United States.Pascagoula · two fishermen report an abduction

Around 7:00 p.m. on October 11, 1973, Charles Hickson, 42, and Calvin Parker, 19, were fishing from an abandoned pier on the west bank of the Pascagoula River, on the Mississippi coast. According to the UPI wire story of the next day, which quoted the chief deputy, they saw a strange craft about two miles away emitting a bluish haze, which came closer and hovered three or four feet above the water. In his statement that night, Hickson described it as a blue light that circled a bit, with a buzzing sound, and as an oblong object about eight feet tall with an opening at one end.

Out of it, gliding, came three robotic-looking figures (wrinkled, grayish skin, claw-like hands and what looked like conical protrusions on the face) that immobilized the two men and took them inside. There, they said, a kind of optical instrument examined them before they were returned to the bank. Hickson estimated they were inside for 15 to 20 minutes and said his own body floated toward the craft. Parker told officers he passed out when the creatures emerged and did not come to until he was back on the pier. Both said they had not been drinking beforehand, but admitted having "a drink or two" afterward to settle their nerves.

They first called Keesler Air Force Base, which referred them to the Jackson County Sheriff's Department, where they arrived around 11:00 p.m. After taking their statements, Sheriff Fred Diamond and Captain Glen Ryder left them alone in the room with the tape recorder still running, to check whether the story was made up. Ryder told the press they did everything they knew to break their stories, but "both stories fit". The tape caught nothing suggesting they had agreed on a story: it captured two deeply distressed men, Parker asking for a doctor and saying he froze and passed out, Hickson worried about telling his wife; when Hickson left the room, Parker, alone, prayed quietly. Chief Deputy Barney Mathis said there was nothing on the tape to indicate a hoax.

The next morning they were taken to Keesler, where doctors ran a radiation check and swabbed their hands and shoes, and the base intelligence chief heard their story. According to the UPI story, neither had apparent injuries, and the next day the base said Air Force physicians had found no evidence of radiation. The base promised to send its report to the sheriff, but according to detective Tom Huntley it never arrived, and the base information office said the case was closed.

That night the sheriff had received other calls about a strange blue light in the sky. Journalist Ralph Blum spoke days later with some of those witnesses: city councilman E. P. Sigalas, riding in a car with probation officer R. H. Broadus, said that around 7:40 p.m. they saw something they first took for a large helicopter and that looked "perfectly cylindrical"; service station owner Larry Booth saw, shortly after 9:00 p.m., a low, slow, silent object with a row of rotating red lights; and detective Huntley told him a shipyard crane operator had also seen something.

Hickson, not Parker, passed a polygraph arranged by the agent with whom they had signed a contract to promote their story; the skeptic Philip Klass objected that the operator was inexperienced and that Hickson refused another test by a police examiner. Investigator James Harder tried to hypnotize them; Jerome Clark writes that he did not succeed, although at the press conference Harder maintained that "a very strong feeling of terror is practically impossible to fake under hypnosis". Nor did the account stay the same: Klass noted discrepancies in the description of the beings, and a month later Hickson said on television that the craft's light had injured his eyes for three days, although the hospital examination of the next day had found no eye damage. Hickson stood by his version until his death; Parker, who avoided speaking for decades and shunned attention, later reaffirmed it in books and interviews, until his death in 2023.

It is an abduction account, what ufology calls a close encounter of the fourth kind, and what gave it weight was the sheriff's secret recording: meant to catch the two men in a lie, it captured fear and no sign that they had agreed on a story. That same night other residents called about lights in the sky.

There is no physical evidence at all: no marks, no debris, no images, and the radiation check found nothing. A polygraph is not a reliable detector of truth, and hypnosis can amplify memory rather than recover it. Klass concluded the case was a hoax. Joe Nickell proposed another explanation in 2012: that the two men, perhaps after drinking, dozed off, and that Hickson entered a hypnagogic state, the transition between waking and sleep, which can be accompanied by sleep paralysis; Parker's account, since he said he passed out and later "remembered" bits and pieces, would fit, according to Nickell, a shared delusion (folie à deux). Nickell discounts a hoax partly because, secretly recorded, they said nothing incriminating.

The witnesses' sincerity does not confirm what happened on the river, but it makes an ordinary hoax hard to sustain; Hickson's account, moreover, grew over the years.