In August of 1955, my father and grandmother and some aunts and uncles had a great adventure.

One night in the summer of 1955.

This historian was approaching his eighth birthday and accordingly has a good memory of what happened that summer.

It was a typical time of growing up in Hop Town in the 1950s.

Typically hot in August.

And so it was on that night, as I recall it, of about August 21st, 1955, that all hell broke loose in Hopkinsville.

It's a fantastic little story.

It has lasted all these years.

I heard it from the main source, and that was my father, who in the story is lucky.

Certain are Elmer Sutton.

Kelly in 1955.

It was very little different from today.

It had a grocery store then and a restaurant, a service station, a couple of churches, and a number of private residences.

You see the little community of Kelly had grown up on the Chicago to Jacksonville line of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, or, as the hobos called it, the long and the nasty.

My dad and his wife Vera, had come in.

They had worked with the carnival for years and Billy Ray, which was my dad's friend at the time, and his wife, June, they were all together.

They decided to come in for the weekend.

He wanted to come home, see his mom and his brothers and catch up and to see how things were going.

And the night this occurred, they were all in the house and there was 11 of them in the house.

As the light began to fade.

Billy Ray stepped outside to draw water from the well.

He saw something shaped like a saucer streaked through the sky, trailing a rainbow of color behind it.

It settled down in the woods behind the house.

When Lucky Sutton came out to check on his friend, seemingly outrageous claim.

The two men saw something emerge from the woods.

Coming toward them was a glowing three foot tall silver beam.

Its arms were raised over its head and it was floating, unnerved and frightened for their families.

The two men ran indoors at first.

Their families wouldn't believe them until Lucky's mother, Glenny, saw it at the back door of the house.

Well, that was it.

It was on.

And so they started shooting.

And they they had a battle.

From the time it started till about 11, 1130 that night, until they finally got a clearing where they could run to Hopkinsville and get help.

They had no phones, so that was only thing they knew to do.

The men claimed that the creatures were protected from the bullets by some sort of armor.

By the time the night was over, you had police officers, you had reporters, you had people from Fort Campbell all out there traipsing around the land, trying to figure out, you know, what happened that night.

They couldn't find anything.

The only thing I could find was shotgun shells, of course, houses, screens and the windows would work shot off and but the bodies.

After the police left, the occupants of the Sutton home were to be terrorized again by three silvery beings until dawn.

And then a new invasion of Kelly took place.

By 730 the next morning.

Everybody in this community knew that a spaceship from Mars had landed in the outskirts of downtown Metropolitan, telling.

They were coming from everywhere.

Magazines were coming out that night.

It had been can take anywhere it came out.

They sent a reporter out then with cameras and everything.

People were camping out in their yard, waiting for him to come back.

People were walking through their house and taking things as souvenirs.

And it got really, really bad.

But over the decades, public sentiment began to change, and the Christian Catholic community took pride in the story.

There's an exhibit at the Penny Riley Museum in Hopkinsville, and the town draws thousands of visitors every year to celebrate the story of the Kelly Green Men.

My grandmother was a churchgoing woman that read her Bible, that prayed that night.

Sure, the kids went to church.

And her credibility, along with all of this, was enough to make people believe.

Our police chief at the time was Russell Greenwell, a highly respected individual, and his widow, Rachel, now deceased, told me this incident that in the years of interviews that Chief Greenwell had on the subject of the little green men that the chief would say, I don't know.

I don't know whether there's anything to it or not, but I know this every time I interviewed the grandmother who was a witness.

As the interview deepened, there would be a look of stark, horrendous fear come across her eyes that he said he could not explain if, in the mind of that old lady, she saw something in the way of these little characters that she saw.

Something that happened that night, and that I just don't think it can happen to one little family out in the country.

It can happen to anybody.

There is possibly things out here that we don't know that we can't explain.

Might be, you know.