UFOS
The Pascagoula Abduction NEARLY FIFTY YEARS AFTER BECOMING ONE OF THE MOST CREDIBLE ALIEN ABDUCTEES IN HISTORY, CALVIN PARKER SHARES HIS STORY
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or forty-six years I kept it a secret. I didn’t even tell my wife about it,” Calvin Parker told me in his thick Mississippi accent, referring to the evening of October 11, 1973. That evening, Parker was fishing on the Pascagoula River with his friend Charles Hickson. It was his first day on the job at F.B. Walker and Sons Shipyard—a job Hickson had helped him to get. He was nineteen years old, his wedding a month away, with aspirations to live a simple life. “I wanted to get married, wanted to have children, wanted to have grandchildren, wanted to buy a house, retire, and fish,” said Parker, now sixty-seven, over the phone from the back porch of his current home in Moss Point, Mississippi. “So the retirin’ and fishin’ has come about, but it was a long battle to get there.” Pascagoula native Rebecca Davis distinctly remembers Parker and Hickson’s story first breaking when she was twelve years old. “I was at a friend’s house— and you know we live in the Bible Belt. I asked my friend’s dad why he was put36
Story by Alexandra Kennon • Illustration by Burton Durand ting aluminum foil in the windows,” Davis recalled over the phone. “He told me it was to keep the aliens from getting to our brains.” When Davis got home, she immediately asked her parents and grandparents about the aliens. “I was stopped in my tracks and told, ‘We do not talk about these things. Don’t ever mention it again,’” Davis said. “I was brought up a Missionary Baptist, and so yeah, it was taboo, you didn’t talk about it. And pretty much South Mississippi was that way.” Despite the outward secrecy, when Davis’s grandmother passed away in 2005 and the family cleaned out her house, Davis discovered her grandmother had saved every local newspaper article about the case of Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson. The events the two men reported that night thoroughly derailed Parker’s pursuit of a quiet, mundane life. It had all started when Hickson asked Parker if he wanted to go fishing after work. Parker, new to town, hadn’t brought his fishing gear with him, so Hickson offered to loan him some of his. “Now, for a man
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that loves to fish from the South to offer you to use his fishin’ equipment, that’s like him offerin’ you his wife,” Parker said. “Just unheard of.” The men tried fishing in one location, but the swarming bugs prompted them to head back to the shipyard, where there were fewer lights to attract insects. Parker pointed out “Posted” signs to Hickson when they pulled up, but Hickson brushed off his concerns about breaking the law: “That don’t mean nothin’, I fish here all the time.” They walked down to the old pier, cast out their lines, and waited for a bite. “I distinctly remember: I was lookin’ at a boat across, it was an old oarboat that they do the weather with, and it was made out of steel. And I was thinkin’ to myself, ‘Now, how does somethin’ made out of steel float?’” Parker remembered. “That’s where my mind was, and that’s when I noticed the blue hazy lights coming in from behind. You could see the reflection across the water.” Thinking the lights were the police, he turned to Hickson and said, “Charlie, we in trouble. You lied to me, and we fixin’ to go to jail.”
When the men stood up and turned around, they didn’t see police cars, but instead a long, ovular craft, floating around two feet from the ground, emitting a blindingly bright light. “There was three bulky-lookin’ creatures, I still didn’t know what they were, that was coming toward us,” Parker told me. “By the time they got to us, I still couldn’t see, for the light was so bright.” He described two of the creatures grabbing Hickson, and one grabbing him. “And that’s when it carried me aboard the craft.” Parker said the creature stopped at the door and injected him with what he described as a “Go to hell shot”; whatever it was ushered him from absolute terror to a sort of peaceful apathy. “I didn’t care what happened then.” Parker described being taken aboard the craft, down a hallway, and into a room where the creature placed him on an “examination table” made entirely of glass. According to Parker, at that point the grey, wrinkled creature that brought him aboard the ship left the room. “That’s when something came out of the ceiling, about the size of a deck of
