Illustration by Burton Durand
“For 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 putting 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 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 said 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.”
Image courtesy of Calvin Parker via Flying Disk Press.
The spot on the Pascagoula River where Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson were fishing the night they claim that they were abducted by aliens.
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 cards.” He said the square-shaped object circled around him, making a series of clicking noises. “I never thought about it until here lately, but it was like this MRI I was in, except the click wasn’t that loud,” Parker explained, looking back. “And then it just shot back up in the ceiling.”
Then, a smaller being entered the room, which Parker said made him feel more at ease. He couldn’t move his body but rolled his head toward the creature. “She was normal,” he said. “Matter of fact, if I’d been in a barroom drinking or something, and was single—you know at this time—I’d have probably asked her out on a date.” It looked just like a human, he explained, except for its middle fingers. “Her two middle fingers were real longer than what an average person’s would be.”
Parker recalled that, without saying a word, the creature put its left hand on his jaw, and opened his mouth. “That’s when she took her right hand and started running it down my throat, and I started gagging. She had scratched it up real bad, and it was bleedin’, it was a darn mess.” It pulled its hand back out; Parker had the impression that it didn’t want to hurt him anymore. Then, it made a groan from deep within its throat. “I don’t know if you ever heard a alligator’s matin’ call, where they vibrate the whole air around you, but that’s how it sounded.”
That’s when the creature that Parker said initially brought him aboard the craft (“I really believe to this day it was a robot,” he added later) returned and carried him back to the bank of the river. “That’s where the story really starts,” he said. “And then my life turned pretty much to hell right after that.”
Parker said his first instinct, which Hickson initially agreed with, was to not tell anyone about what happened to them. Shaken and in shock, the men returned to the car to find the passenger door window shattered, though still in place in the frame. When they opened it, the glass fell out. Parker said that the car, which was relatively new and had never previously had issues starting, failed to start several times before it finally cranked, the motor sounding rough. On the drive back home, Hickson changed his mind. He thought they needed to tell someone about what happened to them, despite Parker’s protests. Hickson dialed Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi and briefly explained what happened to them before being told that they didn’t handle UFO reports anymore—Project Blue Book was finished, they said—and to call the local authorities.
At the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department, the men were questioned separately about their experience, then put in a room alone together, where they were secretly tape recorded. “On that tape they were still talking about what happened to them, and how scared they were,” said Philip Mantle, a researcher with over forty years of experience studying UFOs, whose company Flying Disk Press published Parker’s two books about the abduction. “I think Calvin’s almost praying at one time.”
Parker said that after the deputies listened to the secret tape recording—which he and Hickson didn’t learn existed until much later—they took them more seriously. Parker urged the authorities not to tell anyone about what he and Hickson reported. “I wasn’t gonna tell a soul,” he emphasized. “But when we got back to the shipyard the next day, they already knew.” When they got to work, F.B. Walker & Sons Shipyard was swarmed by news vans—Parker estimated that around two hundred reporters were there hoping to talk to him and Hickson.
In addition to the reporters, astronomers and pioneering UFOlogists Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Dr. James Harder arrived in Pascagoula within thirty-six hours to interview and hypnotize Parker and Hickson. “Now how he got from California to Pascagoula, Mississippi in that short amount of time I don’t know, but he was down there,” Parker later told me about Hynek, who was the scientific advisor for three major UFO studies undertaken by the U.S. Air Force: Project Sign, Project Grudge, and Project Blue Book.
“Of course, I lost my job at the shipyard, because people wouldn’t leave [me] alone,” Parker told me. He drove back home to Laurel, hoping to leave the events of October 11 behind in Pascagoula. “And it started from there. It was just like a roller coaster. I went to work, the reporter would show up at work while I was workin’, and you know, the people you work for, eventually, they get tired of that, so I’d lose another job.” Eventually, Parker went by the name “Randy” to avoid the constant barrage of press. “And that’s where I went from there, to hide. But this has followed me all my life.”
“I don’t know if you ever heard a alligator’s matin’ call, where they vibrate the whole air around you, but that’s how it sounded.” —Calvin Parker, on the voice of an alien.
From his home in West Yorkshire in the north of England, Mantle described the plot of the 1980s television show The Hulk. “Basically, The Hulk was tracked by a journalist. And every time the journalist caught up with him, he’d move on to the next town. Calvin was the real life Hulk, although he didn’t turn into a big green monster. Every time he was recognized, or the journalists caught up with him, he literally, with his wife and family, packed up to get away from them, so they would start all over again.”
Of course, despite the Sheriff's Office’s secret tape recording, the multiple hypnosis sessions, and the polygraph tests backing up Parker and Hickson’s story, many of even the men’s own friends and family did not believe them. “We took polygraph tests, voice stress tests, been hypnotized three times, had more credible witnesses than any case around, and more credible people talkin’,” Parker said. “But see, back in the ‘70s, people thought you was crazy to have done somethin’ or seen somethin’ like that.”
Parker said that he isn’t sure who believed him and who didn’t at the time, because he avoided talking about it for so long. “One thing: my daddy-in-law didn’t believe me, when this first happened. He told my wife ‘You don’t need to marry him,’ and all that stuff,” he said. “But he came back and apologized. He pulled me aside and said ‘Son, I owe you an apology…I didn’t believe you when this happened, but I’ve seen something since then, and I believe it. There’s no doubt in my mind that this happened to you.’”
Parker, still a religious man, had once considered becoming a preacher—another dream derailed that night. “It took so much credibility away, that I wouldn’t have enough people comin’ that would believe me, I didn’t think.” When a documentary reporter later asked him, “How would you feel if I told you I didn’t believe you?” Parker answered, “You know, fella, that’s your opinion. If you want to believe it, you can. If you don’t, you don’t. I know what happened. I know I’m tellin’ the truth.”
Now, in his retirement, and with Hickson having passed away in 2011, Parker is more open to talking about that night than he was before; his wife Waynett is largely to thank for that. This is despite the fact that, decades ago, Parker’s experience on the river led to their brief divorce before they remarried. “It was all my fault, it wasn’t her fault,” Parker emphasized on speaker phone, with Waynett sitting next to him on the porch. “I just couldn’t handle the pressure. I had a nervous breakdown.”
[Read this story from our October 2018 issue: The Evolution of the Modern Vampire.]
It was Waynett who encouraged Parker to write his books, to stop going to such great lengths to avoid talking about the abduction. She got the idea a few years ago, when they were attending a neighbor’s wake together. Parker hadn’t used his real name in their neighborhood—until then, when he signed the register book. “Well, hell honey, they started looking for him at the wake, people were,” recalled Waynett. People were approaching Parker, asking for him to tell the story, and requesting pictures. “People were taking pictures! It just wasn’t the place or the time,” she said. After leaving the wake, she told her husband, “Baby, we need to write a book,” suggesting that if he put his story out there, people might quit asking him about it so much. Parker replied, “I’m not gonna write no book.”
Waynett went to the library to check out a book about publishing, anyway. “And in the meantime, Philip Mantle had contacted Calvin, and he’d been looking for him forever. And between me and Philip, Calvin didn’t really have a choice,” she laughed.
Mantle has been studying UFOs for over forty years, and to this day finds Parker and Hickson’s case one of the most remarkable and credible of the countless he has researched. In addition to the many books he has written and published with Flying Disk Press, Mantle’s resume includes former Director of Investigations for the British UFO Research Association, and former Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) representative for England. He first learned about the Pascagoula abduction in the early 1980s, when the British magazine series The Unexplained published an article about it. “It always stuck with me,” Mantle said. “I don’t know what it was, Alexandra, but something just stuck in my mind about it.”
“Matter of fact, if I’d been in a barroom drinking or something, and was single—you know at this time—I’d have probably asked her out on a date.”—Calvin Parker, on what an alien looks like.
Mantle first tried to get ahold of Charles Hickson, knowing he’d spoken at conferences in the past and was more open to discussing the encounter than Parker. Later, after Mantle began his publishing company, he set about obtaining the rights to republish Hickson’s book, but discovered that Hickson had already passed away. “As I’m preparing this for publication, I thought, ‘I’m sure Calvin Parker is still alive. I wonder if I can get an interview with him,’” he said. “So, I set off trying to find Calvin.”
After three long months of searching, a fellow UFO researcher was able to connect them. “So, we spoke on the phone, and he was polite, you know, but wasn’t really telling me a lot,” Mantle said of he and Parker’s first conversation across the Atlantic. When Parker mentioned his wife wanted him to write a book, Mantle told him about his publishing business, and sent over a draft contract. To his amazement, Parker signed it, and they began working on what would become Pascagoula—The Closest Encounter: My Story.
One of Parker’s biggest stipulations before agreeing to the project was that Mantle was not to edit anything, despite Parker’s lack of formal education or writing background. “So, what he told me was exactly what we were going to publish,” Mantle noted. “Even said keep the spelling mistakes in, and the typos, and the grammar, because he wanted people to know who he was, as well as what had happened to him. And that was very important to him.” Parker corroborated this. “I made him agree to not change nothin’. Not to correct any spelling, not to change a word or anything in the book,” Parker said. “And he’s held by that, and did good.”
[Read about writer Sonya Gordon's mother's nightly hunt for UFOs, from our April 2012 issue.]
Now that Parker has written two books published for international audiences by Mantle’s Flying Disk Press, by all accounts he’s glad he did. “We’d never taken vacations or anything. So, after the book, I got a chance to go to these conferences and speak. And it really opened my relationship with my wife,” Parker remarked.
To both Parker and Mantle’s surprise, the book was a massive success. According to Mantle, the books he publishes with Flying Disk Press are not typically commercial successes, but are books he thinks deserve to be published, nonetheless. Besides his wife occasionally making him a cup of tea, he said, he is the company’s sole employee. “To our amazement, it became an Amazon bestseller, and featured in USA Today, as well as local and national papers. And it just went from there,” Mantle said. “The rest, as they say, is history.”
When the book was first released, Parker gave copies to his own friends and family as a means of explaining to them the story that so impacted his entire life, but that he had never spoken to them about. “Since then, I’ve told it millions of times. I didn’t know there was such an interest in all this,” Parker marveled. “He gets a standing ovation when he gives a talk at a conference, everywhere we have been,” Waynett chimed in, her pride audible.
In 2019, a historical marker was placed near the Pascagoula River, across from the site where the alleged abduction took place. “It remains the best documented case of alien abduction, particularly since there is a secret tape involved, and not one, but two witnesses,” the end of the plaque reads. When it was officially unveiled, Parker was so overwhelmed by the emotions of finally having the story he was ridiculed about for decades legitimized that he cried. “It was one of the happiest moments in his life. And that is rare, that such memorials to UFO incidents exist,” Mantle said. “There are a couple, in different parts of the world, but they’re usually placed there long after they’re dead and gone, you know. Thankfully, Calvin was there to see it and enjoy it, and have it officially unveiled.”
In recent years, even more instances of validation of the story have emerged. More than two dozen witnesses have come forward with their own reports of UFO sightings on or around the Pascagoula River in Jackson County in the weeks surrounding October 11. One man reported seeing a large ship floating over the river from the cab of his crane while he worked that night. A couple reported seeing a large vessel with a blue light flying low over the river as they drove over a bridge. When the man went to visit his aunt the next day—who also lived in the area—before he said anything about the sighting, she said “You’ll never guess what I saw last night,” and reported the same thing. Another couple said they were on the opposite bank, waiting for a boat to come in, when they saw blue lights across the river, and a grey creature in the water. The man told his wife, “Don’t tell anyone, they’ll think we’re nuts.” “Of course the next day, who was on the TV news?” Mantle asked, and answered, “Charlie and Calvin.”
Artwork by Jason Gleaves, courtesy of Flying Disk Press.
An artistic rendering of the night that Parker and Hickson claim to have been abducted by aliens.
Mantle, along with Dr. Irena Scott, a physiologist who has authored multiple books on UFOs, have been diligently at work tracking down these witnesses and collecting their accounts for a new book, The Pascagoula Close Encounter— Witnesses On The Record, which is set to release sometime next year. “My wife said I was like a proper police investigator, looking for this evidence,” Mantle chuckled. “And we found it, we found it.”
One of the best-documented witness accounts came from two fishing boats—with ten passengers total—that went out on the river on November 6 that same year. The fishing party said they saw something large and illuminated floating beneath the surface of the water, which they hit with an oar, before playing cat and mouse with the vessel, chasing it around the river. They reported the encounter to the Coast Guard, who sent a boat out, and experienced exactly the same thing. “We have all the Coast Guard documents,” Mantle said. “It was all documented.” He has since located a photograph of the ten witnesses in the fishing party, and with the help of social media, has tracked down and interviewed one of them who is still alive, who confirmed the account. “This is just a few weeks after the event in the same river. Make of it what you will,” Mantle said. “Information still comes in slowly but surely, but it still comes in. I’m a bit of a pest, Alexandra. My colleagues groan when they get an email from me if it says ‘Pascagoula’ in the subject.”
Mantle said that it’s understandable that so many witnesses hesitated to come forward sooner. “We have to remember as well, in those days, who would you tell? If you see the news media basically mocking Charlie and Calvin, there really wasn’t anyone else,” he said. “They were different times. And of course, when Calvin came out of the woods and went on the record, they saw the media coverage, the second time around, treating it very respectfully. So that encouraged them to do exactly the same.”
Mantle and Parker, who have forged an unconventional friendship Skyping in their vastly different accents from across the globe, are hopeful that even more witnesses will continue to come forward with reports from that strange autumn in and around Jackson County. “There seems to have been a huge, what we call, a ‘flap’. There were a lot of UFO sightings from a few days before to a few days afterward. But the peak of them was the Parker and Hickson event, if you like,” Mantle explained. “And by all means: if there’s anyone out there that did see anything, and that will be willing to speak to us in confidence, by all means, ask them to come forward…we guarantee we will treat them with respect and not release their details if that’s what they want. We’re just interested in the information…it’s as simple as that.”
Since his first book came out, Parker told me he no longer has nightmares about the abduction. “After the book came out, I put all this behind me. It’s out in the open, I’ve accepted it. And it was just a big relief come across my shoulders,” he said. His energy these days is spent enjoying his retirement with Waynett, fishing, and battling a recent cancer diagnosis. “I’m fighting a totally different battle right now,” he said. “But it’s not the first one.”
Despite all this, he says he’ll never forget what happened to him the night of October 11, 1973. “I feel like we was just at the right place at the wrong time,” Parker said of he and Hickson’s choice of fishing location that night. “But like I say, it’s somethin’ that lives with you.”
Calvin Parker’s books, Pascagoula—The Closest Encounter: My Story and Pascagoula—The Story Continues: New Evidence & New Witnesses are available online and in various Pascagoula shops, from Flying Disk Press.
Dr. Irena Scott’s book, Beyond Pascagoula, will be released October 1, and the book she co-authored with Mantle, The Pascagoula Close Encounter—Witnesses On The Record will be released sometime in 2022. Flying Disk Press is also working on a graphic novel about the abduction. A three-part documentary series based on Parker’s story has been picked up by a UK broadcasting company, and a five-part drama series is currently in discussion with a number of production companies, as well.
Mantle and Parker both hope that by getting the story out to a wider audience, more witnesses will come forward with information. “What we would both like to ask is if you can ask others to step forward if they saw anything out of the ordinary around that date and please contact us in complete confidence,” said Mantle. If you or anyone you know has information, you can email him at philip.mantle@gmail.com.
On October 15, from 5 pm–9 pm, there will be an “Out of this World” themed Third Friday event, hosted by Main Street Pascagoula.
