Case description
Margaret Symmonds, fifty-two, reported seeing four small figures on Highway 129 just south of Stockton, Georgia, around 03:30 on 3 July 1955. She was driving a new Oldsmobile toward Florida while her husband Wesley slept in the back. Her later sworn deposition says headlights first made the figures look like animals. She slowed, then saw gray-green cape-like clothing and estimated them at roughly three-and-a-half to four feet tall.
One figure moved slightly aside and looked toward her. She described a rounded head, a slouch-like hat, disproportionately long arms, very large eyes reflecting reddish light without visible pupils, a long pointed nose and a pointed chin. Her deposition mentions a small mouth without noticeable lips; later summaries sometimes say no mouth was visible. Accounts and drawings also vary about which figure held the stick. She swerved around them, screamed and accelerated. Wesley awoke after the sighting and wanted to return, but she refused. He was not a direct observer.
The Cincinnati Post published her story in August after publicity about Kelly-Hopkinsville. Ted Bloecher and Leonard Stringfield later interviewed the couple and reproduced her September 1955 deposition in Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955. They distinguished the witness’s account from an imaginative newspaper cartoon, including clothing and claw-like-hand details.
No craft was seen, and their search found no associated local UFO report. An owl interpretation has since been proposed, but was not established by recovering or identifying the observed animals. The plate preserves the unusual reported nose, eyes, capes and four-figure count without adding a saucer or treating a later drawing as photographic evidence.
