The Pascagoula Abduction
Two shipyard workers fishing at night said three wrinkled, clawed beings floated them into an oval craft. A hidden police recording of the men, made when they believed they were alone, is the case's best-known evidence.
- Date
- 11 October 1973
- Place
- Pascagoula River, Mississippi, USA
- Witnesses
- Charles Hickson, Calvin Parker
- Status
- Unresolved
What happened
Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were fishing from a pier on the west bank of the Pascagoula River when they heard a buzzing sound and saw a craft with blue lights hovering a few feet above the ground. Three beings emerged, floated toward them, and took hold of them. Both men said they were paralysed but conscious. Hickson was carried into a bright room and examined by a floating device like a large eye; Parker fainted. After about twenty minutes they were returned to the pier.
They went first to the local newspaper, which was closed, and then to the sheriff's office, where they were interviewed. Left alone in a room with a hidden tape recorder, they continued to talk about the experience in terror. Hickson: 'I know you don't believe it, but it happened.' Parker, repeatedly: 'I want to see a doctor.' The recording persuaded the sheriff and, later, many investigators that whatever had happened, the men believed it.
The beings
About five feet tall, with wrinkled grey skin like an elephant's, no visible eyes, a slit mouth, pointed carrot-like growths where the nose and ears would be, arms ending in pincers, and legs that seemed joined so that the beings glided. They moved mechanically. Parker's 2018 account added a smaller being with fingers rather than claws that he encountered alone. The description matches no other case, and XenoAtlas catalogues the Pascagoula Being as its own type.
Aftermath
Hickson passed a polygraph and repeated his account for the rest of his life, including at a 1974 conference; he died in 2011. Parker avoided attention for decades, then published Pascagoula: The Closest Encounter in 2018 and spoke at length before his death in 2023. In 2019 Maria and Jerry Blair said they had been parked across the river that night and had seen the lights and figures, and a historical marker was placed at the site.
Explanations
Sceptics have proposed a shared hallucination, an elaborate hoax by two men with no evident motive, or later embellishment. The hidden recording is the obstacle to the hoax theory; the absence of any physical trace is the obstacle to everything else.
Beings described
Sources
- Pascagoula abduction
- Calvin Parker, Pascagoula: The Closest Encounter (2018)