*whew*
Blogspot is giving me some major formatting headaches tonight. My apologies for everyone who tried to read tonight's post only to find a black screen. I think I have things jury-rigged now...
The men
herded everyone away from the doors and took stock of the situation. With three
of them now armed, the family’s odds seemed to have improved considerably, but
what should their next move be? Lucky, Billy Ray and J. C. decided to venture outside
to reconnoiter, still unwilling to believe that all three of their shots had
missed.
“Several of the men were out front now… and they
discovered another up in the tree... and one on the ground right in front of
Lucky Sutton,” reported local radio engineer and host “Bud” Ledwith in his
personal case report. “He brought the shotgun to bear on the little fellow at
point blank range… fired… and stood in amazement as it flipped over and got up.”
Another shot at the creature in the tree had the same
astonishing effect. The little man flipped like a play target in a
carnival shooting gallery
and floated down to the ground before scurrying off
into the woods. As with each shot before, the impact sounded like a shotgun
being fired into a metal pail.
It took a moment for the men to come to the unnerving
realization that their weapons were useless against the invaders, and when they
did they retreated into the house to await the creatures’ next move. They
didn’t have to wait long. “The objects would continue to come to the window and
peer inside,” Ledwith wrote. “The Sutton family would fire through the window…
it would flip over or fall back and disappear for a few minutes. However they
kept coming back… time after time.”
It became apparent to Miss Glennie that the creatures
were averse to the light from the front and rear porch lights, and so those
lights were kept on. Although this limited the creatures’ approach to the sides
of the house and made the homestead easier to defend, the little men did not
relent.
Eventually the Suttons heard an ominous scraping on the
kitchen roof, and the men raced into the back yard to see a creature clawing
its way across the tin roofing panels. “They shot at it and knocked it from the
roof; then it ‘floated’ to the back fence—a distance of some 40-odd feet—where
it seemed to perch; they shot again, knocked it off the fence, and this time it
scurried off into the weeds in the ‘all-fours’ position.”
Strangely, although the creatures themselves never
uttered a sound, the men could hear the rustle of the underbrush as the
creatures ran away through the weeds.
The exhausted family had been
fighting off the glowing silver creatures for nearly four hours, nerves were
fraying, and the children were falling apart.
“At least once, one child
was in the front yard when a creature was seen and fired at,” reported Davis.
“(The children) did hear
the gunfire; they did hear the conversations that were going on, the
hollering,” confirmed Stith. “June was hysterical, she was crying.”
The situation was becoming untenable,
and when things at last grew quiet out in the yard, Lucky decided to make a
move. “He was needing help,” Stith said. “They were trying to figure out what
to do, and they weren’t getting anything done, so the next best thing was to
throw everybody in the trucks and head to Hopkinsville, try to get help from
the police. Why would you do that unless you were needing help? He wouldn’t
have, no.”
It was unusual, to say the least,
for two trucks to skid, one after the other, into the parking lot of the
Hopkinsville Police station after 11 p.m., and then for 11 adults and children
to pile out of the vehicles and pour into the station. The desk officer could
tell that something out of the ordinary had occurred, and when he finally made
sense of the story he was concerned enough to alert the State Police and call
his own Chief of Police Russell Greenwell at his home. “A spaceship has landed
at Kelly,” was the desk sergeant’s message.
Greenwell, who had himself seen an
unidentified object in the sky some years before, mobilized immediately; the
assumption was that the invaders were still present at the farm, so Greenwell
made sure his own responding officers were backed up by the County Sherriff’s
men and the State Police for good measure. Clearly, Greenwell was taking the
story very seriously. “These aren’t the kind of people who normally run to the
police for help,” he said of the Suttons. “When they feel themselves
threatened, what they do is reach for their guns.”
One of Greenwell’s officers
confirmed the Chief’s convictions when he reported that Billy Ray Taylor was
showing undeniable physical signs of raw terror during the ride back to the
farm. The officer, who had a medical background, observed Billy Ray’s accelerated
pulse in his neck and timed it at 140 beats per minute, twice normal. “Maybe
the boy could pretend to be frightened in some ways,” the officer reported,
“but I don’t know how he could make his heart beat twice as fast as usual.”
In all, sixteen law
enforcement officers raced to the Sutton farm, and, although the Air Force tried
to deny it, four M.P.s from nearby Fort Campbell Air Force Base responded to
the APB as well. Within a half hour the Sutton farm was awash with police
officers, all scouring the house, outbuildings and grounds for signs that the
creatures were still present.
The Suttons, for the most
part, waited in their vehicles as the police inspected the area. “Everybody was
terrified,” Stith said. “The women wouldn’t go back in the house.” A piercing
wail from the yard caused hearts to freeze, but it was only a cat. Someone had
stepped on its tail in the dark… “You never saw so many pistols un-holstered so
fast in your life,” Chief Greenwell said.
Rumors of a “Martian
invasion” at the Sutton farm had spread, meanwhile, and local reporters and
curiosity-seekers began to show up. Although no one ever saw more than two of
the creatures at the same time, the story quickly morphed into an invasion of
12 to 15 of the little men, and everyone wanted to get a look at the alien
army. Before long, Lucky was regretting his decision to go to the police. “Yeah,
there was evidence that gunfire had taken place, but little green men? They
thought it was a joke,” Stith said. “(Lucky) could hear people laughing and
joking about the situation, and that’s when he started to think, ‘Maybe I did
the wrong thing trying to go for help,’ because he didn’t get it.”
To Be Continued...
To Be Continued...
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