Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, February 2021
Those Devilish “Little Men” Again
by: Brent Raynes
On August 13, 1967, at 4 p.m., one Inacio de Souza, 41, and his wife Maria had returned from an outing, to their home between Crixas and Pilar de Goias, in Brazil, when they observed a “strange basin-shaped object,” estimated at 115 feet across, on the ground in the landing field of a wealthy farmer, who happened to be Inacio’s employer. Inacio was something like a foreman or manager for this man.
Inacio and Maria also noticed three children sized “men” between them and the object on the ground. The beings appeared to have no hair on them and seemed to be playing like children. To Inacio they looked naked, while to Maria she felt that they were dressed in tight-fitting yellow suits. At some point the strange “men” took notice of the couple and began to run in their direction. Inacio ordered his wife to lock herself inside the house while he grabbed a .44 caliber carbine and began shooting at one of the closest of the beings. Next a green beam of light shot out from the craft striking Inancio around the chest and shoulders, at which point he fell to the ground. Maria, seeing what had just occurred from her kitchen window, rushed back outside shouting, coming to the aide of her husband. She picked up the weapon and stood between her husband and the beings. Next three of the little “men,” one of them injured by Inacio and carried by the other two, ran back to the large “basin-shaped object” which soon slowly rose vertically up into the air with a noise resembling a swarm of bees. Soon the craft was out of sight.
Three days later, the farm owner, Ibiracy de Moraes, who lived in Sao Paulo and was a former Bank of Brazil president, returned to the farm in his airplane. He discovered a very ill Inacio who was suffering extreme nausea, general numbness throughout his body, and a tingling sensation. He took the complaints of illness and the strange story of the craft and the mysterious “men,” which the wife had collaborated, quite seriously. He transported Inacio to Goiana, the capital of Goias State, where a medical doctor who examined him found burns on his torso. Blood tests revealed Inacio was suffering from leukemia and “malignant alterations of the blood.” His weight dropped very quickly and he was in great pain, with yellowish-white spots that appeared over his body.
Before dying Inacio begged his wife to burn his bed and clothing, afraid that the cause of his illness could affect her and their five children. Within 59 days Inacio was dead. His family, the farm owner, and the doctor himself, as well as competent local Brazilian investigators for APRO [the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization out of Tucson, Arizona] reportedly all believed that Inacio had been the victim of radiation poisoning.
As pointed out in this previous column, these dwarfish characters can be mean little suckers, and evidence like this case just cited suggests that they may reportedly at times not only be aggressive but dangerous too. Anthropologists, mythologists, religious scholars, occultists and shamans across the globe have long been familiar with such stories. “The dwarfish occupants reported in most UFO landings have their parallels in the almost worldwide beliefs about diminutive supernatural beings,” noted American folklorist Thomas E. Bullard, Ph.D. “Physical and mental effects of close encounters such as mental time lapse, paralysis, or subsequent illness resemble effects of encounters with ghosts, fairies, and demons.”
Brian Stross, a Berkeley anthropologist, was visiting with the Tzeltal Indians of Tenejapa in Chiapas, Mexico, studying their customs, when one evening in November 1967 [he thinks it was on the 24th] he and an Indian assistant saw a very strange light in the sky.
“I was sitting in the back of a stationary pick-up truck with my Indian assistant waiting for the owner of the truck to come back from dinner,” Stross recalled. “This was in Chenalho. It was a little after six o’clock and the sky was just dark enough to see the first few stars, and quite free of clouds. I looked up and saw what appeared to be a bright star moving rapidly across the sky. It had a powerful light that dimmed a little every once in a while, and was going in the opposite direction from the path that the sun takes (i.e., from west to east). I watched for about fifteen minutes, during which time it went from horizon to horizon in this mountainous country. Once in the middle of its course it made a rapid and very obvious zig-zag and then returned to its course. This zig-zag, combined with absolutely no noise, made me feel that it wouldn’t have been either an airplane or one of the U.S.’s or Russia’s satellites. And anyway the light was too bright for the object to have been either.” “My assistant watched it with me and then said that he and friends had seen the same kind of thing several times while talking late at night. He then told me a few more stories about his friends’ experiences with the ihk’al, the little black being.”
“There are many tales in Tenejapa about the ihk’al, a 3 ft. tall, hairy black humanoid, that has had encounters with the natives here. About twenty years ago, or less, there were many sightings of this creature or creatures, and several people apparently tried to fight it with machetes. One man also saw a small sphere following him from about five feet. After many attempts, he finally hit it with his machete and it disintegrated, leaving only an ash-like substance.” “The ihk’als are said to live in many of the caves around here, and for this reason the natives don’t enter these caves. Occasionally people have been paralyzed when they have encountered the ihk’al, but the paralysis is only temporary.” “In addition to the flurry of ihk’als sighted about twenty years ago, others have been seen (but less frequently) on up to the present time. They are believed to be beings from another world, and some have been seen flying with some kind of rocket-like thing attached to the back. With this rocket they are said occasionally to have carried off people. It is said that two people can be carried by the ink’al and his rocket at one time. Occasionally, too, other kinds of vehicles have been seen with the ihk’al, and in or near caves.”
Gordon Creighton, a former contributor and editor of England’s Flying Saucer Review, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute [FRAI], added an addendum to Stross’s statement [both published in the same issue of the Flying Saucer Review] in which he wrote, in part: “This ik’al of the Tzotzils flies through the air. Sometimes he steals women, and the women so taken are remarkably prolific, and may bear a child once a week, or once a month, or even daily. The offspring are black, and they learn the art of flying inside their father’s cave.”
“Finally, to complete these notes on what I can gather or recall about legends and tales of small black creatures in Central and South America, I would mention the numerous references made by Lt. Col. P. H. Fawcett, to a dreaded race of small, black, hairy and cannibalistic creatures known in Portuguese as ‘Os Morcegos,’ the ‘Bat People,’ in the far interior of Brazil.”
“One man, drunk, met an ihk’al that jumped all around and kept tickling him. He tried to hit it with a stick, but couldn’t. Finally he was exhausted and fell to the ground. The ihk’al left soon thereafter.”
Stross stated, “Interestingly enough, on the night that I sighted the moving light I found, when I reached San Cristobal, that an American woman had seen a light much closer to the ground that darted rapidly up and down flashing a brilliant light on the ground below. She is convinced that it was a flying saucer. She was in San Cristobal at the time and said that the craft was apparently in the direction of Tenejapa. This was the same night that I saw the light over Chenalho.”
This reminds me of a talk I attended back on December 2, 2005 at the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Given by noted American psychiatrist and parapsychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner, entitled Shamans and Shamanism, in which Dr. Krippner, a man who has studied shamanic cultures in various parts of the world, was asked by an audience member whether shamans reported UFO interactions. He responded in the affirmative. “The reason that there’s not much in the literature is because people haven’t asked that question,” he said. “Anthropologists simply haven’t gone into that area of experience with the shamans.”
Returning to Brazil again, the French born scientist Dr. Jacques Vallee, a computer scientist, venture capitalist and astronomer, described in his book Confrontations: A Scientist’s Search for Alien Contact [1990], some of his investigative work in that country, writing: “There is a legend in the Acarau valley about a small being similar to the elves of Celtic folklore. This being is about four feet tall and is called a Caipora. An old man we interviewed at the Santa Rita Fazenda told us that he knew people who were alive today who had seen the Caipora. Older folks said that one should give him fumo (chewing tobacco), and that dogs that meet the Caipora became afraid and unable to hunt any more. The Caipora is humanoid in shape and can go from one point to another instantly, without using his legs, in the manner of modern UFO entities.” Vallee also found considerable reports of UFO activity in this area.
Back early in 1977, I visited one Paul Fournier of Hallowell, Maine, as he had a business wherein he worked with motion picture film and regular photography. I wanted to consult with him about some super 8mm footage I was examining that some felt were either UFO or paranormal related artifacts. Come to find out, he had once seen a UFO, was a pilot, and he and his wife had just submitted an article for the National Geographic (for a children’s edition) on Mayan legends of the Yucatan. They had just been there shortly before in December working on an assignment about the “Alux,” small sized hairy Bigfoot looking creatures. He talked with a woman who lived near a cemetery who complained of seeing them and how they annoyingly played around with her TV antenna. When Fournier found out that I was friends with a Bigfoot hunter in Florida he asked if he could write her. I remember he shared how the natives believed that these beings lived in caves and how some men once, on a lark, grabbed a local man and tried to pull him into one, with the man kicking and screaming as they did so.
The Djinn Too
Gordon Creighton, Rosemary Ellen Guiley, and California ufologist Ann Druffel felt there was a connection between the ancient Muslim belief in the Djinn and our modern ufonauts. “These creatures, the Djinns of the Muslim religion and the elementals in the Buddhist religion – they reportedly can materialize and dematerialize, and so can our Western culture’s abducting creatures,” she told me. “They shape shift in various forms, they delight in harassing and traumatizing human beings – for their own purpose. I don’t know why. They reportedly abduct human beings and transport them long distances in a matter of seconds, and that’s what happens here. And the Djinn, the elementals, and our own abducting greys have taken a sexual interest in human beings, down through the millenia.” “In every major culture of the world, and in many minor cultures, they all have these same folkloric stories, and even religious and philosophical texts in some of the countries talk about this ‘third order of creation,’ as the Muslim’s call it. They aren’t angels, they aren’t devils, they aren’t human beings. They’re something in between that share our world with us in a hidden state.”
Druffel had interviewed a young Iranian-American college student named Timur of Southern California who described having Djinn encounters. In one he was in bed when he felt a great weight on his chest. He felt he was suffocating and couldn’t move. Eventually he managed, with great effort, to call out to God for help, whereupon he was able to sit up and in his darkened room saw a small dark figure looking at him, while there seemed to be other creatures in his room as well, with cat-like eyes. In a second incident, Timur one night found himself in an out-of-body state. Druffel stated he had previously, on several occasions, voluntarily accomplished out-of-body projection, but on this occasion it was involuntary and that frightened him. Thinking that the Djinn might be involved he wasted no time in returning to the safety of his physical body. Afterwards though, after regaining his composure, he decided to voluntarily leave his body and have a look around. In doing so, he encountered two thin, large dark eyed, grayish-brown beings, who seemed to be floating in the air. They looked to be about four feet tall. These entities seemed to emanate an intense feeling of love, like they were long “lost family,” and he felt they were communicating with him telepathically. He decided that these were good Djinn beings.
The world of folklore, religion and ufology are chalk full of “all kinds of creepy characters,” as John Keel once quipped, once again in his typical tongue-in-cheek fashion. It’s quite interesting to take note of the starkly similar comparisons of such data and to wonder how they might be somehow meaningfully interrelated. There certainly seem to be many similar dots that one can try and connect, though the connectors and the collectors of such high-strange sounding tales are often at odds as to how one should interpret and assign meaning to them.
From a ufological perspective, I don’t believe many of us in this field have been doing a fully proper and adequate job. But this field doesn’t stand alone with regard to that problem. Ufology, cryptozoology and parapsychology for instance share the same myopic problem of not taking serious note and study of the so-called high-strange crossover events and manifestations that reportedly branch out from each separate discipline to reflect interconnectivity that encompasses a much greater range of anomalous phenomena. We need more multidisciplinary work where the ufologist in the field, after dutifully collecting details on a UFO sighting, if something is said of a cryptid or paranormal events, doesn’t fire back, “Oh, that’s not my field. Call somebody else.” And, of course, the same applies to those other fields. Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Colorado’s Ash Staunton of Triangulum Publishing for thoughtfully helping me acquire a copy of England’s Flying Saucer Review that contained Brian Stross and Gordon Creighton’s information on the legendary ihk’al of Central America.
I was scrolling down through Facebook not long ago and was very saddened to read the following post by noted ufologist Peter Robbins: “My friend and colleague, Angela Joiner, was a smart, beautiful and compassionate person, a mother and grandmother, and a crack newspaper reporter,” Peter wrote on January 7th. “Right up until she was fired from her job at the Stephenville Empire-Tribune for her unflinchingly honest reporting on the now-famous Stephensville, Texas UFO sighting of January 2008, the first to inform the world of that breaking story. That was how we met. She and her beloved husband Randell contracted the virus last month and it hit them both very hard. Just after New Years, Randell took a turn for the worse and was taken to their local ICU where he was intubated. On January 3 Angela posted on her Facebook page, ‘Randell needs every prayer you can muster!’ Yesterday [Jan. 6], at a little after 1:00 PM her time, she posted, ‘Fly high Randell! Now you have all the answers of the universe. Love you always!’ Less than an hour after that she posted, ‘Friends and family I am being moved to ICU now. Can't maintain my oxygen in regular room.’ Angelia Joiner died one day after Randell. Those of us who knew and loved her will never forget her. My deepest condolences to her and Randell's family and to their other friends. You can visit her FB page at https://www.facebook.com/angelia.joiner
I sure hated to hear this as well. I interviewed Angela for the July 2009 [#126] edition of Alternate Perceptions. Here’s a link to that feature: http://mysterious-america.com/angelajoinerinte.html
Ever since Angela entered the UFO field in 2008 she's been a very familiar and respected figure in this area of inquiry and I'd see her posts frequently on Facebook. Sadly, Covid has taken out a lot of wonderful folks from us way before their time. As Peter stated at the conclusion of his email, “Wear a mask for God’s sake and social distance.”