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Hidden History: The Pascagoula Space Aliens [1]
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Date: 2025-07-01
For a time in the 1970s, the Pascagoula “alien abduction” was one of the most famous UFO cases in the US.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
Calvin Parker at a UFO convention in 2019 photo from WikiCommons
Located about halfway between Mobile and Biloxi, Pascagoula MS has a population of around 24,000. Hernando De Soto passed through this area during his ill-fated expedition in the 1540s, though it wasn’t settled by Europeans until the 1740s. The town was named after the Pascagoula River. For a short time Pascagoula was part of the independent Republic of West Florida along with Mobile, Biloxi and Pensacola, until the United States seized control in 1812.
Today, most of the tourist trade goes to Mobile and Biloxi, and Pascagoula tries to appeal to the more adventurous tourist by billing itself as “The Secret Coast”, featuring parks, trails, lighthouses, and boating out in the Gulf of Mexico. And apparently it worked better than they expected, since the town is now most famous for a dramatic visit by some space aliens that happened in 1973.
On October 11, 1973, 19-year old Calvin Parker and his boss, 42-year old Charles Hickson, decided to do a little fishing after their workday in a local shipyard was over. They settled in on the west bank of the Pascagoula River. Just as it was starting to get dark, they reported, they heard an odd sound. Hickson later told a newspaper reporter: “I was just getting ready to get some more bait, when I heard a kind of zipping sound. I looked up and saw a blue flashing light. Calvin turned around too. We saw a 30-foot-long object with a little dome on top.” Parker described it: “A big light came out of the clouds. It was a blinding light... It was hard to tell with the lights so bright, but it looked like it was shaped like a football. I would say, just estimating... about 80-foot... very little sound. It was just a hissing noise.”
As they watched, three creatures emerged from the object. They floated just above the ground, had a grey skin somewhat like an elephant, a bullet-shaped head, and lobster-like pincers for hands. They had just one leg, and what looked like a foot without any toes. Parker later explained that he thought they were mechanical robots rather than living beings. They made a peculiar sound, he said, like an “alligator’s matin’ call, where they vibrate the whole air around you”.
Hickson and Parker found themselves paralyzed and unable to move, but still fully conscious. The three creatures “floated” them inside the spaceship.
Hickson reported: “When I got in there they had me, you know, they just kind of had me there. There were no seats, no chair, they just moved me around. I couldn’t resist them. I just floated, felt no sensation, no pain. They kept me in that position a little while, then they’d raise me back up.” Parker said: “I think they injected us with something to calm us down. I was kind of numb and went along with the program.”
Here, they were subjected to a physical examination by some sort of mechanical device that, Hickson later said, looked like a “big eye”. He noted: “No, it wasn’t like no x-ray machine. There ain’t no way to describe it. It looked like an eye, like a big eye. It had some kind of an attachment to it. It moved. It looked like a big eye and it went all over my body, up and down. And then they left me.”
Afterwards, the men were floated out of the ship and deposited outside, whereupon the object flew away. Parker later said, “By the time we turned around and looked, this thing picked up off the ground, shot straight up into the sky and just disappeared.”
They found the passenger window in their car shattered, and after initially refusing to start, the car ran rough all the way home. They thought the UFO had somehow affected it. The two men at first agreed that they wouldn’t tell anyone about the incident, but later Hickson decided they should tell someone and Parker reluctantly agreed. They called the Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi to make a report, but were told that the Air Force no longer investigated UFO sightings, and they should contact the local authorities instead. So they went to the police station in Pascagoula. The police noted at the time that both of them appeared to be terrified, but they suspected a hoax.
While interviewing them separately, the police at one point intentionally left them alone together in a room with a tape recorder secretly running, hoping to catch them in the act of making up a story. Instead, they recorded Hickson and Parker discussing how scared they were and how the event might affect their families. Hickson was recorded saying: “Jesus Christ, God have mercy, I thought I’d been through enough of Hell on this earth and now I’ve got to go through something like this, see... But they could have, you know, I guess they, well, they could have harmed us, son. They had us. They could have done anything to us, but they didn’t hurt me.” Parker said: “I just want to cry right now. What’s so damn bad about it is nobody’s going to believe us... I got to get home and get to bed and take some nervous pills or something, see a doctor or something. I can’t stand this. I’m
about to go all to pieces. I can’t sleep like it is. I’m damn near crazy.”
Both men, the police announced, had passed polygraph lie detector tests (though it was later discovered that Hickson had in fact refused to take a polygraph). Two days later, noted flying saucer investigator Dr J Allen Hynek interviewed them under hypnosis, hoping they would recall more details.
In the years after the report, Parker declined to discuss the incident any further, and did everything he could to avoid attention, claiming, as he had to the police, that he had passed out and couldn’t remember what had happened. Hickson, on the other hand, appeared on the Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson TV shows (as well as the TV game show To Tell the Truth), and wrote two books about the abduction. He died in 2011.
In 2019, the city of Pascagoula put up an informational sign at the site of the abduction to memorialize the event. The plaque concludes by saying, “It remains the best documented case of alien abduction, particularly since there is a secret tape involved, and not one, but two witnesses.” Several other witnesses now also came forward, 40 years after the event, to say that they too had seen a UFO over Pascagoula that night.
Also attending in the crowd was Calvin Parker, in his first public appearance since the incident had taken place. He later wrote a book of his own, saying that his 1973 statements that he couldn’t remember what had happened were just a ploy to keep the press from hounding him. In the book he gave a detailed account, noting that after the incident was over he was so afraid that the aliens had infected him with something that he took a bath in chlorine bleach as soon as he got home.
(Sorry if I am AWOL in the comments: I am in Pennsylvania visiting my sister and seeing places, and I don’t know when I’ll be near my laptop.)
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