuine confused experience, not coordinated deception. Physical evidence (shotgun pellets embedded in the door frame and window casing, spent shells found both inside and outside the house) confirms that real shooting occurred. A witness’s pulse was measured at 140 beats per minute by responding officers. And crucially, Glenny Lankford’s understated, almost sympathetic account of the creatures — “it wasn’t hurting nobody,” raising its arms as if to say don’t shoot — is not what someone engineering a scary story would invent.
– Great horned owls (preferred): Requires only that two territorial owls, common to rural Kentucky, were present at the farm that night — and that a family primed by a spectacular meteor and the cultural atmosphere of 1950s UFO excitement misidentified them under conditions of darkness, surprise, and fear.
Joe also addresses the alcohol question. A state trooper who responded that night believed the incident “came out of a container,” but Joe is unconvinced that intoxication explains a multi-witness, hours-long encounter, noting dryly that in his own extensive personal experience, alcohol alone does not produce flying saucers.
📄 The Role of Isabel Davis’s Research
Joe credits Isabel Davis and her meticulous early investigation — compiled in the book 📚 Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955 💵 — as an invaluable source, even though Davis came to very different conclusions. Her careful documentation of individual witness statements, including Glenny Lankford’s specific height estimate and observations about the creatures’ preference for darkness, provides much of the granular detail that Joe marshals in support of the owl hypothesis. He notes that he and Davis would probably disagree on the interpretation, but that her fieldwork made his analysis possible.
🕵️ The Paranormal Naturalist’s Method
Joe takes a moment to distinguish his approach from what he calls the “debunker” stripe of skepticism — investigators who jump quickly to “hoax” because they cannot conceive of a natural explanation. He draws a parallel to his earlier investigation of the Flatwoods Monster of 1952 (which he has identified as a barn owl) and the Mothman sightings (which he has linked to the barred owl): in each case, the key is not to force a superficial visual match but to compile a large number of specific corroborative details from the witness accounts themselves.
He closes with a characteristically generous note: explaining the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter as a pair of territorial owls is not an insult to the Sutton family. These were rural people, unaccustomed to owls at close range at night, in a state of genuine terror, in an era saturated with UFO stories. Their sincere experience deserved a sincere investigation — and got one, fifty years late.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955 💵 by Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher
– 📚 The Kentucky Goblins 💵 — Joe Nickell’s CSI investigation report (see Skeptical Inquirer archives)
– 📚 Tracking the Man-Beasts 💵 by Joe Nickell
– 📚 The Science of Ghosts 💵 by Joe Nickell
🔗 Related Links
– Kelly–Hopkinsville Encounter (Wikipedia)
– Great Horned Owl (Wikipedia)
– Flatwoods Monster (Wikipedia)
– Perseid Meteor Shower (Wikipedia)
– Joe Nickell (Wikipedia)
– Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI)
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
In this episode of MonsterTalk — The Science Show About Monsters, we continue our examination of the case of the Kentucky Goblins. Blake is joined by CSI investigator Joe Nickell to discuss the details of the Kelly-Hopkinsville case and what real world creature Joe thinks best accounts for the mysterious events on that Kentucky farm back in 1955.
If you missed it, read the episode notes and listen to Part 1.
Of Interest
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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