P.S. Hopkinsville
After finishing my earlier posting (see
here), about Hopkinsville and Budd Hopkins having temporal links for August 21st, a postscript presented itself about other people links and "coincidences," regarding that situation.
"Hopkinsville hobgoblin" attacks a member of the Sutton family, 1955.
Budd Hopkins during his early lectures, as in this one from 1967, began to develop the concept of "missing time" and "alien abductions" due to the "intruders."
"Hopkinsville," as the tagging label grew to be known, is all about the Kelly-Hopkinsville "hobgoblins," reported in 1955.
Two of the most mentioned investigators linked to that incident are (1)
J. Allen Hynek (May 1, 1910 - April 27, 1986), ufologist who
developed the close encounter scale and consulted on the making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (released on November 16, 1977), and (2) Isabel Davis, ufologist who authored
Close Encounters of Kelly and Others of 1955 (1978).
Davis was from New York City, and investigated the Kelly-Hopkinsville event a year after it happened. Hynek, living in the Chicago area, examined the details of the case by talking to Davis and one other investigator. Who was that person and how did Hynek and Davis learn the most about the Kelly incident? They received their most credible firsthand data from an individual they would call a friend years later: Andrew "Bud" Ledwith, an announcer-engineer at a Hopkinsville radio station.
Yes, another Bud.
Bud Ledwith was there first. On August 22, 1955, it was Andrew "Bud" Ledwith of WHOP radio who interviewed the seven adult witnesses in two different groups. He judged their accounts as consistent, especially in their descriptions of the strange glowing beings. It is Bud Ledwith's drawings that are most often reworked and used when talking about the Kelly creatures.
Bud Ledwith's sketches were made under the instructions of the eyewitnesses.
Now here is the strange part. Years later, in 1977, I met Bud Ledwith, face-to-face. He was working as the host of a small Boston-area radio station talk show. He invited me to come into his studio so he could interview me about the April 21-22, 1977, sightings of the Dover Demon. Only after I was there, after we began to talk, did I discover that he was
the same Bud Ledwith who was in Hopkinsville in 1955.
What a strange coincidence, I thought. The Dover Demon was so very bizarre in description, I had already researched seemingly similar isolated historical cases of small creatures. Naturally, I had compared the Dover Demon with the Kelly hobgoblins. And then I find I stumble into the primary investigator in that case? It all seemed rather unbelievable.
Walt Webb, then the Assistant Director of the Hayden Planetarium at Boston's Science Museum, would write, in his special report, about this overlap that all of us were discussing back then: "Loren was the first to note some resemblance between the Dover entity and the famous Kelly, Kentucky, 'little men' incident of 1955," (see page 55, in
Mysterious America).
So, there I found myself, sitting with Bud Ledwith, 22 years after he interviewed the Kentucky creature witnesses. I was talking about the bright orange Dover Demon, and then we discussed the silvery Kelly creatures. It all seemed a little weird at the time, and still does today.
To think now of the links between Budd Hopkins/Hopkinsville, and Bud Ledwith/Hopkinsville, in the context of Bud, me, the Dover Demon, and Budd, is beyond strange.
I met Bud Ledwith in April 1977, because of the Dover Demon, and met Budd Hopkins for the first time at the Mass UFO Show/Mass Monster Mash in 2008. I had spoken at the previous Mass Monster Mash, presenting a 30th Year Anniversary Dover Demon PowerPoint presentation in 2007.
Digging a bit, the links from Isabel Davis, through Bud Ledwith and Hopkinsville, to Budd Hopkins are rather direct, historically. It all has ties to the old CSI.
The Civilian Saucer Intelligence (CSI) was an independent unidentified flying object research group founded in New York City in 1954. It was initially called Civilian Saucer Intelligence New York, but the "New York" was quickly dropped from their name.
Jerome Clark writes, "Though its membership was small, what the organization lacked in quantity it made up in quality of its personnel," (Clark, Jerome, The UFO Encyclopedia: 2nd Edition; Volume 1, A-K; Omnigraphics, Inc, 1998, page 188). CSI's core personnel were Ted Bloecher, Isabel Davis, and Alexander Mebane.
Though the group never formally disbanded, CSI was defunct by 1959. However, Davis and Bloecher were active in UFO research into the 1980s, Davis as a NICAP associate. Notably, Bloecher investigated an early 1970s UFO sighting made by young New York City painter, Budd Hopkins; in later years, Hopkins would become a key figure in the alien abduction scene.
I truly am not sure what any of it means, but it is worth a little Fortean pondering.
Kelly-Hopkinsville hobgoblin (1955)
Dover Demon (April 1977)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (November 1977)
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Gremlins (1984); Gremlins 2 (1990)
Hombori Tondo (Mount Tondo) is visible on this war map, SE of Tombouctou (Timbuktu), Mali.
