The Pascagoula Abduction

Autumn 1973. A wave of UFO reports was sweeping the American South, especially Louisiana and Mississippi.

Thursday, October 11. Two shipyard workers from Gautier went fishing off a pier on the west bank of the Pascagoula River. Charles Hickson was a foreman. Calvin Parker was with him.

Dusk was falling. Then came a sound. "A little buzzin' sound," Hickson recalled. A craft "come right down above the bayou," hovering two or three feet off the ground. It was oblong, he said, about eight feet tall, with a blue light. Others would call it egg-shaped, or football-shaped.

An opening appeared at one end. "Three of them just floated out of the thing," Hickson said. They were about five feet tall and pale, with wrinkled skin like an elephant's. No visible neck. A slit for a mouth. Something jutting out where a nose would be. Long arms ending in claw-like hands.

They took Hickson by the arms and floated him inside. He seemed to hang in the air at an angle of 45 degrees. Something like "a big eye" came out of the wall and moved over his body. "Up and down." Early accounts say Parker fainted. In 2013 he said he had been conscious but paralyzed. Then the men were back on the riverbank. The craft shot straight up with a whistling sound and was gone.

Around 11 pm they reached the Jackson County sheriff's office. Captain Glenn Ryder suspected a prank. He smelled alcohol on Hickson but said the men were not drunk. Hickson said he drank whiskey only after being released.

So the deputies set a trap. They left the men alone with a hidden recorder running, hoping to catch them admitting a lie. It never came. "I gotta go to the house. I'm gettin' sick," Parker says on the tape. Then Hickson: "They won't believe it. They gonna believe it one of these days."

At Keesler Air Force Base both men were cleared of radiation exposure. J. Allen Hynek, the former Project Blue Book consultant, and James Harder of APRO came to Mississippi and interviewed them separately under hypnosis. On October 15, Scott Glasgow of the Pendleton Detective Agency tested Hickson on a polygraph and found his story truthful "according to the polygraph technique." Chief investigator Howard Ellzy put it simply: "Whatever it was, it was real to them."

Philip J. Klass called it a hoax in his 1974 book UFOs Explained. He argued that Hickson's story changed in some details and that the polygraph examiner was too inexperienced. The railroad drawbridge operator, on duty all night, saw nothing unusual. In 2012 Joe Nickell suggested in Skeptical Inquirer that Hickson may have imagined it in a hypnagogic "waking dream state," with Parker going along through suggestibility. Parker had his own doubts about the beings. "They might have been demons," he said in 2013.

Others saw things too. Service-station operator Larry Booth had phoned the sheriff around 8 pm about a craft with a blinking, colored light. Years later, retired Navy chief petty officer Mike Cataldo described an object "like a whitish-gray colored sailor hat" dropping into the marsh near the shipyard. Hickson died in 2011. In 2019 Parker attended the unveiling of a historical marker at Lighthouse Park. He died in August 2023. Jerome Clark called it "the second most famous UFO-abduction case in history."