Jan 10 2007
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Kelly-Hopkinsville Creatures Were OWLS?!
Drawings by Kelly-Hopkinsville witnesses. Super Owls?
I don’t know what’s funnier: UFO Believers who are sure that the space brothers are here to save us, or Fundamentalist Skeptics who know with the faith of the devout that everything is explainable in terms of the dogma of 19th century science or maybe just “plain, old fashioned gumshoe work.”
In an article on the CSI(COP) website, Joe Nickell claims he has not only solved the Flatwoods Monster case of 1952, and the Mothman sightings, but also the famous Kelly-Hopkinsville event of August 21, 1955.
In a column entitled “Investigative Files,” Nickell reports on his visit to Hopkinsville for a 50th anniversary celebration. Apparently he was given a key to the city by the mayor, and paid a visit to the site of the original event. He reports that he talked with witnesses, but does not quote any of them, with exception of Lonnie Lankford, now 62, who said that his mother hid him under a bed during the events. All other quotes in the article are from available sources. Nickell dispenses the first sighting of a glowing object landing in a field nearby as a meteor. This is a convenient explanation used time and again by CSICOPers, and fails to take into account that the Air Force and other investigating agencies found no evidence of meteors, but let’s give him that one.
The standard story, quoted here from the UFO Casebook website is well-known to investigators:
Billy left the Sutton house to go for some water from the family well. There was no inside plumbing at the Sutton farm house. At the well, he saw an immense, shining object land in a small gully about a quarter of a mile away. Running back to the house, he excitedly reported his sighting to others in the house. Billy was laughed at; no one believed his “crazy” tale.
After a short period of time, the family dog began to raise a ruckus outside. Lucky and Billy grabbed their guns and headed outside, planning to shoot first, and ask questions later. Only a short distance from the front door, both men were stopped dead in their tracks by the sight of a 3-4 foot tall creature, who was walking towards them with hands up, as if to surrender. This most bizarre creature would be described as having “large eyes, a long thin mouth, large ears, thin short legs, and hands ending in claws.” Frightened by the small greenish entity, Billy Ray fired a shot with his .22, and Lucky unloaded with his shotgun. Both men later admitted that there was no way they missed the creature at close range, but the little being just did a back flip, and ran into the woods in fright.
No sooner had the two men reentered the house before the creature, or another like it, appeared at a window. They took a shot at him, leaving a blast hole through the screen. They ran back outside to see if the creature was dead, but found no trace of it. Standing at the front of the house, the men were terrified by a clawed hand reaching down from the roof in an attempt to touch them. Again, they shot, but the being simply floated to the ground, and scurried into the cover of the woods. The two men sought the protection of the house again, only to find themselves under siege from these little men. For a time, the entities seemed to tease the family, appearing from one window to another. Taking pot shots through the windows and walls, their weapons seemed totally ineffective against the invading creatures.
Drawing on his earlier investigations in West Virginia, Nickell assumes from the available literature that what the 11 witnesses saw in Kentucky was “a pair of territorial owls.” Significantly, Nickell does not recount the whole story, only the sections that support his thesis, and then even not very well. Lucky Sutton and Billy Ray Taylor, the two who shot at the figures until near dawn, reportedly emptied dozens of loads of buckshot and bullets at their targets, including the first one at very close range. The “creature” simply “did a backflip” and ran off. If these were owls, as Nickell asserts, they were impervious to flying lead, walked on the ground for extended periods and were completely fearless. Another detail reported by the Suttons, Lankfords and Taylors was a “metallic” sound as the bullets hit. When local police arrived on the site, they noted the holes in the walls and windows of the house. Apparently these people, living in a rural area, had never seen owls and panicked. Perhaps it also affected their aim.
I don’t know what visited the Sutton farm on a dark night 51 years ago, but it was probably not a pair of owls.
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January 10th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
You KNEW this would draw me out, didn’t you Greg? You KNEW the words “Joe Nickell” and “owls” would set me off. We’ll you’re right.
I often wonder if this man is mentally unstable and absolutely obsessed with owls. He goes back “into time” frequently with these “cold case” investigations of his and almost invariably comes up with some totally inane (and there is only an “s” worth of difference between that word and “insane”) “explanation” for the event…and that “explanation” will almost invariably involve owls.
Anybody got the psychiatric name for an obsession with owls? If you do, you’ve likely got a deep insight into how Joe Nickell’s mind works.
He has a very Phil Klass way of “investigating” his cases, too. This is, if the incident involves a “fact A” “fact B”,”C”, “D”, “E”, etc, and some of these facts MIGHT suggest one “explanation” (say “B”, “D”, and “F”), but such an explanation is contradicted (or refuted outright) by “A”, “C”, and “E”, then you simply JETTISON “A”, “C”, and “E” with NO mention whatsoever (or retain one and announce it was due to an “overactive imagination”). In so doing you set up a “straw man” situation you can bash merrily away at and which may well fool people unfamiliar with the actual situation you are bashing. Trouble comes when you encounter people who can QUOTE “A”, “C”, “E” and so forth and make you look like the intellectually dishonest debunker that you really are.
And as far as the owls go, I fully expect Nickell to prove, over time, that:
Thomas Mantell was killed in his F-51 in high altitude pursuit of a hyperoxygenated giant owl.
All “Thunderbird” sightings are giant owls.
A huge flock of giant owls swarmed Washington, DC, in July, 1952, caused panic in the countryside and took on USAF jet fighters in air-to-air combat.
A semi-aquatic species of giant owls causes people to see “monsters” in the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Champlain, Lake Okanagan and others, at sea off the New England coast, and in Loch Ness, Scotland.
A predatory giant owl is the culprit in the disappearances of Judge Crater, Amelia Earhart & Fred Noonan, Jimmy Hoffa, Glenn Miller, and US Navy Ft. Lauderdale Training Flight 19.
A giant owl plucked the Navy crewmen of the submarine-hunter blimp L-8 right out of the gondola over L.A. harbor in 1942.
The leaping UK whatsit known as “Springheeled Jack” was a giant owl.
and….The reason “Jack the Ripper” was never caught was because he, too, was a giant homicidal owl who flew up and away over the Whitechapel rooftops while the Metropolitan Police scrambled helplessly around in the alleyways below, this after he had slashed and mutilated his victims with his claws and razor-sharp beak. As for those letters and such to the police and press? Reporters made all that guff up.
Joe Nickell…..HE knows. Joe Nickell knows ALL. And its ALL about OWLS!
January 10th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Heh, nice one Bill – you beat me to mentioning Nickell’s owl fixation. Except you were much funnier and eloquent than I would have been. Thanks!
January 10th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Ah no Bill, Nickell did not take on the Springheel Jack enigma, that was Massimo Polodoro, who said that the phenomenon (including the scratches on victims and all the witness testimony) was due to mass delusion. He says MOST of the wounds COULD have been self-inflicted by impressionable people (emphasis added.) Easy enough.
These people are an example of what is holding the human race back!
January 11th, 2007 at 5:18 am
We have so many Loony Tunes walking the streets without benefit of straight jackets that the prospects for the race are truly frightening.
January 11th, 2007 at 8:19 am
Bill,
I have decided to retire from researching anomalies – I now see the light: everything is owls! How could I have missed this? How, how how? What is the point of going on if it’s all just big birds? Woe is me!
Or maybe I’ll just continue in research and laugh…
January 11th, 2007 at 8:45 am
I think the funniest thing about Joe Nickell and his owl explanations are that they are supposedly known owls that he is using in his explanations for all:
(1) Mothman sightings;
(2) Flatwoods Monster sightings;
and now
(3) Kelly creatures sightings.
Known owls, not giant owls, not cryptid owls, but known species of owls.
My Fortean friend and research associate Mark A. Hall has down-to-earth, cryptozoologically-based theories (see his book Thunderbirds) on why, at least, the Mothman reports (which go back over a hundred years) are, indeed, cryptid giant owls.
But with Nickell coming up with a new skeptical article every two years or so on the latest owl explanation, Nickell has confused his fantasies of “owls” with reality. What Nickell is really talking about and trying to make us believe is that horned owls and barn owls grow to be 5 or 6 feet tall or backwoods people “see” them that way, when indeed both situations are incorrect.
Hall’s giant owl, however, is a different cup of tea.
Cheers,
Loren
January 11th, 2007 at 9:12 am
Kudos to the man for thinking up such a brilliant idea, however, I don’t think the next time I see some mothman- I’ll immediatly think it’s a super owl.
January 11th, 2007 at 10:12 am
When my farmer friend saw a huge owl, he mistook it for, you guessed, a huge owl…
…An ornithologist friend told him an Eagle owl was in the area, and he said he hadn’t known owls grew quite that big.
January 11th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
What Loren Coleman says about what Nickell tries to “push” on us all is exactly right. He tries to do a “fast shuffle” on you and, in effect, CON you into believing these creatures are bigger than they really are and behave in ways that they really don’t.
It is also a kind of closed-minded, presumptive arrogance and bias on the part of the man to imply (with great frequency) that people who live in the country, in small-town rural or semi-rural areas, are going to be unsophisticated enough to just go nutso when some indigenous creature they have grown up with all their lives makes a noise in the night.
Well maybe these folks don’t sit around the dinner table and talk Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, or Jean Paul Sartre over their chicken and dumplings at night, but they sure can tell you when you’re hearing a whippoorwill or bob-white quail out in the darkness. Or that the horrific, “monster-like” shriek you’re hearing off in the woods is a pileated woodpecker and not the Wendigo.
They know owls and their doings, too, and will tell you quickly…if you are a “city slicker” and just saw or heard something “bizarre” out there in the deepening twilight…”Pshaw! That’s nothing but an old hoot owl or barn owl! Don’t give it another thought!”.
Fact is, Nickell tries to create a credulous “rube” image of country folk (one based more on Li’l Abner or the Clampetts of Beverly Hills than on real rural Americans) and then tries to incorporate this dishonest stereotype into his “wild imagination” scenarios.
He’s done it with the Flatwoods incident, he’s “worked’ it with Mothman, and he’s trotting the same dog and pony show out yet again for Kelly-Hopkinsville.
How credulous are country folk, for real? Well, I’m one. I live in small-town, semi-rural USA, and I get more of a laugh over city-breds who come TO the country than I do vice versa. Take the time I almost choked on a cup of Waffle House coffee when I heard a city-raised college student in the booth behind me telling his schoolmates…with wide-eyed, breathless earnestness…that he had seen a “Giant Prairie Dog” here on a S.Carolina back road “just this afternoon”…..and I knew full well he was describing a groundhog.
So, Joe, baby, save your owl stories and “dumb locals” stories for Schermer and the rest of the CSI ex-COPS. It’s “No Sale” here.
January 11th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Somebody help me out here. Was there not an old comedy short from the 1930s or 40s…either an “Our Gang”/”Little Rascals” featurette or else a “Three Stooges” episode…that took place in a “haunted house” and there was a jack-o-lantern head rigged up to a sheet as a halloween decoration. Some wind blew the windows open and a owl came in and climbed into the jack-o-lantern head. Then the owl started flying the head around with the sheet trailing out behind it and scaring the bejeebies out of everyone in the place.
Obviously a young, impressionable Joe Nickell saw this, was both terrified and traumatized by it, became a certifiable, neurotically-fixated “owl-a-phobic”, and began to imagine that every frightening thing in life was caused by owls.
This is obviously why, to this day, the man CANNOT cross the threshold of a HOOTERS for ANY reason!
Would I lie to you?
January 14th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Synchronicity; I’ve been working on an article about this very topic for UFO magazine for the past month, and here you are! Yes, Nickell is obsessed with owls; we are to believe that owls are devious creatures indeed, with an ornithological agenda of driving humans mad.
Oy.
Not only is Nickell silly, but snide. Stupid rural folk, can’t tell wildlife from a UFO.
Nickell is also curiously dismissive of the idea the Flatwoods Monster could have been some sort of government project: classified craft, etc. Seems more likely than damn owls!
January 15th, 2007 at 12:11 am
Darn it! I made a mistake! The owl did NOT get into a jack-o-lantern head, I suddenly remember! It somehow got into a SKULL! It was flying a skull around in this stupid movie I referenced. No matter. Still likely warped Nickell….who IS….VERY…warped.
January 15th, 2007 at 12:42 am
I am re-reading The New Inquisition, the first R. A. Wilson book I encountered. Here is an explanation for Nickell and his ilk (and their opposites) in a large nutshell:
[Quoting from another book first]: We, as a species, exist in a world in which exist a myriad of data points. Upon these matricies of points we superimpose a structure and the world makes sense to us. The pattern of the structure originates within our biological and sociological properties.
To the extent that we remain conscious of this process of imposing structure (programming our emic reality) we will behave liberally and will continue learning throughout life. To the extent that we become unconscious of this process, we will behave Fundamentalistically or Idolatrously and will never again learn anything after the hour at which we (usually unconsciously) elevate a generalization to a dogma and stop thinking. (emphasis in original.)
This is one idea that I try to keep in mind, even though it’s difficult sometimes to get outside my own thinking and see where this concept is affecting my own perceptions!
January 16th, 2007 at 7:11 am
I have cross-linked to this blog above, via a new posting over at Cryptomundo:
Giant Owls, Mystery Millionaires & the CIA
I mention that owls are all over the news in three countries. Is it true a millionaire is ready to give you a million dollars for a giant owl? Is there twilight language being broadcast in these news items?
And finally, with a wink, I ask: Is Joe Nickell a spy?
Loren Coleman
January 16, 2007
January 16th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Hey Loren,
What does this ubiquitous unnamed millionaire want with OWLS? As you sort of suggest, perhaps there is another agenda here. Also, this reminds me of the line in Twin Peaks: “The Owls Are Not What They Seem.”
If Nickell is a spy, or on the payroll for some reason, he’s a bit funnier but not as tenacious as Phil Klass was, who was accused of working for “the government.” Owls have apparently replaced ball lightning as the go-to explanation of choice for CSICOP.
January 17th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
hi Greg
I remember hearing rumors about another case, this one from the 19th century, where a man reported his house being surrounded by similar-looking creatures, this time in a “fairy/Little People” context of a UFO one. Does anyone know anything more or is this just another unsubstantiated rumor?
January 19th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
If I am remembering correctly doesn’t whitley strieber make reference to an owl in communion. Could this be where Nickell got the idea?
January 20th, 2007 at 2:22 am
Brian,
I have never heard of this case, but there was a hoaxed one from the late 19th century (written in the late 1980s I think) called “An Account Of A Meeting With Denizens Of Another World.” Maybe you could give us a few more clues?
January 20th, 2007 at 2:24 am
seeinisbeeleevin,
Yes, Strieber did mention owls as a possible screen memory for encounters. I always suspected that this was where David Lynch picked up on it for “Twin Peaks.”
January 20th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Greg,
Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything more about it, I just have a vague memory of hearing about it a while ago as a third-hand account, so it was most likely bogus.
Oh, btw, interesting choice of using a picture of Aleister Crowley’s Lam in your banner…
Brian
January 21st, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Hey Brian,
Glad you’re enjoying the site. I didn’t choose the Lam picture, I just sent in a load of images and the web designer put it in. I was pleasantly surprised, although I’m still waiting for the banner to be fixed so that it goes all the way across the page like Nick’s.
January 24th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Greg,
ah ok. Though, I have always thought it was interesting that Lam and the “Greys” looked so similar to one another…
January 25th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Brian,
That’s why I sent the picture in. I may write an entry about it at some point.