The Fishermen and the Craft: The Pascagoula Abduction

At approximately 11 o'clock on the evening of Thursday the 11th of October 1973, two men walked into the Jackson County Sheriff's Office in the small Gulf Coast city of Pascagoula, Mississippi, and told the sheriff on duty that a few hours earlier, on the west bank of the Pascagoula River, they had been abducted by aliens. The older of the two men was Charles Hickson. He was 42 years old. He was a former military man. He was a shipyard fitter at the local Walker Shipyard. The younger was Calvin Parker. He was 19 years old. He was Hickson's co-worker. Neither of them, prior to that Thursday evening, had ever given a moment's thought to flying saucers. They had brought with them, to the sheriff's office, two catfish. They had, they explained, been fishing on the river when it happened. They had brought the catfish as evidence that the fishing part of their story, at least, was true. The sheriff, a man named Fred Diamond, listened to them describe a piercing sound in the air, blue lights on the water, an oval-shaped craft hovering silently at the edge of the river, and three creatures with grey folded skin, no visible eyes, and pincer-like claws for hands, who had paralysed them, floated them aboard the craft, and subjected them to a medical examination before returning them to the pier. Sheriff Diamond assumed, as any sheriff in Mississippi in 1973 would have assumed, that it was a hoax. He then, in the way that experienced law enforcement officers deal with suspected hoaxes, decided to test it. He put both men in an interview room. He ran a hidden tape recorder. He left them alone, expecting to catch them laughing. What he captured, on that tape, was two men, believing themselves to be unobserved, still absolutely terrified. Fifty-three years later, that tape has been recovered from a lost archive, listened to by researchers, and analysed alongside polygraph results, radiation testing, multiple corroborating witnesses, and the testimony of an American astronomer who had spent his career debunking UFO claims and who described this one, in careful language, as credible and deeply puzzling. The story of a night on the Pascagoula River in October 1973, of two ordinary men who reported an extraordinary experience, and of a mystery that has, in the 52 years since it happened, never been explained.

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