The Pascagoula Abduction Claim

Background

The Pascagoula River runs through the Mississippi Gulf Coast city of Pascagoula, home to a large shipyard that employed both men. In the fall of 1973 the United States was in the middle of a wave of UFO reports, and Nickell places the case within that year’s ‘flap’.

Charles Hickson, in his early forties, and Calvin Parker Jr., a teenager who had started at the shipyard that day, according to Country Roads Magazine, and who, Nickell writes, was living with the Hicksons, went fishing after work on October 11. Accounts differ on the men’s exact ages, and on which shipyard employed them.

What was reported

By the men’s account, they were fishing from an old pier on the river’s west bank when they heard a zipping or whizzing sound and saw flashing blue lights and an elongated, glowing object hovering nearby. Three gray figures with clawed, pincer-like hands, Hickson said, took them by the arms and lifted them aboard. Parker has said he was awake but paralyzed and was examined thoroughly; Hickson described a large floating eye that scanned him. Nickell notes that Parker told officers in 1973 that he had passed out at the beginning.

Afterward the men sat in their car, and Hickson said he drank whiskey to settle his nerves. According to Country Roads Magazine, Hickson first telephoned Keesler Air Force Base, which referred him to local authorities. At the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department, deputies at first suspected that the pair were drunk, and Ryder, then a captain, laughed at the report before meeting them. The men kept to their story. Other callers reported odd lights in the sky that night, though Nickell, citing Randle (2001), notes that the object was apparently not seen by drivers on the heavily traveled nearby highway.

Investigations and official findings

Deputies left Hickson and Parker alone in a room while a recorder ran without their knowledge. On the tape, as the AP described it, Hickson tells Parker ‘It scared me to death too, son.’ Ryder told the AP, ‘I know you don’t fake fear, and they were fearful.’ Nickell likewise notes that the men made no incriminating remarks and sounded like people comparing notes. According to Country Roads, the men did not learn of the recording until much later.

UFO researchers arrived quickly. J. Allen Hynek, who had advised the Air Force’s UFO studies, and James Harder of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization reportedly reached town within about 36 hours. In Nickell’s summary, Hynek believed the men had at least had ‘a very real, frightening experience’, and Harder concluded that they had experienced an extraterrestrial phenomenon, though sources disagree on whether his attempt at hypnosis succeeded. Hickson requested and passed a polygraph test; a local examiner reportedly said he told the truth as to what he believed. The men were also taken to the Keesler Air Force Base hospital to be checked for radiation exposure, according to a UPI wire report, which said neither man suffered any apparent injuries.

The wider response was frenzied. According to the AP, the story hit front pages the next day, reporters and investigators flooded the area, and authorities received hundreds of reports in the next two weeks, along with several hoaxes.

Explanations and debate

Philip J. Klass, a leading UFO skeptic, found discrepancies in Hickson’s account, for example in whether the creatures’ mouths were a ‘hole’ or a ‘slit’. He also argued that the polygraph was run by an inexperienced operator and that Hickson declined a second test by an expert police examiner. On that basis, and other evidence, he concluded that the case was a hoax. Kevin Randle, himself a UFO writer, wrote that Hickson’s later changes seemed aimed at smoothing rough spots after criticism, while Nickell read them as defensiveness from a man being ridiculed.

Nickell, writing for Skeptical Inquirer in 2012, offered a different possibility from outright hoax. He suggested that the men, who may have been drinking, dozed off and that Hickson experienced a hypnagogic state, a waking dream with vivid imagery and sleep paralysis, with Parker, who said he had passed out, going along by suggestion. He cited, among other things, Hickson’s claim that the beings spoke inside his head, a claim Nickell says fits that kind of experience, and Hickson’s later claim of eye injury, which a hospital examination did not support.

Hickson held to his account until his death in 2011, and Parker was still describing it in 2013, though critics said details shifted over time. Parker stayed largely silent for decades and, Nickell writes, suffered a breakdown soon after the episode; he told the AP in 2013 that he still believed he met gray, crab-clawed beings but had wondered whether they were demons. He published a book in 2018. Hickson died on September 9, 2011, according to Nickell, who gives his age as eighty. Parker died on August 24, 2023, of kidney cancer, according to WLOX.

Why it still matters

Jerome Clark, quoted by Nickell, called the Pascagoula case the second most famous UFO abduction case in history, after the Betty and Barney Hill case of 1961. It is also unusual for its recording: a hidden tape of two witnesses alone, cited by believers as evidence of fear and by skeptics as inconclusive. In 2019, Pascagoula placed a historical marker at Lighthouse Park, and the city holds an annual October event.