Regular Episode
#138 – AMERICAN GOBLINS – PART 3
October 18, 2017

#138 – AMERICAN GOBLINS – PART 3

🎙️ Blake Smith wraps up MonsterTalk’s three-part investigation into the Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter of 1955 with a conversation that’s equal parts meta-inquiry and monster talk. Joining him are Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess, co-hosts of the popular paranormal podcast Astonishing Legends, who conducted their own three-part deep dive into the same case — and in doing so, stumbled onto a significant citation problem in a peer-reviewed psychology journal.

The episode doubles as a meditation on how bad information propagates: through Wikipedia, through academic papers that cite other papers without checking primary sources, and through the all-too-human tendency to stop asking questions once a satisfying answer presents itself.



📰 The Wikipedia Problem

The Wikipedia entry for the Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter contains what Blake calls “the offending sentence”: that the creatures “were in fact great horned owls and the eyewitnesses were probably intoxicated during the alien attack.” That sentence cites a 2014 article in Frontiers in Psychology by Rodney Schmaltz and Scott Lilienfeld — but Scott and Forrest discovered, after reading the cited primary source in full, that neither the intoxication claim nor the definitive owl identification actually appears in the report being cited (Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher’s Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955).

Blake draws a parallel to his own Wikipedia rabbit hole: a famously witty headline supposedly printed by the Chicago Daily News about the death of Richard Loeb — which he spent considerable effort tracking down on microfilm, only to confirm it never existed. Widely repeated, cited in published books, and still living on Wikipedia in softened form: a lesson in how a good story outruns the evidence for it.



🔬 The Schmaltz & Lilienfeld Paper

The trio are careful to distinguish between two separate issues. First, the Frontiers in Psychology paper itself: its actual purpose — helping college instructors use paranormal topics as vehicles for teaching critical thinking — is something all three hosts find genuinely worthwhile and largely agree with. Second, the specific example chosen to anchor that lesson: the Kelly–Hopkinsville case, presented as a solved mystery when it demonstrably is not. A known, clearly documented hoax (Blake suggests Piltdown Man or the Cardiff Giant as better candidates) would have made the paper’s point without the evidentiary baggage.

Blake notes the particular sting of the word “probably” applied to the intoxication claim: there was no evidence of heavy drinking that night, the family matriarch reportedly kept a dry household, and the responding law enforcement officers — people professionally trained to spot intoxicated witnesses — did not record that observation. Scott and Forrest point out that asserting a rural Southern family “was probably drunk” and hallucinated the whole thing carries real reputational weight for living descendants, regardless of whether the subjects are legally defamable.



🦉 The Owl Hypothesis, Revisited

Building on Joe Nickell‘s naturalistic explanation from Part 2, the conversation takes a more granular look at where the owl hypothesis fits and where it strains. Scott and Forrest raise practical objections: a family living and working rural land would be intimately familiar with local wildlife; the creatures only appeared that one night and never returned; and a great horned owl in a territorial threat display spreads its wings laterally — not the arms-raised posture described and sketched by witnesses. All three agree, however, that if a natural explanation is required, the owl is the single best fit among known animals. Occam’s razor, they acknowledge, doesn’t promise satisfaction.

The group also discusses the role of psychological priming: the witnesses arrived from Evansville, Indiana, where local papers had just reported the so-called Green Clawed Beast incident, and the broader culture of 1955 was saturated with flying saucer reports. Blake notes the sighting wasn’t continuous — encounters were separated by long, tension-building gaps — conditions well-suited to escalating fear and perceptual distortion.



🌌 Ultraterrestrials, the GUTP, and the Null-Terrestrial Hypothesis

The conversation widens into territory Blake usually sidesteps: the question of whether any investigation of the paranormal could, in principle, return a verdict of “genuinely inexplicable.” Forrest raises John Keel‘s ultraterrestrial hypothesis — the idea that anomalous phenomena originate not from outer space but from other dimensions, stepping in and out of our reality — as a kind of grand unified theory of the paranormal (their “GUTPE”). Blake coins a skeptical counterpart on the spot: the null-terrestrial hypothesis, the position that all anomalous sightings reduce, without remainder, to failures of human perception. He finds it intellectually defensible and emotionally bleak in equal measure.

The group discusses Michael Shermer‘s well-publicized personal account of a broken radio spontaneously playing music at a moment of deep emotional significance — an experience Shermer himself has written about as genuinely unexplained while declining to abandon skepticism — as an example of the space between “I don’t know what caused this” and “therefore the supernatural.”



👁️ Eyewitness Testimony and the Sincerity Question

Scott offers what becomes a recurring touchstone: the “truck story.” A friend is struck by a vehicle and misremembers its color, size, and number of wheels — but was unambiguously hit by something. The witness is wrong about the details and right about the event. Applied to Kelly–Hopkinsville: investigators on scene that night, including law enforcement, found the family genuinely terrified. Whether owls, something else mundane, or something unknown caused that terror is a separate question from whether the terror was real. Joe Nickell’s own conclusion — that the case does not appear to be a hoax — is, all three note, a significant finding in itself.



📡 Science Journalism, Provisional Truth, and the Limits of the Field

A thread running through the second half of the conversation is Blake’s frustration with how science journalism works in practice: individual studies, often preliminary and requiring replication, get flattened into declarative headlines (“chocolate makes you smarter,” “a glass of wine a day is healthy”) that erode public trust in science when the findings are later revised. The actual mechanism of science — provisional conclusions, incremental refinement, willingness to be falsified — is both its greatest strength and its least satisfying public face. Scott and Forrest’s listener complaint that the hosts sometimes say “we just don’t know” lands as a feature to all three hosts, not a bug.



📚 Further Reading

– 📚 Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955 💵 by Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher (NICAP, 1978) — the primary source cited, but not accurately summarized, in the Wikipedia article
– 📚 Monsters Among Us 💵 by Linda Godfrey — mentioned in the context of geographic overlaps between Dogman, UFO, and burial-mound sightings
– 📚 Spooky Archaeology 💵 by Jeb Card — forthcoming at time of recording; Card is credited with surfacing the Evansville Green Clawed Beast connection
– 📚 The Mothman Prophecies 💵 by John Keel — discussed in relation to the ultraterrestrial hypothesis and the character of Indrid Cold


🔗 Related Links

– Kelly–Hopkinsville Encounter (Wikipedia)
– Green Clawed Beast / Evansville River Monster
– Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis (John Keel)
– Priming (Psychology)
– Piltdown Man hoax — suggested as a better “solved case” example for critical thinking curricula
– Cardiff Giant — likewise suggested
– Skeptic Insight Blog — Blake’s accompanying essay on the Wikipedia/Schmaltz–Lilienfeld issues posts alongside this episode
– Astonishing Legends Podcast — Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess’s three-part Kelly–Hopkinsville coverage

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

Our final part of our three-part look at the Kentucky Goblins case of 1955 concludes with an interview with the hosts of Astonishing Legends, Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess. We discuss the facts of the case, possible explanations, and the problems with the Wikipedia entry and the scholarly journal article cited within it. This episode’s topic is also discussed in a blog post by Blake Smith: Astonishing Legends, Questionable Facts.

If you missed them, be sure to listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of American Goblins.

Of Interest

Music

  • Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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