The UFO era produced several incidents where alleged extra-terrestrial's are claimed to have attacked human beings. However at least one case attracted the attention of of the US Air Force's official UFO investigative agency, Project Blue Book. During the evening of August 25th, 1955, Billy Ray Taylor, who lived with 10 people in a farmhouse near the small town of Kelly, Kentucky, walked out to the backyard to get some water from the well there. He came running back inside, claiming he had just seen a flying saucer land in the gully on the opposite side of the surrounding field.
No one believed him, and no one bothered to go investigate, but about an hour later they heard the frightened yelps of their dog, and witnessed it bolting underneath the house with its tail between its legs. Billy Taylor and Lucky Sutton then saw the strangest thing they had ever seen in their lives: a luminous three and a half foot tall being with an oversized head, big floppy pointed ears, and hands with sharp looking claws on the fingertips.
The entity, dressed in silvery material, simply stood there with its hand raised. Whether this was intended as a gesture of peace or not, it was not so interpreted. When it got within around twenty feet of the pair of men they opened fire on it with a shotgun and .22 rifle. It did a flip and scampered over to the side of the house in response. Soon after, the same or similar creature showed its face at a side window of the house. This time J.C. Sutton (Lucky's brother) and Taylor, shot at it, in J.C's case at nearly point blank range. This continued until around 11 p.m., they would shoot at the creatures, which would roll over or flip and escape, propelling themselves with their arms and hands only. Their legs, thin and rigid, seemed to serve no other function than to hold them standing up. If the entities were in a tree or on a roof when fired upon, they would float, not fall to the ground.
At 11 p.m. all the witnesses packed into a car a sped to the Hopkinsville police station, seven miles away. When they arrived they were so hysterical that that police chief Russell Greenwell said that it was evident that something "beyond reason, not ordinary" had frightened them. On the way back to the farm a medically trained investigator measured the pulse in Taylors neck, and found it to be twice normal. Additionally at the time of the witnesses flight to the police station a state police officer reported seeing strange "meteors" passing overhead "with noise like artillery fire." They were heading opposite the direction of the men, in the direction of Kelly.
Though they found no direct evidence of alien visitation, Greenwell and other investigating officers found plenty of evidence of the shooting that had been going on. Aside from that Greenwell told ufologist Isabel Davis "In and around the whole area, the house, the fields, that night, there was definitely a weird feeling. It was partly uneasiness but not entirely. Everyone had it. There were men there that I would call brave men....They felt it too." They also found an odd luminous patch where one of the beings had been fired upon and, in the woods beyond, a green light that they could not determine the source of.
Later upon returning to the house, members of the household spotted the beings several more times, one time causing Lucky to fire his gun again through a window. The last sighting occurred at 4:45 a.m. Investigations by the police, Air Force officers, reporters and ufologists uncovered no proof of a hoax. Even Project Blue Book, whose function was to debunk sightings of this type were at a loss to explain what occurred. As was Davis, among the most hard headed of ufo investigators. Inevitably some skeptics claimed the witnesses were drunk, which Chief Greenwell testified they were not. Some speculated they were misidentified escaped monkeys. Of this offered "solution" Davis wrote, "No amount of 'optical illusion' can explain a mistake of this magnitude."
It should be noted that during the entire incident, at no time did the beings display hostility towards the men.
