The Monstrefact: Sableye and the Hopkinsville Goblins

0:03 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:10 Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. It's been a while since we discussed a Pokémon on The Monster Fact, and since it's the Halloween season, I figured, hey, why not a ghost type? I considered some of the more popular ghost types out there before zeroing in on the dark slash ghost type, Sableye. Sableye, if you're not familiar, looks like a small purple goblin with blue gemstones for eyes and a red gemstone on its torso. In many renderings, its sharp claws and teeth give it a hungry, bitey appearance.

0:55 We're told that they're cave dwellers and that they eat gemstones, digging for them endlessly in the earth. They protect their food source with sinister pranks, and in this, the creatures are reminiscent of various real-world goblin, dwarf, and mine spirit traditions, which we've discussed in the past on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Now, various Pokemon reference sites point to a connection between Sableye and a 1955 alleged alien encounter in Christian County, Kentucky. a case that received a great deal of ufology media coverage in Japan over the decades. It is the Hopkinsville Goblins. There are actually some great Japanese children's book illustrations from the 70s of these creatures and other cryptids, which I highly recommend looking up. The Hopkinsville

1:43 Goblins encounter itself is certainly dramatic stuff. So dramatic that it apparently inspired an early script of what would eventually become Steven Spielberg's E.T., Following a UFO sighting, a Kentucky family is besieged in their home by multiple goblin-like creatures with glowing eyes and large hands, floating up to the windows, you know, that sort of thing. Colin Dickey writes about the incident in the 2024 Atlas Obscura article, The Long Surprising Legacy of the Hopkinsville Goblins, discussing, among other things, the way that the creatures were said to appear at the window screens of the family home. later roosting on tree limbs and on the roof of a nearby house.

2:25 It's frightful stuff, and I don't want to discredit the traumatic experience of the people involved, but most skeptics now believe that the sightings were a pair of great horned owls, their large eyes appearing to glow as they reflected lantern light, their outstretched wings reading as oversized hands, and their silent nocturnal flight, as is common in owls, contributing to the feeling of something altogether otherworldly. If you've ever observed an owl in flight, certainly at night, you have some idea of what I'm talking about here. Now, certainly the people who experienced the Hopkinsville goblins would not have been the first to interpret owl sightings as something out of the ordinary.

3:08 Because throughout the world, the owl has long been associated with spirits and gods, representing everything from evil and death to divine wisdom. In many, many respects, the 20th century experience of UFOs and extraterrestrials was, of course, a continuation of these same sorts of encounters, interpretations, and ideas. The great horned owl doesn't only look the part of a fiendish goblin, it is a very impressive organism, it also frequently smells the part as well. You see, while skunks are able to keep many would-be predators away with their potent stink, The great horned owl's weak sense of smell makes it an excellent skunk killer, preying upon them with a ferocity that dwarfs that of any other predator, and

3:55 certainly anything even thinking about preying on a skunk. As such, the owls in their nests, which may be littered with skunk remains, frequently carry a strong odor, and the birds may even leave traces of the smell behind at kill sites where they have preyed on some sort of animal that they're hunting. Now, there's no indication that that Sableye, the Pokemon, stinks. Certainly nothing like, let's see, Skuntank and Stunky.

4:23 Both are Pokemon based on the skunk. And then we also have the owl-based Noctowl. I'm going to hold up... I actually have the Pokemon card of this little guy right here for our video viewers. Certainly resembles the Great Horned Owl, and I think is likely based upon this real-world organism. So always enjoy diving into the Pokedex here and seeing what we have, because as I've mentioned before on the show, like the designs of the various Pokemon, they speak to so many different things in our natural world, in our folkloric and mythological history. Then there's a lot to admire in their interactions. Tune in for additional episodes of the Monster Fact, the Artifact, or Atomalia Stupendium each week.

5:05 As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com.

5:21 Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.