On the evening of October 11, 1973, Gautier resident Charles Hickson and his buddy Calvin Parker were fishing on the Pascagoula River when they heard a screeching sound behind them.
“It was like air or steam or something escaping from a pipe,” Hickson said. Turning around, they saw “some kind of craft, probably 30 or 40 feet long.” They were then approached by “three things, they weren’t human beings. I know now they were robots,” Hickson explained.
“They had something like elephant skin, very wrinkled. These things came to us and took a hold of me, and one took a hold of Calvin. We went into that beam of light and they carried us aboard that craft.”
Charles and Calvin were submitted to the intimate scrutiny of the aliens for a half hour. “Something came out of a wall, like a big eye. It came up in front of me, it went under me, and it came up my back side. The next time I saw it, it came over my head in front of me. Then they turned me around and carried me right back out where they picked me up.” In the blink of an eye, the UFO was gone, and the men were left pondering what had happened.
“I thought it might be some type of threat to the country. We talked it over and decided we would go the sheriff’s department,” Hickson said.
Both men passed lie detector tests and were questioned under hypnosis. Investigators are on record as claiming that their story never wavered. When interviewed by WLOX reporter Patrice Clark 35 years later, Hickson said, “I am not trying to force anybody to believe anything. I just simply tell them what happened to Calvin and me, and they make up their own minds if they want to believe it or not. There are objects that come from other worlds out there, and those worlds are . . . I have no idea.”
Hickson, who died in 2011 at the age of 80, was very public about the incident. He was still known to occasionally sell his book, “UFO Contact at Pascagoula,” outside local businesses. He reportedly told friends and family — and sometimes total strangers — that aliens continued to communicate with him via telepathic means.
In his book, which he co-authored with William Mendez, Hickson wrote that aliens contacted him three times following the abduction — in January 1974 at a local tree farm, in February 1974 at his home and on Mother’s Day in 1974 on Miss. 67. He said the messages were always the same — “We mean you no harm. You are the chosen one. Your world needs our help.”
Parker, however, was seriously disturbed by the events, and didn’t embrace the attention. In the years that followed, Parker said he changed jobs and relocated to other towns when people realized who he was, largely remained in the background without ever detailing the full account of what happened that night, how it affected him and his life, and other close encounters he has experienced down the years.
But in July, 2018, at the urging of his wife, Waynette, Parker published a book about the encounter to set the record straight. His book, Pascagoula – The Closest Encounter, containing the full transcript of Calvin Parker’s hypnotic regression session with the late Budd Hopkins, one of the world’s foremost researchers of this phenomena.
“I felt like everyone deserved an explanation,” Parker told the Clarion Ledger in 2018. “Everyone has an expiration date and I wanted to get this out there before I die. I’ve had some near-death experiences and I’m in bad health. I just wanted to do it.”
The book prompted others to come forward saying they saw objects in the sky that night that couldn’t be explained. These were compiled in a subsequent book, Pascagoula—The Story Continues: New Evidence & New Witnesses, published in September, 2019. Like Parker, many said they had been largely quiet about their sightings for 45 years due to fear of ridicule.
The retellingof the story also met with favor in Pascagoula. A historical marker was placed along the Pascagoula River and the city now celebrates the event with an annual alien festival in October.
The evidence of Hickson and Parker’s abduction was crucial in the establishment of the National UFO Reporting Center in 1974, an institution that conceivably could play a critical role in the security not only of our nation, but of our world itself, which might ultimately constitute Mississippi’s greatest contribution to mankind next to Elvis.
