legs" later appeared in various media. Explanations Psychologists Rodney Schmaltz and Scott Lilienfeld cite the alleged incident as an example of pseudoscience and an "extraordinary claim" to help students develop critical thinking skills. Although contemporary newspaper stories alleged that "all officials appeared to agree that there was no drinking involved", Schmaltz and Lilienfeld suggest that intoxication may have played a part in the sighting. Committee for Skeptical Inquiry member and skeptic Joe Nickell notes that the family could have misidentified "eagle owls" or great horned owls, which are nocturnal, fly silently, have yellow eyes, and aggressively defend their nests. According to Nickell, meteor sightings also occurred at the time that could explain Billy Ray Taylor's claim that he saw "a bright light streak across the sky and disappear beyond a tree line some distance from the house". Author Brian Dunning noted that the height of the owls would be comparable to at least the lower end of the reported range of around : "There are simply too many similarities between the creatures reported by the families and an aggressive pair of the local Great Horned Owls, which do stand about two-thirds of a meter tall." UFOlogists French UFOlogist Renaud Leclet also argued in a publication that the best explanation of the case is great horned owls. UFOlogist Jerome Clark writes that the supposed creatures "floated" through the trees and the sound of bullets striking them "resembled bullets striking a metal bucket". Clark describes "an odd luminous patch along a fence where one of the beings had been shot, and, in the woods beyond, a green light whose source could not be determined"; however, this description was consistent with foxfire, a bioluminescent fungus on decaying wood. Clark also wrote that investigations by "police, Air Force officers from nearby Fort Campbell, and civilian ufologists found no evidence of a hoax"; however, Brian Dunning reported: "The claim that Air Force investigators showed up the next day at Mrs. Lankford's house has been published a number of times by later authors, but I could find no corroborating evidence of this." Dunning also observed: "The four military police who accompanied the police officers on the night of the event were from an Army base, not an Air Force base." Some UFOlogists compared the alleged creatures to gremlins, which have since often been referred to as the "Hopkinsville Goblins" in popular culture. UFOlogist Allan Hendry wrote: