P.S. Hopkinsville

P.S. Hopkinsville


After finishing my earlier posting (see here), about Hopkinsville and Budd Hopkins having temporal links for August 21st, a postscript presented itself about other people links and "coincidences," regarding that situation.

"Hopkinsville hobgoblin" attacks a member of the Sutton family, 1955.

Budd Hopkins during his early lectures, as in this one from 1967, began to develop the concept of "missing time" and "alien abductions" due to the "intruders."

"Hopkinsville," as the tagging label grew to be known, is all about the Kelly-Hopkinsville "hobgoblins," reported in 1955.

Two of the most mentioned investigators linked to that incident are (1) J. Allen Hynek (May 1, 1910 - April 27, 1986), ufologist who developed the close encounter scale and consulted on the making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (released on November 16, 1977), and (2) Isabel Davis, ufologist who authored Close Encounters of Kelly and Others of 1955 (1978).

Davis was from New York City, and investigated the Kelly-Hopkinsville event a year after it happened. Hynek, living in the Chicago area, examined the details of the case by talking to Davis and one other investigator.  Who was that person and how did Hynek and Davis learn the most about the Kelly incident? They received their most credible firsthand data from an individual they would call a friend years later: Andrew "Bud" Ledwith, an announcer-engineer at a Hopkinsville radio station.

Yes, another Bud.

Bud Ledwith was there first. On August 22, 1955, it was Andrew "Bud" Ledwith of WHOP radio who interviewed the seven adult witnesses in two different groups. He judged their accounts as consistent, especially in their descriptions of the strange glowing beings. It is Bud Ledwith's drawings that are most often reworked and used when talking about the Kelly creatures.

Bud Ledwith's sketches were made under the instructions of the eyewitnesses.

Now here is the strange part. Years later, in 1977, I met Bud Ledwith, face-to-face. He was working as the host of a small Boston-area radio station talk show. He invited me to come into his studio so he could interview me about the April 21-22, 1977, sightings of the Dover Demon. Only after I was there, after we began to talk, did I discover that he was the same Bud Ledwith who was in Hopkinsville in 1955.

What a strange coincidence, I thought. The Dover Demon was so very bizarre in description, I had already researched seemingly similar isolated historical cases of small creatures. Naturally, I had compared the Dover Demon with the Kelly hobgoblins. And then I find I stumble into the primary investigator in that case? It all seemed rather unbelievable.

Walt Webb, then the Assistant Director of the Hayden Planetarium at Boston's Science Museum, would write, in his special report, about this overlap that all of us were discussing back then: "Loren was the first to note some resemblance between the Dover entity and the famous Kelly, Kentucky, 'little men' incident of 1955," (see page 55, in Mysterious America).

So, there I found myself, sitting with Bud Ledwith, 22 years after he interviewed the Kentucky creature witnesses.  I was talking about the bright orange Dover Demon, and then we discussed the silvery Kelly creatures. It all seemed a little weird at the time, and still does today.

To think now of the links between Budd Hopkins/Hopkinsville, and Bud Ledwith/Hopkinsville, in the context of Bud, me, the Dover Demon, and Budd, is beyond strange.

I met Bud Ledwith in April 1977, because of the Dover Demon, and met Budd Hopkins for the first time at the Mass UFO Show/Mass Monster Mash in 2008. I had spoken at the previous Mass Monster Mash, presenting a 30th Year Anniversary Dover Demon PowerPoint presentation in 2007.


Digging a bit, the links from Isabel Davis, through Bud Ledwith and Hopkinsville, to Budd Hopkins are rather direct, historically. It all has ties to the old CSI.

The Civilian Saucer Intelligence (CSI) was an independent unidentified flying object research group founded in New York City in 1954. It was initially called Civilian Saucer Intelligence New York, but the "New York" was quickly dropped from their name.

Jerome Clark writes, "Though its membership was small, what the organization lacked in quantity it made up in quality of its personnel," (Clark, Jerome, The UFO Encyclopedia: 2nd Edition; Volume 1, A-K; Omnigraphics, Inc, 1998, page 188). CSI's core personnel were Ted Bloecher, Isabel Davis, and Alexander Mebane.

Though the group never formally disbanded, CSI was defunct by 1959. However, Davis and Bloecher were active in UFO research into the 1980s, Davis as a NICAP associate. Notably, Bloecher investigated an early 1970s UFO sighting made by young New York City painter, Budd Hopkins; in later years, Hopkins would become a key figure in the alien abduction scene.

I truly am not sure what any of it means, but it is worth a little Fortean pondering.

Kelly-Hopkinsville hobgoblin (1955)

Dover Demon (April 1977)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (November 1977)

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Gremlins (1984); Gremlins 2 (1990)

Hopkinsville + Budd Hopkins / August 21st

Peter Park sends along the following:

One curious twilight-language coincidence I myself have long noticed but which I've never to my recollection seen in accounts of the 1955 Sutton farmhouse alien siege is the fact that Hopkinsville, KY, was the birthplace and home town of famous psychic and "sleeping prophet" Edgar Cayce. I've long been a little surprised that Christian fundamentalists who see anything "occult," "New Age," or "psychic" as "of the Devil" haven't picked up on the Sutton case, with its decidedly demonic-looking "goblins," as just some of Edgar Cayce's buddies paying a rerturn visit to his home town!

Several twilight insights can be said about this.

First off, in January 2008, Mac Tonnies (pictured above) looked at the Hopkinsville + hobgoblin 1955 invasion + Edgar Cayce "name game" link, here. 

(Mac Tonnies was found dead on October 22, 2009, the same day that American comedian and television personality Soupy Sales died. October 22, 362 is remembered for a mysterious fire that destroyed the Temple of Apollo at Daphne outside Antioch.)

One of the 1955 creatures attacks. Illustration from Mysterious America.

The time period of the Kentucky sightings occurred between 8:00 p.m. and 4:45 a.m Central Time. This "attack" occurred on, please note this date, August 21, 1955, through the morning of August 22nd. Tonnies also mentioned Budd Hopkins in conjunction with the Hopkinsville event.  The name game is a natural with Hopkinsville and Budd's last name.

Tonnies wrote at his blog: "Skeptics will point out that 'Hopkins' is hardly an unusual name. But there are enough cases of synchronicity within UFO research alone to justify a closer, more rigorous analysis. Perhaps Fortean events unfold in a barely glimpsed 'Matrix,' their manifestations only partially perceptible to baseline human consciousness."

In my book Mysterious America: The Ultimate Guide to the Nation's Weirdest Wonders, Strangest Spots, and Creepiest Creatures, I dealt with the 1955 events, the name game (like Lafayette = “the little fairy” or “the little enchantment”), the devil meaning behind "hob" and "hobgoblins," and my further interest in links to dates. 

William Mott, rephrasing and extending my notes, shared the following at Mac's blog, 

"Hob" is an ancient appellation for a demon, goblin, or devil. The stretch to "Hobkin" or "Hopkin," i.e., "goblinkind" or "devilkind," is another connection in all this. Hobyahs, hobgoblins, etc. bear this out.

We have here a Fortean case of names and dates colliding across time and space.

Budd Hopkins died on, get this, August 21, 2011, at 1:35 p.m. ET.

What gives with August 21st? Hopkinsville hobgoblins in 1955 and Budd Hopkins' death in 2011.

Dipping into the events of August 21st, I find these quick examples:  In 1945, on August 21st, physicist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. is fatally irradiated in a criticality incident during an experiment with the Demon core at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, near the 33 degree north latitude. In 1968, Soviet Union-dominated Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia. In 1971, Black Panther George Jackson was killed (some say "assassinated") in a shootout with police at the Marin County Courthouse, the last commissioned building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1983, Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr. is assassinated at the Manila International Airport. 

For more on Tonnies's ideas, see his book, The Cryptoterrestrials: A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and Aliens Among Us (NY: Anomalist Books, 2010), which was published soon after his death.

I have to point out that the "Hopkinsville invasion" actually took place in Kelly, Kentucky, located 8 miles north of Hopkinsville, and Cayce was born 10 miles away, in Beverly, south of Hopkinsville, straight down Lafayette Road.  

Nevertheless, Cayce is most often said to have been born in "Hopkinsville," and the "little silver hobgoblins" were remembered as having attacked in "Hopkinsville," because of the 1955 newspaper and Air Force accounts associating that town with those events.

Meanwhile, Happy Winter Solstice everyone. In Hopkinsville, Kentucky, this year, that's December 21st. In 2011, the December solstice takes place on Wednesday, December 21 at 11:30 p.m. CST (Thursday, December 22 at 5:30 UTC).