Pascagoula, 1973: two men, a tape recorder left running, and a sheriff
Two shipyard workers fishing off a Mississippi pier reported being taken aboard a craft. What they did not know was that the sheriff left them alone in a room with the recorder on.
Hickson and Parker were fishing from a pier on the Pascagoula River on the evening of 11 October 1973.
On the evening of 11 October 1973, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were fishing from an old pier on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi. They reported a craft descending nearby and figures that carried them aboard. Hickson was forty-two; Parker was nineteen.
They went to the sheriff’s office the same night, and what happened there is the reason this case is different from almost every other of its kind.
The recording
The sheriff, having taken their statements and suspecting a hoax, left the two men alone in an interview room — with a tape recorder running, which they did not know about.
What the recording captured is two frightened men talking to each other with no audience. Hickson tries to calm Parker. Parker is close to panic and repeatedly says he cannot cope with it. At one point he is alone in the room and can be heard praying.
What is documented besides
That both men reported it the same night rather than later. That Hickson was a shipyard foreman with a settled life and Parker a teenager who wanted no part of the attention. That the case was investigated locally and by Hynek, who interviewed them.
Parker suffered lasting psychological difficulty and avoided the subject almost entirely for four decades — behaviour hard to reconcile with a man enjoying a hoax.
The account itself
The described figures are unlike almost anything else in the literature: roughly humanoid, grey and wrinkled, with claw-like extremities and no obvious eyes, moving without walking. That singularity cuts both ways. It is not the template, which argues against copying — and it is so unlike other accounts that it corroborates nothing and is corroborated by nothing.
What the sincerity is worth
More than it is usually given credit for and less than it is sometimes claimed. It effectively rules out a deliberate hoax between the two men, which is the explanation that would otherwise be first in line for any two-witness case.
It leaves everything else open: misperception, a shared frightening experience of another kind, or something unexplained. What it does not leave open is the lazy dismissal, and that is why the tape matters.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
Does the original sheriff’s office recording survive in full?
It is the single most valuable artefact in the case. Copies circulate; the provenance of a complete original is worth establishing.
Be the first to comment
Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry
J. Allen Hynek, Henry Regnery · 1 Jan 1972 · no public copy located
UFO Contact at Pascagoula
Charles Hickson and William Mendez · 1 Jan 1983 · no public copy located
Related
Psychic Phenomena
The Nine: who — or what — were they?
On New Year’s Eve 1952, in a laboratory in Maine, a voice announced itself as one of nine. Over the next forty years it reached a credentialled scientist, a celebrity psychic, a bestselling book and the creator of Star Trek. This is what is documented, and what is not.
Psychic Phenomena
New Year’s Eve 1952: the first session with the Nine
The founding event of the whole Nine phenomenon happened in a Maine farmhouse on 31 December 1952. Here is what the record supports about that evening, and how much of the familiar account was written down much later.
Psychic Phenomena
D. G. Vinod: the man at the beginning of the Nine
Every version of the Nine story starts with Dr D. G. Vinod in a trance in Maine. He is also the person that story then almost entirely forgets. Why the first channel is the biggest hole in the record.
Psychic Phenomena
Andrija Puharich: the doctor who kept turning up
A qualified physician, an inventor with real patents, an army medical officer — and the constant in forty years of the strangest story in American parapsychology. Puharich is the reason the Nine keep touching institutions.
0 comments