IT WAS A METEOR AND TWO OWLS!

by Anna Karyl

I was recently dragged out of a sickbed and asked to respond to an article by former private detective and professional skeptic, Joe Nickell. In the November-December 2006 issue of The Skeptical Inquirer, Mr. Nickell wrote about The Kelly Incident of 1955 in Kentucky where local farm residents claimed they were attacked by bizarre-looking aliens. (http://www.csicop.org/si/2006-06/i-files.html)

This historical event was also the subject of my novel, The Kelly Incident (Gateway Publishers, 2004).

I don’t wish to get into a pissing contest with Mr. Nickell. I already have enough trouble with my kidneys. But I’ll be glad to respond to his comments….

Summer before last, Mr. Nickel attended the fiftieth anniversary of the Kelly, Kentucky event where he looked into the details surrounding this very strange happening.

As reported, the facts are these: one August night in 1955, eleven people in Kelly, Kentucky experienced something that scared them so badly that, even after a three-hour gun battle with it, they drove in two cars to nearby Hopkinsville to get help. The sheriff said the witnesses were not drunk but were clearly terrified. Authorities at every level of government -- including the military -- went to the farm to gather information and try to explain what happened. They couldn’t.

Mr. Nickell said that he spoke with the state trooper called to the scene in 1955, as well as the descendants of the eyewitnesses. He visited the site and said he read all data and materials on the event. After citing himself as an expert in two other famous (but otherwise unexplained) UFO cases, Mr. Nickell concluded that “the famous 1955 Kelly incident is easily explained by a meteor and a pair of territorial owls.”

“What a hoot!” he writes.

A hoot, indeed. Personally, I found Mr. Nickell’s conclusions quite entertaining. But of course I can’t agree with them.

Here’s why: they assume everything and explain nothing. All of his might-have-been’s and could-be’s are convenient and reassuring in a limited sort of way (to skeptics anyway), but they don’t address the facts.

This is an often-used ploy to avoid dealing with phenomena. Make a false assumption and then treat it as a logical conclusion. It could be owls that the witnesses saw in 1955, skeptics surmise, therefore it must be owls that they saw. Flawed logic.

Even the U.S. Air Force, who claims to have debunked more than 90 percent of the thousands of sightings, might have used the owl explanation if they thought it would fly. But they were also forced to conclude that the case remains “unidentified.”

Yet UFO/owl expert Joe Nickell wants us to believe that the culprits must have been owls protecting their nests.

In August?

Don’t birds nest in the spring? And wouldn’t you think that country folk (who can usually recognize an owl when they see one) would notice noisy owls nesting out of season on the roof of their farmhouse? And how many owls do you know that can stand up to a barrage of shotgun blasts and keep coming back for more?

I think Mr. Nickell’s article should carry the disclaimer, “For Entertainment Purposes Only.” It is clearly not a serious investigation of the facts.

Whatever it was that invaded the Sutton farm that fateful night was not explained at the time of its occurrence and has not been explained to this day. It remains a mystery.

Source & References:

*THE KELLY INCIDENT is referenced at Wikipedia under "Little Green Men":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Men

*THE KELLY INCIDENT has been acquired by the University of Illinois

at Urbana-Champaign library for their special Mandeville Collection.

THE KELLY INCIDENT by Anna Karyl, 2004

http://www.freewebs.com/thekellyincident/

THE KELLY-HOPKINSVILLE by UFO Casebook

http://www.ufocasebook.com/Kelly-Hopkinsville.html