The Pascagoula River enters the Gulf of Mexico at
Pascagoula, Mississippi. This was where, on the evening of 11th
October 1973, 19-year-old Calvin Parker and 42-year-old Charles Hickson were
fishing from a pier jutting into the river when, according to their testimony,
they had an experience that brought them considerable fame – or possibly
notoriety, depending on your point of view.
The story goes that they heard a loud buzzing noise behind
them and turned round to see a glowing egg-shaped object, about 3 metres wide
and 2.5 metres high, at a distance of about 12 metres. It was hovering above
the ground and had flashing blue lights on it.
Three strange creatures emerged from the egg. They were
quite short, at little over a metre in height, vaguely humanoid but with round
feet and claw-like hands. Their heads were bullet-shaped, they had no necks, or
even eyes, but slit-like mouths and odd lumps that seemed to serve as ears and
noses.
These “aliens” grabbed hold of the two fishermen and hustled
them on board their craft. The younger man, Calvin Parker, fainted from the
shock and therefore could not offer any further details of what happened, but
Charles Hickson remained conscious and he was therefore the sole source of
information for the supposed event.
According to Hickson, once on board the craft the two men
were examined closely for about 20 minutes by a hovering electronic eye, after
which they were returned to the pier completely unharmed.
The craft then took off and disappeared skywards at great
speed, leaving Parker and Hickson with an extraordinary tale to tell. Or to put
it another way, it left Hickson with a tale to tell because – as mentioned
above – Parker was apparently out cold from beginning to end of the “alien
encounter”.
The only corroboration of Hickson’s story came from reports
of a sonic boom heard that evening across Ohio and Pennsylvania, for which no
direct cause could be assigned. Could this have been caused by the alien “egg”
heading off back to its mother ship?
During the following days hundreds of other reports flooded
in of UFO sightings, notably from Ohio and West Virginia, thus lending credence
to the tale told by Charles Hickson. Pressmen from far and wide descended on Pascagoula
and the two “abductees” became celebrities in the UFO watching community, being
invited to conventions and conferences for years afterwards. Their story
clearly did them no harm as far as their bank balances were concerned.
But what is the possibility that the men were talking about
a real experience as opposed to an invented one? There are several factors in
this story that should make sane people wonder at the credulity of some their
fellow human beings!
For one thing, as mentioned above, we only have Charles
Hickson’s word for most of the story, due to Calvin Parker’s apparent
unconsciousness during most of the supposed encounter. A sceptic will
immediately conclude that this would be remarkably convenient for someone who
wanted to spin an alien abduction yarn – if only one person tells the tale, they
cannot be accused of telling it differently from someone else. As it was,
Charles Hickson was happy to take a lie detector test from an inexperienced
polygraph operator but not from someone who knew what they were doing.
There are in any case some facts that don’t add up. Why, for
example, would a sonic boom heard in Ohio have anything to do with an alien
spacecraft taking off on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, 850 miles away? If
this strange craft with its flashing blue lights was able to land close to a
town with a population of around 20,000, how come no-else else saw it arriving
or leaving?
Then of course there is the massive improbability of alien
lifeforms travelling for many years across the vast distances of space for the
sole purpose – it would appear – of scaring the living daylights out of two
guys fishing beside a river in Mississippi! No-one else reported a similar
encounter at around that time, so what were these aliens doing during the rest
of their visit to Planet Earth? For the Pascagoula encounter to be even remotely
credible one would have to assume that the aliens’ mindset would have been
similar to that of the crew of Apollo 11 had they stepped on to the Moon,
grabbed a few rocks and headed straight home again!
A highly unlikely story!
© John Welford
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