Pascagoula Abduction

On the night of October 11, 1973, deputies at the Jackson County Sheriff's Office left two men alone in a room with a tape recorder running that neither man knew about. Charles Hickson, 42, and Calvin Parker had just reported being taken aboard a craft on the Pascagoula River, and the deputies wanted to hear whether the story changed once the officers were gone. On the tape, Hickson tells Parker, "It scared me to death too, son. You can't get over it in a lifetime."

Glenn Ryder, the captain who interviewed them, talked about that night with the Associated Press 40 years later. "I know you don't fake fear, and they were fearful," he said.

The report

Hickson and Parker worked at the same shipyard. Parker had started there recently and was living with Hickson's family. They were fishing from an old pier on the west bank of the river, which accounts place at an abandoned shipyard between the railroad drawbridge and the US 90 bridge. The city's marker says a buzzing sound alerted them as dusk fell.

Hickson described a glowing, elongated craft hovering just above the ground, and three gray figures with no necks, slits for eyes and mouths, pointed ears and noses, and clawed hands. He said the figures glided instead of walking, carried both men aboard, and examined him with what the marker calls a robotic eye. Parker told officers he passed out at the start and came to when it was over.

Afterward the two sat in a car while Hickson drank whiskey. Before going to the sheriff, Hickson called Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi and was told the Air Force did not take UFO reports. One account has the men arriving at the sheriff's desk at 10:30pm with two catfish; another puts their report at about 11pm.

The investigators

The next day, doctors at Keesler examined the men and found no radiation exposure. James Harder of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and J. Allen Hynek, the Northwestern University astronomer, reached Pascagoula within about 36 hours. Accounts of the hypnosis differ. The UFO historian Jerome Clark wrote that Harder could not hypnotize them, and another account says Harder ended a session when Hickson became too frightened to continue. Hynek said the pair had at least had "a very real, frightening experience."

Hickson passed a lie detector test arranged by the agent the men had signed with to promote their story. Reports from 1973 describe a test for Hickson only, while a 2023 WLOX obituary for Parker says both men passed. Parker had a breakdown and was briefly in the hospital.

The doubts

The skeptic Philip J. Klass said the polygraph operator was inexperienced and that Hickson refused a second test from an expert police examiner. Klass also noted that Hickson called the figures' mouths a hole in one telling and a slit in another, and he concluded the story was a hoax. A month after the encounter, Hickson said on television that the craft's lights had hurt his eyes for 3 days, though the examination the day after the encounter found no eye damage.

In 2012, the investigator Joe Nickell proposed that Hickson dozed off and dreamed the encounter in a hypnagogic state between waking and sleep, which can bring paralysis and a sense of floating. Parker, who said he had blacked out, could then have taken on Hickson's version. Nickell also noted that the craft apparently went unseen from the heavily traveled highway nearby, though other people in the area reported lights and objects in the sky that night, one of them shaped like a helicopter.

After

Hickson kept to his account until he died of a heart attack on September 9, 2011, at 80. Parker published Pascagoula: The Closest Encounter, My Story in 2018. He attended the unveiling of the marker on June 22, 2019, and said he wanted to be buried beneath it. Parker died of kidney cancer on August 24, 2023, at 68.

The marker

The historical society paid for the plaque, and the city chose the spot beside the boat ramps and a small gazebo at Lighthouse Park. The text does not hedge: "Out of the craft glided three creatures, who carried them back into the space vehicle." In 2024, Mayor Jay Willis explained the wording to NPR. "Because these two guys had the exact same story of what happened for the rest of their lives," he said.

Lighthouse Park is on the downtown side of the river. The city's own event listing, and every other account that names a bank, puts the pier on the west bank. That is the industrial shore across the channel from the gazebo, between the drawbridge and the US 90 bridge.

The marker stands beside the boat ramps and a small gazebo at the river end of Lighthouse Park, at the foot of the US 90 bridge, with parking by the ramps. From US 90 (Denny Avenue), the usual route is north on Pascagoula Street, left on Laurel Avenue, left at the stop sign, under the overpass, then an immediate right.

The park lists no hours. The Round Island Lighthouse, moved from its island to the park in 2010, opens Friday and Saturday from 10am to 5pm.

Main Street Pascagoula holds an alien-themed downtown evening called Goula Palooza each October for the anniversary, on a date set each year.