For a few terrifying hours in the summer of 1955, two Kentucky families emptied their guns into small, glowing creatures that swarmed their farmhouse and simply would not die — and to this day, no one agrees on whether they fought off aliens, owls, or something the mind conjured out of the dark.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/kellyhopkinsville
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p86wb4m
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: It’s considered one of the most bizarre and convincing extraterrestrial events ever reported… we’ll look at the alien encounter in 1955’s Hopkinsville, Kentucky that was experienced by two terrified families. (The Hopkinsville Encounter) *** In the deep jungles of the Congo, natives tell of a giant creature that, once described, sounds exactly like a long-necked dinosaur. But how could this be? And is it pure legend? Perhaps not, as one noted biologist from the area saw it with his own eyes and reported it. We’ll look at the supposed real sighting of Mokele-Mbembe, the living dinosaur of the Congo! (Dinosaur Observed In The Congo) *** Running a club during prohibition was extremely lucrative… and extremely dangerous, as one Theodore Lakoff would’ve learned… had he been awake when he was murdered. (The Mysterious Death of Theodore Lakoff) *** Benjamin Franklin was known not just as one of the father’s of the United States of America, but also as an inventor, a womanizer, and a man with a bit of an ornery streak in him – as is evidenced by a series of letters he wrote to the New England Courant, where he pretended to be a woman. (Who Was Mrs. Silence Dogood?) *** The internet is a vital part of modern life. Without web access, all kinds of businesses and jobs would be unable to function. So, as you can imagine, there are plenty of people who would love to see the internet crumble. And many have tried. (Taking Down The World Wide Web) *** In 1983 sightings poured in from people on the California coast who claim they saw a sea monster. (The California Sea Monster)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:10.244 = Show Open
00:03:40.994 = The Hopkinsville Encounter
00:13:15.837 = Dinosaur Observed in the Congo ***
00:27:07.561 = Taking Down The World Wide Web ***
00:36:42.752 = The Mysterious Death of Theodor Lakoff
00:43:15.319 = Who Was Mrs. Silence Dogood?
00:49:11.286 = The California Sea Monster
00:55:29.517 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“The Hopkinsville Encounter” by Hannah Collins for Ranker.com’s Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yp8pnfx7
“Dinosaur Observed in the Congo” by Richard Greenwell for the ISC Newsletter: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yc3r3mpp
“The Mysterious Death of Theodore Lakoff” by Kathi Kresol for HauntedRockford.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ku5x3cat
“Who Was Mrs. Silence Dogood?” by Bipin Dimri for HistoricMysteries.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p868eac
“Taking Down the World Wide Web” by Benjamin Thomas for ListVerse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/c85j5cau
“The California Sea Monster” by Malcom Smith for Malcom’s Cryptids: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yc2wts7h
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
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Originally aired: December, 2021
Weird Darkness pulls together a farmhouse siege by little gray creatures in Kentucky, a biologist's claimed sighting of a living dinosaur in the Congo, decades of attempts to knock the internet offline, an unsolved Prohibition murder in Illinois, a teenage Benjamin Franklin's literary hoax, and a hundred-foot sea serpent sighted off the California coast.It opens on August 21, 1955, when Billy Ray Taylor stepped out to the well at Glennie Lankford's farmhouse in Kelly, outside Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and watched a bright object drop behind the trees. Two families spent the night barricaded indoors, firing a 12-gauge shotgun and a .22 rifle at short gray creatures with spindly legs and glowing eyes that peered through windows and swiped at Taylor from the roof, yet the buckshot rang off them like sheet metal before they floated away unharmed. Skeptics later blamed an aggressive great horned owl or a green glow of bioluminescent foxfire, while the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book dismissed the case as a hoax and filed it under C.P., for crackpot.
From there the episode reaches the Likouala swamps of the People's Republic of the Congo, where in 1983 biologist Marcellin Agnagna became the first trained scientist to claim he had seen Mokele-Mbembe, the long-necked animal described as a surviving dinosaur for over two centuries. At remote Lake Télé on May 1, 1983, he watched a creature with a long neck, small head, and broad back rising some fifteen feet above the water, judged it a Mesozoic sauropod, and waded out to film it — only to find he had left the lens cap on, and his last roll of film later developed black.
Next comes a survey of attempts to knock the internet offline since Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web. A man named Liu in Weifang, China tore apart four China Telecom junction boxes in 2016 to bury footage of himself joining a public "granny dance," while the Mirai botnet's 2016 assault on the firm Dyn took down Twitter, Netflix, and CNN, and Cornell student Robert Tappan Morris had loosed the first such attack by accident in 1988. It ends on Seth Aaron Pendley, a Texas man arrested in 2021 for plotting to blow up a Virginia data center with C-4 in hopes of crippling most of the web.
The show then drops back to January 1931, when roadhouse owner Theodore Lakoff was shot once through the top of the head as he slept in his own Rockford, Illinois resort, a Prohibition den of liquor, gambling, and women he ran under the alias Tony Evanoff. His wallet lay emptied while far more cash sat untouched, and suspicion fell on twenty-year-old Viola Hunsficker, said to be extorting him, until ballistics cleared the pistol found in her apartment. Investigators then turned up five other women who each believed she was his only sweetheart, and the killing was never solved.
Then it reaches back to 1722 Boston, where a witty widow named Silence Dogood published letters in the New England Courant skewering religious hypocrisy, Harvard, and fashion, charming readers so thoroughly that several men wrote in offering to marry her. She was the invention of sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin, an apprentice in his brother James's print shop who slipped the letters under the door at night for six months before revealing himself, then carried his taste for hoaxes to Philadelphia and a fabricated 1730 account of a Mount Holly witch trial.
The episode closes off the California coast, where on October 31, 1983 a highway crew above Stinson Beach watched a dark, slender animal roughly a hundred feet long swim toward shore, trailed by about a hundred birds and two dozen sea lions. Crew member Matt Ratto described three humps rising straight from the water before a head lifted to look around, and days later, near Costa Mesa, a surfer named Young Hutchinson reported a long black eel-like animal with no dorsal fins surfacing ten feet from his board — though a Caltech spokesman offered that the witnesses might have seen a whale or a line of porpoises.
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