ROWDY TREE BOYS aka the Hopkinsville Goblins! pic.twitter.com/QIlQlQldE4
— 🔜FurSquared DD20 (@ZENOPHRENIC) October 18, 2018
In 1955, a family in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, were besieged by what they considered alien beings with glowing eyes lurking outside of their home. A shotgun blast through a screen window did not deter them, and one even grabbed at a man from the roof. The family managed to escape to the nearest police station and begged for help in their battle against the goblins.
What became known as the Hopkinsville Goblins eventually faded from the public’s mind, but became embedded in the files of those who keep up with UFO sightings. One of them was astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who Steven Spielberg consulted when he was making the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film’s title actually came from Hynek. It was he who told the story of the Hopkinsville Gobins to Spielberg, and it struck a chord with him. The idea of a family who grows closer while being threatened by outside forces is a running theme in Spielberg movies, and this was right up his alley. He wrote a treatment about the Hopkinsville incident that John Sayles turned into a script called Night Skies. But elements of the script were changed into what would become E.T.: the Extraterrestrial. Discarded elements from Night Skies were resurrected to become Gremlins, and still others were used in Poltergeist. Read how all this happened at Atlas Obscura.
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Source: neatorama