Wednesday Weird: Hopkinsville Goblin Case

On August 21st, 1955, two families (11 People total, 4 of them children) were staying together at a rural Kentucky farmhouse. Around 7 pm, one of the men went outside to get a drink of water from the well (the house had no plumbing) and saw lights and an object in the sky.

Excited, he ran inside to tell the others but no one believed him.

About an hour later the people in the house began to hear strange noises and a dog that had been tied up outside began to bark frantically. Two of the men armed themselves and went outside to investigate. The dog hid under the house and didn't come out until the next day.

Then shit got real, so to speak.

The men saw two strange creatures, humanoid, with long arms, legs that seemed atrophied and silver skin. The men shot at them (because why not?) and the creatures flipped over and fled into the woods. The men said the bullets sounded as if they had struck a bucket.

sketch made by one of the witnesses

When the men returned to the house, though, the creatures returned as well. They would pop up in the windows, or in doorways, and each time the men would shoot at them, to seemingly no effect. The residents of the house could hear the creatures on the roof and the children were quickly reaching a state of hysteria when the 11 people finally decided to get into a car and flee to the police station.

The police returned to the house and while they didn't see any creatures, they did note damage to the house and quite a few of them reported seeing lights in the sky. The closest neighbors to the farmhouse also reported seeing lights in the sky and that they could hear the weapons fire from the farmhouse.

The U.S. Air force investigated and would later rule the incident as due to "an escaped monkey, from a carnival, painted in silver paint". Because, right, that makes a lot of sense. Honestly, that almost makes less sense than something paranormal happening.

The owners of the house never wanted any publicity or money from their story, and in fact, stopped telling it to people who asked. A few months after the event, they moved, fed up with the attention from people who believed them and people who thought they were responsible for a hoax.

In 2002, a daughter of one of the men present for the encounter said this about her father:

It was a serious thing to him. It happened to him. He said it happened to him. He said it wasn't funny. It was an experience he said he would never forget. It was fresh in his mind until the day he died. It was fresh in his mind like it happened yesterday. He never cracked a smile when he told the story because it happened to him and there wasn't nothing funny about it. He got pale and you could see it in his eyes. He was scared to death. (source)

So, what do you think happen?
For me, I don't think it was a hoax. I really believe those people saw something that night. Though one police officer blamed it on moonshine, there was never any evidence attributed to drug or achohol use. And presumably the children wouldn't be drunk either.

I don't think we can say for sure what it was. If we're purely looking for a natural, common explanation, I think the closest theory we'll get is that the family mistook a pair of Great Horned Owls for gremlins, though that doesn't explain the inability to kill them.
But Great Horned Owls look a lot like the sketches and reports and will aggressively defend their nests. In fact, the Great Horned Owl is the only known owl species to have killed a human.

If you see this bird, do not confront it

Thoughts? Theories?