Goblin (Hopkinsville type)

"Goblin" is the press nickname attached to the small, floating, silver-skinned entities at the center of the August 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville siege in rural Kentucky, during which an extended farm family reported repelling repeated nighttime approaches by short, large-eared, metallic-looking beings with a shotgun over several hours, eventually fleeing to the local police station in genuine terror. Newspapers covering the story reached for "goblin" and, separately, "little green men" to describe the beings for a sensation-hungry readership, even though the family's own detailed description was consistently of silver or metallic-toned skin rather than green — a mismatch between the witnesses' actual account and the phrase that became permanently attached to the case, and, more consequentially, to the entire genre of small alien-being reports that followed it. "Little green men" in particular outlived the Kelly-Hopkinsville case by decades as pop culture's default catch-all alien cliché, despite originating from a case whose witnesses never actually described that color. The siege itself remains one of the most intensely investigated multiple-witness occupant cases in American ufology, notable for the sheer number of family members present and the consistency of their independent accounts under sustained, repeated police and later researcher questioning.