On the evening of October 11, 1973, Charles Hickson, 42, and Calvin Parker, 19, were fishing off a pier on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi, on the grounds of a shipyard. Hickson said he heard a hissing sound and turned to see an oval craft with blue lights hovering just above the ground behind them. Three figures came out. He described them as about five feet tall, gray and wrinkled, with no eyes he could see, slits for mouths, and claws like a crab’s instead of hands. They did not walk. They floated. Two of them took him by the arms and he went numb. Parker fainted.
Hickson said he was carried inside, held in the air, and examined by something like a large eye that moved over his body. Then he was set back down on the pier, and the craft was gone. The whole thing lasted perhaps twenty minutes.
The two men drove to the sheriff’s office. Deputies questioned them for hours and then did something clever: they left the pair alone in an interview room with a hidden tape recorder running, expecting them to drop the act. The tape caught Hickson saying he never wanted to see it again, and Parker, badly shaken, saying he wanted to see a doctor, and praying. No laughing. No story planning. Both men later passed polygraph tests. Hickson told the same account until he died in 2011. Parker avoided it for forty years, then wrote it down in 2018.
In 2019 a man came forward to say he and his wife had been parked on the other side of the river that night and saw the lights too. What do you think?
