Historical research: The station trip is on paper, the little men are not
The paper’s count of the invaders, twelve to fifteen, is the station story, not a head count from the yard. The same article records a smaller number on the ammunition. The men told Batts they had fired about four boxes of .22 shells. A neighbor told him he had heard shooting at the Suttons, made out about four shots, and thought they were firecrackers. The screen hole is the one piece of damage the officers put in the report.
The Aug. 22 story does not say the figures were green. It says metal plate. Joe Dorris, who wrote it, later said the national stories added the green a few days on, and that the people who claimed to have seen them never used that word. By Aug. 23 the local paper was already running “little green men” in a piece about what townspeople thought. That piece also carried a rumor that circus trucks had stopped on Highway 41A and that monkeys had been let out to exercise. The paper did not establish that any monkey was missing.
Project Blue Book later carried the report as a hoax. That is not what the officers said on the morning of the 22nd. They said they had found nothing that proved the story and nothing that disproved it, except the absence of tracks and of a landing mark.
Joe Nickell’s reading, published for the fiftieth year, is a bright meteor for the light over the trees and great horned owls for the figures. An owl has large yellow eyes, ear tufts, a head set close on the body, talons, and a habit of sitting on a roof or in a tree and dropping. Glennie Lankford, the older woman of the house, in a statement taken later, said the figures were shining, which can be light on feathers. The match stops at the parts the family was most sure of that night: a height of about four feet, a hand in Taylor’s hair, metal plate, and a body knocked down by a shotgun that then got up. Nickell does not claim an owl grabs a man by the hair.
Later interviews call Sutton Elmer rather than Cecil. His brother Lonnie, who was a boy in the house, said he crawled under the bed and did not see anything, and that Lucky had a name as a tale-teller and still did not invent this. Lucky’s children said he would talk about it in private and would not perform it. None of that is a second look at the yard. The night itself is one date, 21–22 August 1955.