In this episode, I will explore the 1973 Pascagoula Abduction story where two men were allegedly abducted while fishing from a pier.
In this episode, I will explore the 1973 Pascagoula Abduction story where two men were allegedly abducted while fishing from a pier.
Ep 33 Pascagoula
Hello and welcome back to the UFO and Aliens Podcast. I’m your host Rick Black. It has been a crazy week. I’m out of town at a conference for my day job and I’ve been checking in on the podcast from time to time and the downloads are exploding. I don’t know what happened, but there have been more downloads this week than any other week and not by a little. I know I have some dedicated listeners and I really appreciate you, but there are also some new folks having a listen. And I say welcome to you, I hope you are enjoying listening. Tell your friends.
Last week I talked about the Coyne Helicopter UFO and I also mentioned the rash of UFO incidents in 1973. Today I am going to look into an interesting case of abduction. It is the Pascagoula Abduction Incident.
The Pascagoula Incident involved two men, Parker and Hickson, both from Gautier, Mississippi, who decided to go fishing after their shift at the Walker Shipyard. They were fishing in the Pascagoula River when they heard a buzzing noise behind them. Both turned and were terrified to see a ten-foot-wide, eight-foot-high, glowing egg-shaped object with blue lights at its front hovering just above the ground about forty feet from the river bank. As the men, frozen with fright, watched, a door appeared in the object, and three strange beings floated just above the river towards them.
It was on the evening of October 11th, 1973. 42-year-old Charles Hickson and 19-year-old Calvin Parker told the Jackson County, Mississippi Sheriff’s office they were fishing off a pier on the west bank of the Pascagoula River in Mississippi when they heard a whirring/whizzing sound, saw two flashing blue lights, and observed an oval shaped object 30-40 feet across and 8-10 feet high. One source says the object was ten feet wide and eight feet high and another says that it’s thirty to forty feet across. There were only two witnesses, and that’s a big discrepancy.
Both men are frozen with fear. One article says that they were paralyzed somehow and couldn’t move anything except their eyes. Another one says that Calvin Parker passed out and was out for the entire event. He feels compelled to go along with Hickson’s story, but really doesn’t know anything except for the initial sighting.
So the men are frozen, either by fright or they have been rendered motionless somehow and a door appears in the object. The way that this is worded, it makes me picture a smooth side of the object with no seams or indication that there is door and then ‘poof’ a door appears and three strange beings floated out of it. They floated just above the river towards the two men.
The beings had legs but didn’t use them. They were about five feet tall, had bullet-shaped heads without necks, slits for mouths, and where their noses and ears would be, they had thin, conical objects sticking out, like carrots from a snowman’s head. Except, not just where the nose should be, but where the ears should be also. There is a drawing of this thing on ufoevidence.org and it is really odd looking. They had no eyes, they had grey, wrinkled skin, round feet and claw-like hands.
Two of the beings grabbed Hickson; when the third grabbed Parker, that’s when the teenager fainted. Passed right out. Hickson claimed that when the Beings placed their hands under his arms, his body became numb, and then they floated him into a brightly lit room in the UFO’s interior, where he was subjected to a medical examination with an eyelike, device which, Iike Hickson Himself, was floating in mid-air.
When the exam ended, the Beings simply left Hickson floating, paralyzed except for his eyes, and went to examine Parker, who, Hickson believed was in another room. Twenty minutes after Hickson had first observed the UFO, he was floated back outside and released. He found Parker weeping and praying on the ground near him. Moments later, the object rose straight up and shot out of sight.
This craft makes me think of a movie I saw years ago with my cousin. We would watch these outrageous sci-fi movies that were so bad and we would make jokes about them the whole time. Kind of like Mystery Science Theater 3,000 but before that. In the movie I’m talking about, there is this submarine. From the outside, it is this tiny little submersible that you could probably fit three people in if you squeezed them in, but it would be a tight fit. But when they showed a scene from inside the submarine, they were in this huge room with two doors behind them obviously leading to other rooms and the characters were sitting at the controls with so much room above and behind them, it looked like the bridge of a massive aircraft carrier.
That’s what I think of because the craft is described as being ten feet wide and eight feet high, yet there were two humans and three aliens in there and one of the humans was in another room. That is one magic egg-shaped craft.
So that’s what happened. Allegedly. At first, the two men didn’t want to tell anybody because they were afraid of the ridicule that it would cause and nobody wants that, right? But then they thought that the government might want, or need to know about it so they called Kessler Air Force Base in Biloxi. But the air-force was like “nah, we’re good” you should probably call the sheriff. They really didn’t want to go the local police, or sheriff because they were worried about the reception their bizarre story might get from local law so, get this! They decide to drive to the local newspaper office to speak to a reporter. That doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Not if they were worried about what people would think. I guess they weren’t worried about the ridicule like they claimed. Something doesn’t sound right here.
They get to the newspaper office and it’s closed. After hours. They felt that they had no alternative than to go and talk to the sheriff. I guess they couldn’t wait until business hours to tell their story.
I’m really coming into this with an open mind, but it just doesn’t have that truth feel about it. I’m going to keep trying.
The sheriff, after listening to their story, put Hickson and Parker in a room wired for sound in the belief that if the two men were left alone they would reveal their hoax; of course they did not. The local press reported their tale; the wire services picked it up; and within several days the Pascagoula Encounter was major news all over the country. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), founded in 1952, sent University of California engineering professor James Harder to Mississippi to investigate. J. Allen Hynek, representing the Air Force, also arrived. Together they interviewed the witnesses. Harder hypnotized Hickson but had to terminate the session when Hickson became too frightened to continue.
Hickson and Parker both subsequently passed lie detector tests. Hynek and Harder believed the two men’s story. And Hynek was later quoted as saying “There was definitely something here that was not terrestrial”.
Well, if they didn’t want attention, they got it anyway. I really think they wanted the attention based on what they did. Not on what they said. Hickson gave interviews and lectures. He appeared on television (including an episode of the game show To Tell The Truth. Which was a gameshow that featured a celebrity panel that tried to guess which of three contestants is the person they are claiming to be.) I don’t know which one was on the Dick Cavett Show, but one or both of them were. In 1974 Hickson claimed he had additional encounters with aliens and in 1983 he authored a self-published book UFO Contact at Pascagoula. Hickson died in September of 2011 of a heart attack.
Parker started going to UFO conventions, and in 1993 started a company called “UFO Investigations” to produce television stories about UFOs.
In 2018, Parker released his book, entitled Pascagoula—The Closest Encounter, My Story, which is “the first full account of the event given by Parker along with how it affected his life.
Their story was in the April 1975 edition of Flying Saucer Review in an article titled “The Pascagoula UFO and Occupant Incident”. Their story was the anchor of the book “Beyond Earth: Man’s Contact with UFOs” by Ralph and Judy Blum. On the cover of this book there is a sentence that reads “Are Van Danikans Ancient Astronauts Landing in America Today?” Well, I guess that’s more of a question than it is an sentence. This book was published in 1974, so that’s how far back the Ancient Alien Theory goes back. It just took 25, 30 years for it to gain traction.
And there is a new book called “ Beyond Reasonable Doubt”” The Pascagoula Alien Abduction”, by Philip Mantle and Irena McCammon Scott with a forward by Calvin Parker.
And there is more out there. The story has legs and people are continuing to look into it and write about it. Unfortunately, you can no longer interview the witnesses. Parker just recently died from kidney cancer in August 2023.
Back on June 22, 2019, the city of Pascagoula allowed a historical marker to be placed at the site of the alleged abduction, it was funded by the historical society. Parker attended the unveiling, as well as Hickson’s son and family. Parker said “It is emotional for me. I can’t really describe it because I would break out in tears if I do. I wish when I died I could be buried right here underneath this plaque, that would explain it the best.”
It looked like Charles Hickson had no problem with people knowing about his encounter. Until his death in 2011, he told his story to anyone who would listen.
But Calvin Parker. Now, that’s a different story. He said that the encounter turned his life upside down. He was not okay with the instant notoriety. He was bombarded with people wanting to learn more about that night. There were reporters and UFO enthusiasts actually going to his work at Walker Shipyard to talk to him and ask him questions. He tried to lay low and stay out of the spotlight. That had to be tough for him.
The incident made headlines, sparked a wave of UFO sightings nationwide and became one of the most widely examined cases on record. Skeptics ranged from the deputies who first interviewed the men to an author who sought to poke holes in the story, and Parker himself has had conflicting thoughts about whether he was visited by aliens or demons.
One source says that Parker fainted when the entity grabbed him and was out the whole time. Another says that Parker was conscious but paralyzed. If that’s the case, then he would have a memory of the incident. He said “They gave a thorough, I mean a thorough examination to me just like any doctor would”.
When they were back on the shore, where it all began. One source says shore, another says pier. The UFO was gone and Parker said they tried to collect themselves. Hickson needed three shots of liquor from a bottle in his car to calm his nerves before deciding to report what happened.
At the Jackson County Sheriff's Department, deputies initially suspected both men were drunk. Then-Capt. Glenn Ryder said he laughed at the report, but met with the men. Parker and Hickson stuck to their story.
I mentioned before that the sheriff put them in a room that was wired for sound to try to catch them pulling a hoax. The Sheriff expect them to say something like “Well, we got them fooled” But,on the tape, Hickson tells Parker “I scared me to death too, son. You can’t get over it in a lifetime. Jesus Christ have mercy.”
The Sheriff was convinced that they were genuinely afraid of what they experienced that night.
For two weeks after the encounter, hundreds of reports flooded in to authorities in south Mississippi.
There were hoaxes and humor too. A Long Beach Mississippi taxi driver told police a being with pincers tapped on his window, a story he admitted days later was fake.
A Mobile, Alabama television station said it would record a UFO appearance predicted by a psychic between Mobile and nearby Pascagoula. Roughly 1,000 cars converged on the spot, where…..nothing happened.
An Ocean Springs alderman proposed an ordinance making it illegal to operate a UFO at more than twice the speed of light on U.S. 90, the coast’s main drag. Mayor Tom Stennis voted against the ordinance, joking he didn’t want to discourage tourism.
Parker had a hard time with the attention. He married later in 1973 and eventually took oil industry and out-of-state construction jobs to escape the attention. He said “ By the time you get somewhere and they figure out who you were, I’d just go, I’d just go find another job somewhere”.
Aviation journalist and UFO skeptic Philip J. Krass found ‘discrepancies’ in Hickson’s story. He said that Hickson refused to take a polygraph exam conducted by an experienced examiner, and concluded that the case was a hoax. Earlier I mentioned that both men had taken and passed a polygraph test. Which is true? Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell wrote that Hickson’s behavior was ‘questionable’ and that Hickson later altered or embellished his claims. Nickell speculated that Hickson may have fantasized the alien encounter during a hypnagogic ‘waking dream state’, and suggested that Parker’s corroboration of the tale was likely due to suggestibility because he initially told police he had “passed out at the beginning of the incident and failed to regain consciousness until it was over” a claim supported by Hickson during his To Tell The Truth appearance.
So, we have conflicting stories about whether Parker was awake or not. When that happens, it almost confirms that someone is lying.
So what do you think? If you are intrigued and want to look deeper, you should pick up one of those books. You can probably get one for about 20 bucks and it would be a fun read.
But remember, Believe none of what you hear and half of what you read.
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Do you have a UFO story that you’d like to share? Is there a UFO story that you’d like for me to look into? Just send me an e-mail at ufoandalienpodcast@gmail.com I’m Rick Black and I’ll talk to you next time.