The Kelly-Hopkinsville case is a classic of UFO literature that has puzzled both believers and debunkers alike. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the leading UFO researcher of the early days of ufology, said the Kelly-Hopkinsville case seemed "preposterous" and offensive to "common sense". Despite this, the case as a whole is interesting and many investigators consider it a solid example of a close encounter of the third kind.
Close Encounter At Kelly And Others Of 1955
Subsequent press coverage gleefully reported there were 12 to 15 "creatures" involved, described as "little men."[3] Ufologists Bud Ledwith and Isabel Davis interviewed the witnesses and were among the first to cash in with a book about the incident, Close encounter at Kelly and others of 1955. Unburdened of such concepts as Occam's Razor, details like a UFO landing and creatures made of shiny silver metal were swiftly added to the story by other ufologists.[1]
What was Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter?
It was August 21, 1955, when a young man in his early 20s named Elmer "Lucky" Sutton along with his wife, brother, sister-in-law, and some friends visited his mother Glennie Lankford and three younger half-siblings at their family farmhouse - eight miles north of Hopkinsville in Kentucky. As reported by Country Living, they all enjoyed a fun-filled day and after having a hearty supper, the group planned to play a card game when Billy Ray -- a friend of Lucky -- said something that left everyone astonished. Ray claimed that while coming back towards the house after a trip to the well to refill his water glass, he saw a round, metallic object, with rainbow-colored streaks trailing behind it, moving through the sky above the farm. But no one believed him. However, sometime later, something happened that halted their card game - a glowing object, approaching from the woods behind the house. The object came closer to them and the two men found a short, human-like creature, with large eyes, two legs that seemed to float rather than walk and arms raised as if in surrender. The sighting left the men scared and they ran inside the house.
My impression of this book is quite positive; and yet I have some reservations. First, the "shake-ups" of ideas that it achieves are usually only achieved by adhering more or less closely to an already established pole of a dichotomy or dialectic. It is a safe book, where the tendency is to everywhere advocate a middle approach. For Victoria Kahn, it is prudence, which is between theoria and techne (152). Garver says something similar: prudence is between philosophy and rhetoric (184). Struever wants neither a "full Parnassian retreat to Culture Criticism, nor...a conservative fixation on an authorizing past" (228). Olmsted negotiates between meaning that is for some univocal, for others undecidable (235). Second, it talks about the other, but, as Eve Sedgwick might say, it does not sound as if it really has the political projects of any real "others" in mind (See Sedgwick 23). [1] Richard Palmer's essay on "What Hermeneutics Can Offer Rhetoric" lists the knowledge of the "dark thou" as an important contribution to our own horizons; the introduction, as I have said, introduces Levinas's ethical vision, which urges us to listen to the "saying of the face"; the Azande come up a couple of times. But look at the names of the contributors: they do not seem "other" to me. Third, nobody in this collection calls attention to the difficulty of acknowledging anti-foundationalism in rhetorical situations. Rhetorical theory might be comfortable with it, but should we try to say, in Congress, "No, Mr. Speaker, I was not saying that it is eternally true, I was saying only that, given our historical situatedness..."? You get the idea. Finally, the writing, though usually good, is not always. Garver's very fine essay has a couple of easy-to-identify ambiguous sentences; Kahn's essay is too full of untranslated Latin. Donald Marshall's essay boiled down to alternately labeling elements in Augustine's texts as either "rhetoric" or "hermeneutic."
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