Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, September 2024
Tennessee man who claimed encounter with “little men” singing and dancing around a flying saucer
by: Brent Raynes
Stanley Ingram of Lewisburg, Tennessee, had worked in cattle farming, was a former city judge and city manager in Lewisburg, as well as a Life-Health Insurance Representative, and someone I had come to know quite well back in 1975 as he was a regular columnist for the Pulaski Citizen newspaper, where he had been writing articles about local UFO sightings back then. In fact, he and a NASA scientist named W. A. Darbro, who worked at Huntsville, Alabama's Marshall Space Flight Center, wrote a book together about these sightings entitled Unidentified Flying Objects over the Tennessee Valley (1974). I came to know Mr. Ingram quite well, and he introduced me to quite a few witnesses. Particularly people with alleged high strange encounters with aliens, Men in Black, and even Bigfoot. One notable claimant, who I never did get to meet, but who periodically came up in our conversations and was mentioned in his book, was a man named Carl Haynes. Ingram met Haynes back on May 5, 1973, for an interview. The story this man told would have been a perfect fit for Jacques Vallee's 1969 book Passport to Magonia, which delved heavily into comparisons between our modern UFO-related diminutive being encounters and the tales of fairies, gnomes, and other "little people" of the British Isles, our Native Americans, and others across the globe.
The story that Haynes told was how it was nearly 11 p.m., a Wednesday, around June 1952. He was 22-years-old at the time. He was walking down a dirt road returning home after being out to see a movie in a nearby town and was returning on foot, which was about a three-mile trek, to his home on Little Spring Creek in a rural part of Hickman County, Tennessee.
He claimed that during this walk he began to hear what sounded like some kind of "weird music and weird singing." He said he got to the top of a hill where a man was outside his home. "He was a blind man and he had heard this weird music and he was out in his front yard, and he asked me what in the world was that noise. I told him I didn't know since I hadn't ever heard anything like that." From the hilltop Haynes began to notice light down around the Creek bank. "They was just the brightest lights you ever saw and they was just lighting the sky and the fields up all around. Just like in town. All this weird music and lights was like a circus would make but there wouldn't be no circus way out here in the sticks, you know," he told Ingram. He claimed he crawled down on his stomach to within an estimated seventy-five yards of the activity. After watching for a while he became convinced he was seeing what people have described over the years as a "flying saucer." However, there was more: "There was four or five of these little men - I couldn't tell for shore because of all them bright lights - they would blind you - but there was at least four or five that I saw on the outside, but I knew there must have been more on the inside I couldn't see - and they was dancing and singing. They was dancing all around this spaceship and singing."
Ingram tape recorded an interview with Haynes, who he described as a "plain old country boy" with no reason to make up such a story. He produced the following transcript of their interview:
Ingram: Were they making the music?
Haynes: They were singing and I am not sure but I think the music was coming from the inside out of that door.
Ingram: Can you describe the music? Was it made by musical instruments?
Haynes: Yes, of some kind. It was like - well, maybe like bagpipes. You know how they sound but this music was weirder than that.
Ingram: How tall would you say they were?
Haynes: Well, from where I was, if I had of been closer, I'd say four and a half, five feet tall. Something like that. Little men. They were little men. A lot smaller than we are.
Ingram: Did they have coarse or high-pitched voices?
Haynes: High pitched. Like children would make.
Ingram: Did they talk to each other?
Haynes: Yes, but there wasn't no way in the world to tell what they was saying. Some kind of strange talk.
Ingram: Now about the ship itself. Did it glow or reflect?
Haynes: Yes, itself - just a aluminum color - you know - it had three or four different colors - colors that you couldn't describe - orange and blue looking glow - different from anything I've ever seen. Lights that was so bright it would just ruin your eyes if it hit you in the eye - just so bright you couldn't stand to see them.
Ingram: Did any of the lights move?
Haynes: Yes, rotated.
Ingram: Were these lights around the middle of the saucer?
Haynes: No, they was around the top part. There was a little, well, dome or something - looked like glass and all these colored lights. They was so powerful. You just knowed they was up there - any color you could think of.
Ingram: What did this saucer set on?
Haynes: Just little legs with a ball on the bottom and a little claw.
Ingram: How many legs?
Haynes: Four legs. I went back and checked then on Sunday morning. You know to see if I had been dreamin' or something. I wanted to be shore, and in this chert, where they had been hauling it, just like a highway, I could see the four tracks and this little claw in the middle to hold it - keep it from slippin'.
Ingram: A claw? Or a spike?
Haynes: Yes, right in the middle. It sunk all the way down in this hard chert. Must have weighed a ton and the tracks of the little men. Funny feet.
Ingram: Funny? How?
Haynes: Well, they didn't look like our tracks. No heel marks.
Ingram: Like a moccasin would make?
Haynes: Kind of like that and funny shaped.
Ingram: What do you mean?
Haynes: Well, their tracks was more narrow than we would make. It was dusty and hadn't been nothing in there since they left. Just plain as you please there in the dust.
Ingram: How long did you watch them? How long from the time you heard them singing until they took off?
Haynes: Forty-five minutes at the least. I guess one hour. It took me about half a hour to crawl down that long hill to this drain down the bank of the road. I was laying in this drain and just peeping over enough to see, but they was too smart for me. They knowed I was there well ten minutes after I got there.
Ingram: How could you tell they had detected or picked you up?
Haynes: The way they acted - stopped dancing and singing and putting things in the spaceship getting ready to take off.
Ingram: How did they pick you up? Did they have something in their hands?
Haynes: Yes, they had things in their hands. I don't know what they was. Instruments (musical) or radar or something. They knowed I was there.
Ingram: Did they come towards you?
Haynes: Yes, they came as far as the creek. They would have come on, cause they wanted to do something about me. That water is all that saved me. They was scared of that water. They didn't want no part of that water.
Ingram: They picked up your direction. They were coming towards you?
Haynes: They knowed I was there - with that radar or something. These things in their hands. They looked like guns.
Ingram: You are a pretty big fellow. You might have given them a fit.
Haynes: I'd have tried to of got away that's for shore.
Ingram: What did they do next?
Haynes: Well, they all went in that door the light was shining out and shut the door.
Ingram: How did they get into the saucer?
Haynes: They just walked up into it.
Ingram: How?
Haynes: On that door or a thing that came to the ground.
Ingram: A ramp or steps?'
Haynes: Yes, just like you seen people get on a airplane.
Ingram: What happened to the ramp?
Haynes: It just went up in the spaceship - automatic like - and the door shut.
Ingram: Sliding Door?
Haynes: Slidin' door, just shut automatic like.
Ingram: How high off of the ground did the saucer set?
Haynes: I'd say three or four feet. Yet it set real high in the middle. Seven or eight feet. Real roomy through the middle.
Ingram: Did it look like two saucers or cereal bowls stuck together?
Haynes: That's how you would describe it. Like two saucers stuck together.
Ingram: Then what happened?
Haynes: They got it cranked up - made a whistlin sound and just went straight up in a sort of twisting, corkscrew motion. Brightened up more brighter when it took off. Them lights was bright enough as they was but they got brighter and I watched it till you could just see a glow in the sky. It never did level off as I could tell. Just straight up till you couldn't see it anymore. Ingram: Did anyone else see this besides yourself?
Haynes: Well, that blind man heard the music and singing and this other fellow who heard the music and saw the lights, further away, you know, he said later he would have gone with me in a minute if I had come after him, but that would have been a mistake, you know, if me and him had gone right over to it. Me and him might not have got back! But these men have both passed on now. I told my mother and father about it and a few other people but people will say you aught not to tell things like that. People won't believe it, but it's the God's truth. I wouldn't have no reason to tell a story about it. I've thought about it a thousand times since. I remember it just like it was yesterday and ain't no way I could forget it. I've thought time and time again that I aught to report it but I didn't know who to tell and I glad to tell you about it. It stays on a fellow's mind, you know."
Haynes took Ingram and a friend of his to the very spot on the creek bank where two creeks came together and pointed out where the "little men" he said had been dancing and singing weird songs around the mysterious saucer. In his transcript from the recorded interview, Ingram kept Haynes' words and country expressions as he said them, adding "not to be critical and in no way to make fun of grammatical errors but because it is more convincing to hear it in his own words. ...I am convinced that he is telling the truth."
Reference: Unidentified Flying Objects over the Tennessee Valley by W. A. Darbro and Stanley L. Ingram, published in 1974, by South Publishing Company, 909 Chatterson Road, Huntsville, Alabama 35802
