A family friend named Billy Ray Taylor claimed to see a spacecraft land behind some trees near the house after which the people in the building, including Glennie’s three adult sons and their wives, began seeing dark, short, non-human figures with what were described as large eyes, claw-like hands, and other possible appendages on their heads, floating outside the house and popping up at the windows. The creatures, allegedly as many as 12 or 15 of them, were spotted coming out of the woods from the direction in which Taylor had seen the alleged flying saucer land.
According to accounts of the incident, the men in the house, including Taylor and Lankford’s son Elmer “Lucky” Sutton, reportedly grabbed guns and started shooting at the invaders through the windows. According to contemporary reports, when police arrived later to investigate, they observed a number of windows were shattered and there were loads of spent ammunition around the property. No evidence of the creatures was found, although there was reportedly a green glow emanating from the trees nearby. It had disappeared the next day and was widely assumed to be “foxfire,” a bioluminescent fungus that grows on wood.
Press coverage at the time was sensational, especially when word got around that the U.S. Air Force had sent officers to investigate the incident. The officers who did arrive on the scene were actually from a local Army base and were summoned to assist by the local police. Over the years, other Ufologists and skeptics have done further research and determined that the Lankford-Sutton clan (who claimed that the creatures returned at 3:30 a.m. that morning, prompting them to pack up and flee) only fired their guns perhaps four times, with a single bullet hole found in one screen.
It was later ascertained that Taylor might have merely seen a shooting star, not a spaceship, and it was theorized that the Lankford-Sutton men were actually firing at a pair of belligerent birds known as great horned owls, which would correspond in some aspects with the description of the alleged aliens as floating creatures with big eyes ranging from two to four feet tall. The Air Force eventually deemed the incident a hoax in its Project Blue Book files, but it nevertheless persists as a major event in the history of close encounters and UFO studies. And it certainly lit a creative fire in the mind of Steven Spielberg.
How the Kelly-Hopkinsville Incident Led to Night Skies
Spielberg heard the story of the Kentucky encounter from famed Ufologist J. Allen Hynek and later pitched a version of it to Columbia Pictures when the studio requested that he make a sequel to Close Encounters. Spielberg wasn’t interested in a direct sequel but thought the idea of doing a dark version of the Close Encounters story (with aliens that were sinister and not just mischievous, like the ones in that film) was appealing.
The proposed film was originally titled Watch the Skies, and Spielberg wasn’t sure if he wanted to direct or just produce it. One director he had in mind was Tobe Hooper, the horror filmmaker behind The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Eaten Alive. According to David Hughes’ book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, Spielberg’s original idea centered on a farmhouse under attack by 11 aliens who initially try to communicate with the animals and livestock around the property. They eventually dissect the animals (a nod to the popular “cattle mutilation” theories involving UFOs) and turn their attention toward the humans trapped in the house.
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