August 21-22: An Eclipse, Disasters, and Suicides?

On August 21, 2017, the shadow of a total solar eclipse will cross the entire continental United States, the first time since 1918, and astrologers, according to Newsweek and other sources, say perhaps it will be a disaster for President Trump. But he may not be the only one looking to the heavens to a troublesome late August.

There are some who are waiting for "something" to happen on August 21 or August 22. We all know that there will be specific talk of certain known events for those days. It is the unknown that is causing some fears to build. 

The solar eclipse has a good deal of people quite excited. Here is a sterling state by state breakdown (here) that you might wish to consult.

The path of the totality will cross several interesting locations.

Bucky Fuller, a Fortean and architect, by Andy Finkle; 

a painting permanently on exhibit at the International Cryptozoology Museum.

Take for instance Carbondale, Illinois, the home of Southern Illinois University, claimant to the seat of all good Buckminster Fuller followers, and right in the middle of the mysterious Little Egypt triangle. 

See #9: The Little Egypt Triangle, Illinois:

Teeshirts are for sale, already, on the Internet.

Then there is also Hopkinsville-Kelly, Kentucky, where the visit of the total eclipse will exactly match the August 21st anniversary of the infamous little creature invasion. I devote an entire chapter to these beasties in Mysterious America: The Ultimate Guide to the Nation’s Weirdest Wonders, Strangest Spots, and Creepiest Creatures.

On the evening of August 21, 1955, five adults and seven children arrived at the Hopkinsville police station claiming that small creatures were attacking their farmhouse and they had been holding them off with gunfire "for nearly four hours." Two of the adults, Elmer Sutton and Billy Ray Taylor, claimed they had been shooting at "twelve to fifteen" short, dark figures who repeatedly popped up at the doorway or peered into the windows. (See more here.)

The creatures association with "aliens" and "spaceships" would be added later in the popular mind. The look of the creatures appear to have influenced the appearance of the Gremlins in the movie of the same name.

Will the New Madrid Earthquake, in some kind of a 2017 version shake the middle of America? Will an asteroid hit the Earth? Is there disaster written in the interaction between the Sun, Moon, and Earth? Some people use to talk about suicides when comets were flying by. Is there really going to be any human impacts due to this well-publicized eclipse? Only time will tell.

We all shall get through it, and August 22, 2017, will come and go. Correct?

Or will some choose suicide? This is actually a dangerous time for "Grunge suicides." And I have asked for people to talk to those who may feel suicidal around this time of the month. There is a traditional one-month syndrome with some suicides, and Chester Bennington did die by hanging on July 20, 2017. 

As I posted on July 26, 2017, "Will Grunge Suicide Copycats Continue?" Specifically I am looking at the date of August 22, for it is the birth date of Layne Staley, a member of Alice in Chains, who OD'ed on April 5, 2002, the anniversary date of Kurt Cobain's suicide.

Buckle your seat belts for August 21 and 22, 2017.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number is 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

P.S. Hopkinsville

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)