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The Atlas Obscura Podcast

Gabbing Goblins with Colin Dickey

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.61.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2024

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Author Colin Dickey tells us the story of a Kentucky family who, in 1955, claimed to be in a wild gunfight with unidentified creatures who may or may not have been aliens. And we learn how this event had a mysterious, surprising, and shockingly long legacy that eventually inspired one of Hollywood's greatest movie makers to create multiple films about aliens and monsters and family. MORE: Check out Colin’s column on Atlas Obscura, our check out his website here: https://colindickey.com/about/

Transcript

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0:00.0

Tell me what happened on August 22nd, 1955 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

0:13.0

Like 10 or 11 o'clock at night at the local police station,

0:16.0

these two cars full of people,

0:18.0

several adults and a bunch of kids,

0:20.0

come screaming into this police station parking lot and they pile out of the cars and they're like we need help we've been fighting them all night long.

0:30.0

They're all kind of semi-hysteric it. It takes a little while to get this story out, but basically this family who had this farm out in Hopkinsville, had some visitors over, and one of them had gone out to get some water from a well around dusk and he goes out and he

0:46.6

sees this spaceship sort of fly overhead and land in a valley nearby, which he thinks is kind of odd.

0:54.8

And then before he knows it, there's this figure walking towards him,

0:57.5

this kind of two and a half, three feet high, kind of waddling creature with like glowing red eyes that is enough to freak him out

1:06.6

so he runs back inside him and another one of the guys armed themselves with a

1:11.0

pistol on a shotgun and one of these creatures then pops its head in one of the windows.

1:16.6

They shoot out the window trying to shoot at this thing, don't hit it, or well they

1:21.3

don't know if first they're like well we should go outside and see if we hit it.

1:23.3

So as they, as they're walking outside, one of them feels this sort of scaly,

1:30.2

creepy hand grab his hair from the porch ceiling above. They freak out, they run back inside

1:35.2

and they sort of barricade themselves into this house as though they're under siege by these creatures, these like short, you know, glowing-eyed monsters that they sort of defend themselves against for the next couple hours before they finally decide they could take a break for it and they run to the cops.

1:57.0

cops, cops, sheriffs all come you know, come out at, you know, around midnight to this house.

2:06.6

They cannot find any evidence of these creatures, nor can they find any evidence of a, of the supposed shootout that's been happening.

2:14.6

There's basically, other than the one window that's been destroyed, there's no evidence of any kind of

2:20.0

battle.

2:21.0

But that, so that's the story.

2:26.0

Yeah.

...

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