Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, July 2023
Rachel Baker, UFOs, and the Little Men
by: Brent Raynes
Soon after meeting Indiana ufologist Don Worley in 1975, I learned of his investigations into the Rachel Baker (a pseudonym) UFO encounter. He had written a thought-provoking article on it in the February 1976 edition of the now defunct Official UFO magazine. With his permission I soon engaged in correspondence with this witness and paid her a visit (with my mom tagging along) on the evening of March 18, 1976. Rachel lived in a large old house built back in 1820, in a very rural setting, at the end of a long gravel road in Deputy, Indiana. She lived alone except for her pet cats and dogs. She told us she felt a very strong closeness to God and felt no need to have a gun for protection. I found her, as Worley had stated, to be a very spiritual person with a strong faith in God. She told me she had been a member of a local Baptist church for 45 years.
It wasn’t until November 1966, a time when certainly many sightings were being reported of UFOs nationwide, that Rachel began to notice strange things in the sky. Around 12:35 a.m., when leaving her place of employment (as a nurse at the State Hospital in nearby Madison) she observed two flying disc-shaped objects. While one of them moved off into the distance, the other approached close to her and followed her for 14 miles to her home. At one point, her car stalled and wouldn’t start for several minutes, while the UFO came to take on an orange glow. By the time she arrived home she was shaking in fright, she stated. A few months later, again while returning home, she saw a silent craft with illuminated windows descend by a power line close to her home, after which the area had a power blackout.
Then shortly after midnight, while again leaving from work on December 8, 1967, Rachel noticed she was being followed home by a large, deep orange colored saucer-shaped craft. At one point she lost sight of it, but then explained to Worley: “Suddenly the car felt like it was hit or grabbed by something. It was like I was being electrocuted, with stinging all over. It became very hot. I heard a humming sound, and there was an odor, as if someone was gassing me. My head and neck (felt like they) were in a vise, and I could only grip the steering wheel. It felt as if I were going down a tunnel, spinning. I had no feeling of being on the road. I could only see straight ahead but saw nothing. I thought I must be having some kind of strange seizure and I got ready for death. Then the car wheels started on the blacktop again. Kind of bumpy at first. The car rolled to a stop and I relaxed all over as if in a heavy stupor. That’s when I don’t remember for a while. I don’t know how long. I don’t know when I got home.”
When it was all over and she was back home, we learn that she was feeling quite ill, felt like vomiting, with a hurting head, neck and spine. She was covered with a red rash and large blisters, and so swollen she could not wear her bra. Her ’67 Buick had a burst water hose, the battery died, and the car radio wouldn’t work, and all her windows leaked.
The strangeness continued. “During the following month a little person and a black car entered her life,” Worley reported. “The little dark man or boy was suddenly standing at her door one day. Her dog ran and hid. Rachel smelled an odor like rotten eggs. He dashed out of sight faster than any human she had ever seen. For a period of about a month the big black car would be waiting in the road for her with its lights out. It would go down the road cutting into her lane. Her phone line has a history of strange noises. I witnessed this on one occasion.”
At age five, Rachel fell off a horse and struck her head upon the ground. She became aware of a strange light inside her head during this time as she tried to come back around. She tells how soon afterwards she began to become aware that she had psychic abilities. She described how she would tell her mother about approaching storms, which would upset her mom, who would threaten to whip her for talking about such things. Rachel also said she had an ability too for detecting where lost objects could be found. Years later, as an adult, she would engage in correspondence with parapsychologists about her experiences, like Dr. Karlis Osis of New York’s American Society of Psychic Research and the Rhine’s of North Carolina’s Duke University. Mrs. Rhine had encouraged Rachel to keep a diary of such things, which she began doing in 1958. Rachel would have strange lucid dreams, some which she felt were out-of-body projections. “Before the UFO encounter, whenever I would have an out-of-body experience, I would always be myself, regular sized,” she explained to me. “After the UFO encounter, whenever I have an out-of-body experience, I am a little person, maybe 24 to 30 inches tall. We would crawl in holes, inside of mountains, into pyramids, down into tunnels to large rooms, where they had their supplies stored for future use. They were coming back to planet earth again. These pyramids were in South and Central America. We would be checking on the large earth people, trying to influence them in their thinking.”
Rachel had a good many stories of these little people appearing in and around her home. Worley correctly pointed to their similarity to such entities described in folklore, pointing to the gentry of Ireland, the trolls of Scandinavia, and so on. Certainly, Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia (1969) presents an excellent review of numerous accounts of both modern ufonauts and ancient folkloric entities. In one of Rachel’s letters to me later in June 1984, she included one encounter that involved a mysterious black box, that many other UFO contact experiencers have described over the years. “I saw six little people in brown suits about 30 inches tall. They had a black box from 8 to 12 inches by 1 inch thick on a string or a line (rope). They then got up on the bed, pulled the covers off me, and put this black box on my back, where my kidneys are. It was so hot I tried to scream. Then I passed out.”
During my visit with Rachel in 1976, she shared an interesting story of her mother once seeing little people. “The incident took place in Jefferson County, in the year 1910,” she said. “My old home place was on a large farm. My father was fox hunting late at night, maybe 12 or 1 o’clock. He loved to fox hunt. My mother would stay home but she would get up and go out on the huge porch to listen to the hounds run. One night in September, the moon was shining bright as day and the yard had several large shade trees. Then he saw several small men moving back and forth. They would disappear, then reappear, like they were working maybe 200 yards away in the front yard, near a huge boulder, which was red in color. …She watched for about one hour, then went inside the house. She was afraid so she did not go out again that night. She said that these tiny men were about three foot tall and they looked like the pictures of Indians, with pointed faces. She never talked about this – only with a few close friends. She died in 1942. Gradually the huge boulder disappeared. No one seemed to know what happened to it. It was the only stone of its kind I ever saw. It was round and red. I live one mile north from the old homestead and I own part of it. …I was born in the old log farmhouse in the year 1918. I used to sit on this stone when I was a child.”
At one point, Rachel left the room for a moment, at which time my mom in a low but concerned sounding tone said to me, “You better not be thinking about spending the night here!”
Although she never would admit that she gave any such stories credence, I could tell she was a bit on edge after hearing such strange accounts. Later that night I thanked Rachel for her time and the sharing of her stories, and my mom and I headed off back to where we were staying with my Ufological friends Charles and Geri Wilhelm of the Ohio UFO Investigators League in Fairfield, Ohio.
