Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter

You have a very small group of people that are really pressing some of these ideas that, look...

Like I said, I'm not saying this stuff is impossible to happen, okay? But I am saying if you go back through the entirety of the UFO mythology, per se the X-Files level of the mythological space of each individual case that's, you know, the Hopkinsville Goblins, for instance, and go to each of these cases, I have a hard time believing all that's real.

And yet we have a very small group of people in the modern space that are regurgitating these ideas.

We've heard it all.

I need to be able to travel to Kentucky, to Hopkinsville to cover that whole aspect of the story because the people listening don't know.

Night Skies was a rural alien horror movie that Steven Spielberg developed in the late 70s, early 80s, and it is loosely based on a real quote-unquote incident that took place in Kelly Hopkinsville.

So yeah, I mean just that chapter alone was kind of a real big challenge because I'm a movie journalist and that chapter has nothing to do with movies at all.

So it was a little out of my wheelhouse and that made it fun.

that, that, that ending, you know, that, that sort of

false ending that you get the false sense of, uh, uh, a day, a day new month when Carol Ann is rescued is really cool, uh, And I do think there are also some elements of that from Night Skies, which in and of itself was based on a – I'm using air quotes here – real alien encounter from 1955 called the Kelly Hopkinsville encounter.

And that had a similar – uh, rhythm to it in the sense that like, you know, this family was bombarded by these mischievous aliens, you know, um, in, in, in the real life encounter, they just stayed outside the farm and we're, you know, we're, you know, we're sort of messing with them and in the night sky script, they actually go into the house and start fucking with the family.

But like, I think, um, but yeah, in both night skies and in Kelly Hopkinsville, you know, the, the encounter with, The battle with the aliens sort of comes to an end and then the family flees.

They go to the police station.

The police come.

The police leave.

Everybody settles down to go to sleep and then the aliens come back.

Like, here's a chapter about close encounters.

Here's a chapter about Kelly Hopkinsville, you know, and then, you know, but my God, it accumulates and it builds, you know, and it is one story being told sort of, you know, in a mixed up zombie kind of way.

Really, it is a strange story.

It's almost like a palimpsest or something where it's like, okay, we start with this, but then we overwrite it with this other thing.

And yeah, what Cobb did was he originated kind of the story, you know, alongside Spielberg and Sayles.

He originated the story and guided the direction of it.

I think he came up with the adding the cattle mutilation aspect and sort of taking it in a different direction from Kelly Hopkinsville.

After the family of Kelly Hopkinsville sort of threatened to sue, you know, like, I mean, yeah, I think he was responsible for, you know, conceiving of a lot of those things.

You've got the Brown Mountain Lights.

In Kentucky, you've got the Hopkinsville Goblins.

And these are just off the top of my head.

There's so many more.

Yeah, and they inspired the creatures in the movie Gremlins.

Even Pokemon designs like Sableye are based on the Hopkinsville Goblins.

The town of Kelly even hosts an annual Little Green Men Days festival now.

But when you extract the core insight from this stack of sources, the real takeaway isn't about pop culture at all.

She said, yes.

And I wrote this huge sugar paper project about the Hopkinsville Goblin encounter and Betty and Barney Hill.

I was obsessed by that.

I'd seen Close Encounters as a kid and I liked all that ghosty stuff on television.

the Hopkinsville.

Yeah, Kelly Hopkinsville,

where all the tenants shot the aliens.

There was a close encounter nearby.

I don't know.

There's, of course, also the Kelly Hopkinsville Goblins.

That's from Kentucky.

I've heard about this one from relatives that I know that are from Kentucky, but I have also decided to look more into it myself.

I'm trying to explain it away here.

Because obviously the realist in me says...

There ain't such thing as a fucking Kelly Hopkinsville goblin.

They're not goblins running around people's farms trying to steal their shit.