Kelly, KY - 55 years ago

It started with a drink of water from a country well on a quiet August night in 1955.

What followed was an event that would give the tiny community of Kelly, Ky., its own permanent chapter in the nation’s paranormal history books and haunt one family’s reputation for years.

Now, a member of that family, one too young to have a role in their 1955 battle against beings believed to have come from another world, has come forth to offer the family’s personal version of their alien encounter — the true story.

“Alien Legacy” is one of three books currently nearing release from Princeton resident Geraldine Sutton Stith.

The book, a non-fiction account of the Aug. 21, 1955, alien encounter at the home of her father in Kelly, should be released in about six months, she said.

A novel, “Rollan,” written at the same time but unrelated to the Kelly incident, should be released next month, she said, and a third book, a children’s book called “My Guardian Angel?” is also in development.

The most personal of the tales, though, deals with the story of Stith’s father, Elmer “Lucky” Sutton, his family and friends, who unwittingly became a part of UFO history a half-century ago.

“I just felt like it was time to bring it back out and make it right,” she said.

“The real story had not been told. I kept thinking to myself, ‘This could be done better.’”

Stith herself did not find out about the Kelly incident until she was 7 or 8, more than a decade after the incident happened.

The family spoke little of their encounter, Stith said, attributing their silence as a reflection of both the ridicule they endured for reporting the incident and the fear that lingered long after the encounter was over.

Of her father: “It terrified him. You could tell by the look on his face, in his eyes. He just went pale,” Stith said. “He didn’t want to talk about it no more.”

And her grandmother, who was also in the home at the time: “My grandma was very religious. She would not lie if her life depended on it. She seen what she saw that night.”

What the family saw, Stith said, were a small group of glowing humanoid creatures, about 3.5 feet tall, with oversized heads and arms that nearly reached the ground.

Eleven people were in the Sutton house that night: Lucky Sutton and his wife; Billy Ray Taylor (a family friend) and his wife, Stith’s uncle J.C. Sutton and his wife; Stith’s grandmother, O.P. Baker (another friend of the family), and three small children.

The incident began when Taylor went out to the well to get a drink of water, between 7:30 and 8 p.m.

As the story goes, he saw a disk streak across the sky, with “all colors of the rainbow streaming behind it,” Stith said.

Taylor returned to the home and told the others what he had seen, but, with a reputation for being a joker, his story was laughed off and dismissed.

Soon, though, the barking and howling of the family dog outside alerted them that something was approaching, and the men, upon looking outside, saw the glowing beings coming closer.

Lucky Sutton, the patriarch, armed himself with a .12-gauge shotgun, and Taylor grabbed a .22-caliber pistol.

One went to the front door, and one went to the back, and when one of the beings approached, the first shot was fired.

“They fought those little things for almost three hours,” Stith said.

The aliens seemed relatively unaffected by the shots, though. They would roll from the impact and then retreat into the nearby woods, despite taking direct hits from the shotgun and pistol.

“These are country boys. They knew how to hunt,” she said.

When the men went outside to investigate, an alien hand reached down from the roof of the house and touched Taylor’s hair. It too, was fired upon, but floated off the roof and ran away, unfazed.

When they saw their weapons were having no effect on the creatures, the men and their families piled into their vehicles and raced to Hopkinsville to alert authorities.

The investigation, though, did not produce evidence of any alien presence. A small, luminous pool was reported on the ground, but apparently, no samples were taken, Stith said.

A U.S. Air Force investigation included the Kelly case in Project Blue Book, perhaps the most famous government study of UFO phenomena.

For Stith, though, the knowledge that her family, especially her father, believed in the reality of the encounter makes it real to her.

The media circus surrounding the incident placed a stigma around the family, she said, too often portraying them as uneducated hillbillies prone to delusion and out to bring attention to themselves.

“My daddy would not have put himself in a situation like that,” she said. “He was too serious. You did not laugh at that man.”

Neighbors would later report seeing strange lights in the sky, and in the woods, that evening, she said, but kept their mouths shut at the time.

“Everyone was afraid to say anything that they had seen that night,” she said, “because of what that family went through.”

Despite the ostracism, the family stuck to its story, giving it that much more credibility.

Publishing “Alien Legacy,” Stith said, will help reinforce that credibility, in an age when belief in extraterrestrial life is more acceptable.

“Now, I think things are different,” she said. “People are more open-minded.”

Stith began working on the book soon after last year’s festival commemorating the Kelly encounter.