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CLOSE ENCOUNTER AT KELLY AND OTHERS OF 1955 By ISABEL DAVIS And TED BLOECHER CENTER FOR UFO STUDIES 1978 CLOSE ENCOUNTER AT KELLY AND OTHERS OF 1955 BY ISABEL DAVIS WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF BUD LEDWITH AND TED BLOECHER WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF LEONARD STRINGFIELD © CENTER FOR UFO STUDIES ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 1609 SHERMAN AVENUE, RM 207 EVANSTON, IL 60202 U.S.A. MARCH 1978 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION by Ted Bloecher i PART ONE: CLOSE ENCOUNTER AT KELLY by Isabel Davis Chapter I Background of the Inquiries 1 Chapter II What Happened at Kelly 23 Chapter III Investigating What Happened 39 Chapter IV Weighing the Evidence 64 Chapter V Blue Book Documents 95 PART TWO: OTHER ENCOUNTERS, 1955 by Ted Bloecher Introduction 123 Chapter VI The Loveland Bridge Case 126 Chapter VII The Hunnicutt Encounter at Branch Hill 138 Chapter VIII Mrs. Symmonds at Stockton 149 Chapter IX The Hairy Little Man of Edison 161 Chapter X The Grey Ghost of the Kinchafoonee 173 Chapter XI A Domestic Silly Season 181 MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS PART ONE Map of Kentucky and adjacent states......................... Map of Hopkinsville-Kelly area ............................. 7 Map of Sutton Farm, showing fields and gully .............. 9 Map of farmhouse and immediate vicinity.................... 11 Plan of farmhouse............................................. 12 Mrs. Glennie Lankford and Mary Lankford.................... 17 Elmer Sutton and Billy Ray Taylor at door of farmhouse . 26 "Little man" as described by Mrs. Lankford, Mrs. Elmer Sutton, and Mrs. J.C. Sutton............................. 44 "Little man" as described by Billy Ray Taylor............. 48 "Little man" as described by Elmer Sutton, J.C. Sutton, and O.P. Baker................................ 51 The "little men" as pictured in nearby newspapers......... 57 Slide photograph of model of "little man" .................. 58 O.P. Baker, Elmer Sutton, and J.C. Sutton in Evansville. 60 The "spaceship" as described by Billy Ray Taylor ......... 61 Diagram of screen, with detail of holes.................... 71 Mrs. Juanita McCord at the living room window............. 72 Sergeant Malcolm Pritchett at the living room window . 76 Sketch of "little man" from Blue Book file on Hopkinsville 118 PART TWO Figure Page 19 Facsimile of letter from Palmer W. Baken of the F.B.I. 136 20 Map of Symmes Township ...................................... 139 21 Creatures described by Hunnicutt as drawn by Leonard Stringfield ........................................ 142 22 Single figure sketched by Cincinnati Post artist from Mrs. Symmonds' description .................................. 151 23 Figures described by Mrs. Symmonds as drawn by Leonard Stringfield........................................... 153 24 Single figure described by Mrs. Symmonds as drawn by Leonard Stringfield........................................... 155 25 Diagram of highway showing location of small figures and c a r ........................................................ 159 26 Map of Georgia showing creature sightings in 1955......... • 168 27 Creatures reported at Riverside, Cal. sighting, as drawn by artist for FSR from witnesses' descriptions................ 28 Computer list of humanoid and creature sightings in 1955. 195 29 Code showing degree of association of Humanoid and UFO 196 INTRODUCTION At the beginning of the first contemporary wave of un­ identified flying objects (UFOs) in this country in 1947, little was said about the possible occupants of these mysterious de­ vices. The question was, "Do they exist or not?" and the con­ sensus was that if they did exist, UFOs or "flying saucers" were probably United States secret devices of some novel design. Few observers at that time claimed publicly that what they had seen were "spaceships," and the idea of extraterrestrial visita­ tion was confined mainly to the columns of journalists making light of the reports (1). This does not mean that there were no reports of occupants in 1947. Local newspapers published at least three accounts of small beings associated with "flying saucers" that year. An elderly woman reported the first incident, at Webster, Massachu­ setts on June 19. She had seen from her window a "moon-sized" object fly nearby with a "slender" figure inside dressed in what appeared to be a Navy uniform (2). On July 7, during a flurry of object sightings at Tacoma, Washington, residents of the Center and J Street neighborhood, Gene Gamachi, I.W. Martenson, and others, told of seeing a number of objects, some of which landed on nearby roofs. Witnesses saw several "little people" who disappeared upon the arrival of newsmen (3). On July 8, during a concentration of sightings all over Texas, an unidenti­ fied merchant seaman in the Acres Home suburb of Houston observed the landing of a "silver saucer." From it emerged a dimunitive pilot no more than two feet tall with a round head "the size of a basketball" who greeted the seaman, re-entered his vehicle, and took off (4) . l If these absurd-sounding stories--especially the last— were sketchily reported and written tongue-in-cheek, apparently with no expectation that they would be taken seriously, this is understandable. For almost everyone in 1947, such stories were without precedent; press and public, already confounded by the enigma of the saucers themselves, were naturally unwilling to take on the added riddle of a two-foot man with a head like a basketball. Stories like these, of course, never made the wire services and were known only in the areas served by local news­ papers, although stories about occupants of aerial objects had been told long before 1947. During the American Airship Mystery of 1897, "aeronauts" had frequently been reported in or near their vehicles. But in 1947 no one seems to have made any connection between "flying saucers" and the fifty-year-old "air­ ship" reports. (Those 1897 sightings, incidentally, are as baf­ fling today as they were when they occurred, but that is another book.) Closer to the 1947 wave of reports was the series of "ghost rocket" sightings in Scandinavia in the summer of 1946. Two striking occupant cases in that year have recently come to light. The first, near Angelholm, Sweden, occurred in May, just when the ghost rockets were beginning to be reported. In Angelholm, a man named Gosta Carlsson came upon an object on the ground in the shape of a domed disc, in a wooded section outside the town. It rested on two legs and a fin, and in and around it Carlsson said he observed as many as eleven crew members of human appearance and of both sexes, dressed in white coveralls and bubble-type helmets. As he approached the area, Carlsson was warned by the hand gesture of one crew member not to come any closer; believing he had stumbled upon some military operation, he left the scene. Returning from another direction a short time later, he observed the object ascend from the clear­ ing and rapidly disappear in the sky. Traces were reported to have been found at the site (5). l i The second report occurred three months later in the United States, during the crest of newspaper publicity about the Swedish ghost rocket reports. Toward the end of August, Margaret Sprankle, a civilian employee at Tinker Air Base in Oklahoma City, observed a large, disc-like object near her home. The disc hovered in a vertical position with its broad side toward the observer, and the lower right quadrant contained twelve to fourteen square windows through which she clearly saw a number of round-headed, bald-pated occupants. When she called out to her mother, the disc turned abruptly on its vertical axis, affording the witness an edge-on view, and then swiftly climbed out of sight toward the northwest, vanishing in seconds (6). Two years of the modern wave of domestic UFO reports went by before the wire services gave national publicity to an occupant report. On August 19, 1949, two Califor­ nia prospectors, Buck Fitzgerald and Mace Garney, said they had seen a saucer make a forced landing in Death Valley. According to Fitzgerald, "The flying disc, which was 24 feet in diameter, whizzed past us going about 300 miles per hour. It crash-landed and two little men jumped out and started running when they saw us. The men looked human but they were very small— like dwarfs. We chased them over a sand dune but lost them. I don't know where they went" (7). It was not long after the Death Valley report that the oc­ cupant question became a significant part of the flying saucer controversy. Even while the prospectors were chasing dwarfs over sand dunes, an experienced pilot and aviation writer was inter­ viewing military, commercial and private pilots all over the country. The result of these inquiries appeared in an epoch­ making article: "The Flying Saucers Are Real," by Major Donald E. Keyhoe, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.). It was published in the January 1950, issue of True magazine and was the first full-length, fully- documented presentation of the extra-terrestrial hypothesis. Its impact was enormous. Even though Major Keyhoe presented no occu- iii pant reports in his article, his contention--first, that the saucers were real and second, that they were extra-terrestrial spaceships— immediately raised the questions implicit in the idea of other-worldly visitation: who were these visitors and where did they come from? From then on the subject was squarely in the public con­ sciousness and people began asking, "But what about the occupants?" Other people began answering and unfortunately, some of those answers were to bring the whole subject into disrepute. The first book-length story on occupants, Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers (8), told a fantastic tale of small, chocolate-colored humanoids found dead in crashed saucers in the American southwest. It was so carelessly written and so poorly documented that it was thoroughly implausible. Furthermore, the originator of the tale, Silas Newton (who may have based this elaborate fabrication on the 1949 Death Valley incident), was eventually indicted and convicted in California for oil stock fraud— not the most reliable source for stories about "little men" (9).

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