Original subtitles

How would you explain the seemingly unexplainable?

It's even hard to make yourself believe it.

What if it was a story so far -fetched nobody would believe you?

Lo and behold, here this thing is again.

Would you keep it a secret?

I don't know what it was.

Or would you share your experience with the world?

When you talk about it, it makes it more real.

It was uh, it was kind of like a humming noise.

Just one of them made it.

And what if that experience was with the extraterrestrial?

I'm going to describe some of the creatures that was aboard the craft.

This is the curious story of Charles Hickson

and Calvin Parker, whose tale of alien abduction in 1973 gripped the nation.

Everybody's mouth fell open, it was like.

And when more eyewitnesses surfaced over the years...

Suddenly there's an insurgent of a whole lot of reports.

There was just a huge number of UFO sightings, everybody was singing.

It begged the question, are we really alone in the universe?

And are we even ready for the truth?

I think we maybe all seem to have the same kind of feeling of validation that

we didn't make this up.

How could that many people imagine the exact same thing at the same time?

(dramatic music)

(dramatic music)

Welcome to Pascagoula.

Nestled along Mississippi's Gulf Coast, this unassuming city

harbors a mystery that has endured for decades.

Beneath its quiet streets and scenic charm lies a story that shook the world.

A tale of unexplainable encounter that forever altered

the lives of two men and those who bore witness to it.

These three figures was coming toward us and there wasn't nowhere to run.

When Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker decided to

go fishing after work, nobody could have predicted what would happen next.

We was fishing right where the power poles are, there's a little pier.

But the fishing spot they chose was on private property.

I said, Charlie, we're gonna go to jail for trespassing down here.

He said, no, I fish here all the time.

I was fishing and I noticed a reflection off the water, some hazy blue lights.

And that is the color of the lights that the law has around here.

And of course, there's no trespassing signs up.

And I figured me and Charlie was going to jail.

In hindsight, going to jail probably would have

been the better option for the pair, as

what they went on to experience altered their lives forever.

You know, my skin was kind of standing up.

So I don't know if I was afraid of going to jail or afraid something else

was going to happen.

This case primarily features two very ordinary men.

On the night of October the 11th, 1973,

on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi, these two

ordinary men encountered the extraordinary.

And I come here and I think about Charlie and his bad thoughts because I don't

like to think about what happened to us or him breaking the story.

I feel betrayed by him because we agreed we was going to keep this quiet and

we didn't.

And I never spoke to my dad about it till I got home from the Marine Corps.

And the night we sat down and talked about it, he was telling me what happened.

And all of a sudden he had tears and it's just flowing down his face.

And I asked him, I said, what's wrong?

He said, son, he said, I spent 20

months and 16 days in combat in Korea.

I was scared.

He said, I've never had anything to scare me like these things did.

It scared the hell out of me because I just knew I was going to jail

and it's going to cost money to get out for trespassing.

It got our attention, let me put it like that.

I now firmly believe that this case, when

it comes to close encounter cases, is probably

the best documented case on the record.

I have no doubt about that whatsoever.

But just what did these two men see?

What had they experienced on this fateful night in 1973?

The craft came out of the west and landed just about where that big pile of

this out there, which was laying.

It kind of shocked our eyes there for a little while.

You could tell that it was oval shaped.

It had two portholes on top and you could see lights coming out of that.

It has the ability to change colors.

This started out as a hazy blue, then it kind of a bluish green.

And then I seen some red somewhere and I'm not for sure that the red come

from the craft because there was a car parked over there and it might have been

a brake lights off the car or something.

But it was a little bit of red.

But then the door opened and the lights

got bright because the lights was coming from the inside.

They was blinded, the lights were.

So it kind of shocked our eyes there for a little while.

But the door just slid open and the lights was from the inside.

And almost immediately they seemed like the end

of the craft opened up some way.

And three things came out of it.

These three figures was coming toward us.

You could tell they was bulky looking creatures

like football players or something.

And they was gliding across the swamp grass and there wasn't nowhere to run.

There was debris on the left, debris on the right, water on the front.

With nowhere to run, the men froze in

fear as three figures from the aircraft floated towards them.

Two of them got a hold of Charlie, one of them got a hold of myself.

And they give us, give me a go to hell shot.

I didn't care.

I know they give Charlie one too.

He said they did.

They give us the shot in the left arm here and that calmed us down.

Just what were these beings that Calvin and Charles saw that night?

Why were they here?

And where did they come from?

(dramatic music)

These three figures was coming toward us.

You could tell they was bulky looking.

They was gliding across the swamp grass.

They wasn't no separation in the legs and the feet look like a pair of work

boots.

The only moving parts was their arms and

their hands was like crab claws or mittens.

Couldn't really tell what it was.

Believe me, I wasn't looking that hard.

I was trying to think about getting out of there.

He said, I didn't know what they were, where they came from.

And I was so afraid they were going to take me away.

And nobody would ever know what happened to us.

There'd be you, your mom, your brothers and

sisters and they would never find Calvin and I.

And so I knew right then my father was telling the truth.

Fact or fiction.

The close encounter story of Calvin Parker and

Charles Hickson is one of the most compelling in history.

When it comes to cases like this, the argument goes three ways.

Not sure what it is, you know, leave it open-ended.

The argument that it's extraterrestrial.

Or that there's some kind of psychological explanation for it.

You know, take your pick.

When it comes to the Pascagoula case specifically,

it's even been claimed that it was some

kind of military experiment that took place that night.

But, you know, the list is endless.

It really is.

And if witnessing a UFO wasn't scary enough,

what happened next would stay with the two men for the rest of their lives.

And I seemed to just raise up to the level that they were, which they were

about a foot or a foot and a half off of the ground.

And they carried me inside of the spacecraft.

Once aboard the craft, the two men were

separated, with each taken to a different room by the beings.

And what they had to experience next was more fitting for a sci-fi movie.

I didn't see Charlie no more when I went aboard.

They took a left turn, went about 10, 15 foot down the hallway.

And then they turned right into what I call an examination room.

And he said, they took us in that thing.

He said, I'm assuming they took Calvin in.

He said, they took me in first.

And he said it was like being in an extremely bright light bulb.

He said it was blinding.

And he said, I remember seeing this thing.

I guess it was a wall come out

and to my face, went down my body.

Because he said, I felt like I was suspended in air at a 45 degree angle.

And went around my body twice and came back around and back to my face and

just disappeared back into wherever it came from.

Charles experience brings up some questions.

Why had he been chosen?

What were they examining him for?

And where was the information they were gathering going to go?

(dramatic music)

He told me they got a hold of him and took him back out.

And he said, Calvin was standing out there

by the river with his arms outstretched facing the river.

And he said he was in a state of shock.

When I seen him, he seemed to be going in shock.

I've seen many men in shock.

And he seemed to be going in shock.

Just what had Calvin experienced that night that had left him in such a state?

What did he see?

What did he witness?

And how did it affect him?

He laid me on my back and I was facing the ceiling.

When I was laying on the table, this big ugly thing that brought me in went

to a corner and just shut down.

And then there's something about the size of a deck of cards to come out of

the ceilings.

It come down within a foot and a half of my head.

And it rotated around my head.

But each time it would go around, you could hear it click, click, click.

And what he experienced next stuck with Calvin for the rest of his life.

I was laying on the table and that

thing that clicked was running around my head.

And that's when I noticed I heard a noise, which wasn't a loud noise, but I

just felt a presence.

And that's when she come out of another room and put her finger down my throat.

(dramatic music)

And I started bleeding and there was a lot of blood on me.

She kind of, she, I called her she,

backed up out of the way and made a noise like a bacon call on an

alligator, like a gulp, gulp.

And the big ugly one that I called him, like a jack-in-the-box come alive.

And he come over and picked me up by the arm again.

And I felt a rejection go in my arm.

And I heard a noise like that.

And I was relaxed again.

He carried me out.

I was on the pier, but I was facing the river with my arms stretched out

in front of me.

And that's where I felt Charlie.

Charlie was, he said, you all right, sir?

You all right?

I told Charlie, well, hell no, I'm not all right.

And we agreed not to mention nobody and not tell nobody.

Remember, this was 1973.

And they put you in a nut house back in just for thinking it, much less

saying it.

But imagine if, on that night in 1973,

several individuals experienced a similar phenomenon.

What if Charles and Calvin weren't the only

ones to encounter the unexplainable?

Their story wouldn't be so crazy, would it?

Down through the years, there have been reports of unidentified flying objects.

With the dawn of the space age, the frequency of these reports have increased.

Many people believe that these UFOs are indeed

space vehicles from outer space, manned by living

creatures sometimes called humanoids.

On rare occasion, actual contact with these creatures

from space have been reported.

Alien abduction stories have fascinated and puzzled humanity for decades.

Yet they almost always share one curious detail.

The experiences are deeply personal, with little to no external eyewitnesses.

Most encounters remain confined to the memories of

the individuals involved, leaving skeptics to question their legitimacy.

But the Pascagoula case is one of few

where multiple independent witnesses came out over the

years, reporting phenomena that aligned with the central story.

Friends and my family think I'm crazy.

It's even hard to make yourself believe it.

I didn't admit what I had seen for years.

Back in that day, if you'd seen a UFO...

It was almost taboo to talk about something like this.

I didn't go out and get on TV or interviews or anything.

I kind of kept it, me and my wife kept it to ourselves, what we've seen.

Back in those days, nobody believed in UFOs.

You really had to be crazy if you said you'd seen one.

Was it mass hysteria?

A series of coincidental misidentifications?

Or could these eyewitnesses offer further proof of

Charles and Calvin's story of abduction?

It was a warm night, as it is here in the South.

We were at the red light, waiting for it to turn green.

After a few seconds, I said, Hey, guys, do y'all see what I see?

And they said, yeah, man, it looks like an airplane.

And it's awful low.

It's very low.

We just assumed this airplane was in trouble.

And, you know, hey, man, that thing looks like it's going to crash.

And then it was on top of us.

I looked in the back window, like looking straight up through the back window.

And I watched it go straight up.

Not side, not back and forth, straight up.

And completely disappeared within seconds.

In 1973, I was 32 years old.

I remember that part.

I was a crane operator at Walker Shipyard the night of the UFO sighting.

And I seen this thing, it just eased right over.

And it looked like it stopped right in the middle of the Pasco River.

Just stopped, dead still.

Maybe a tiny bit of movement, not much.

It was an egg-shaped looking thing.

You really couldn't tell that much about it.

You could tell that it was oval shaped.

You'll never understand totally until you've been there.

You know, I was a senior in high school.

And I was 18 years old.

And this was October.

So it had to have been a Friday night or maybe the Saturday night, which would

have put it at the 12th or 13th.

We were on Espy Avenue fixing to turn east onto Pineville Road.

And we just got a little ways around on Pineville Road.

And all of a sudden, boom!

The whole inside of the car lit up blue.

I'm shocked.

I don't know what's going on.

We were coming from Pasco to Gautier.

And as soon as I got up on top of the bridge, I seen these very bright lights.

They were not rotating.

It was just a wide span of bright lights.

Never thought of the fact that it could have been a UFO.

If I had, I would have turned off on the port road and went down there

to see what was going on.

But we came on to Gautier.

And like I said, didn't hear it on the news till 10 o'clock.

But it was pretty amazing to see that,

you know, to witness it.

And then not realize what I was even seeing at the time.

Seemed like quite a few people had seen something.

It was unexplanatory, you know, that evening.

I had walked outside to take out the trash.

I looked up above the house and there

was a red, white, and blue flashing light.

It has the ability to change colors.

It had no wings.

It had no manner of propulsion that I could tell.

No vapor trail.

We watched this thing make some of the

most, some of the most incredible turns you've ever seen.

They would make 90 degree angles at just

such a fast pace that there's no possible

way that a human being could, you know, could be in there because the g-forces

would be so bad.

But it was like you would take the arrow on a computer screen and just take

the mouse and just wiggle it all around.

That's the way this thing was moved.

You know, I was always, I've been interested in astronomy for years.

So I always kind of watched the sky anyway.

I had taken my dogs out in the backyard and just idly waiting on the dogs.

They got their evening run and I noticed something in the west.

But first, of course, thought it was a plane.

I realized that's not a plane.

I have no idea what I'm looking at, but it doesn't look like any plane I'd

ever seen before.

I want to use the word hovered, kind of stayed in one position for, oh, several

minutes.

And then it slowly started to move to the south and it stopped.

And then it moved slowly to the north and it stopped.

It moved back toward the south and it stopped.

It did this probably at least three or four times.

And then before I could even recognize really

what was happening, it, the only words I can use is it shot off to the

north and disappeared.

This was in the afternoon.

I was riding my bicycle down the street and it caught my eye.

There was this green smoke and I ran inside and told my mother and finally got

her to come out there and she saw it too.

And maybe, I don't know, 10 to 15

minutes, it just sort of faded out.

And after it did, all of a sudden this thing appeared out of nowhere.

Just looked like it just popped out of thin air.

And I assume we were looking up at the bottom of it.

What makes this case different to most, if

not all the others, is the fact that

we have a growing number of independent, first

-hand eyewitnesses.

And that is like, unlike anything I've ever come across before.

Whilst these eyewitnesses took decades to reveal their

stories of that night, for Charles and Calvin

in 1973, they had to make a decision.

Would they keep their encounter secret or try

to convince the world of what had happened to them?

Charlie wanted to call somebody and tell them, said, no, let's not.

I didn't see nothing.

I'm just going to act like I don't remember nothing, like I was blacked out.

And I couldn't stay, say, you know, distinctly

because I was at the point where I passed out.

Which at the time, that was probably the best thing I could do because I didn't

like people.

I didn't like pressure.

I didn't want nobody to know.

I had just started the job with him, so we agreed on that.

We wasn't going to mention nobody.

But unknown to Calvin, Charles had other ideas.

I think daddy's the one that made the

decision that, yes, they should tell someone.

And I can understand Calvin not wanting to

get in the limelight and everything like that.

My father, I guess, just thought it was too important to ignore.

Directly after the alleged happening, Charles told Calvin

to drive to the Mississippi press room to

share their news with a reporter, going against what they had agreed.

Once there, the two men met with accusations

of being drunk to craft such an unbelievable story.

Now we have social media, seeing comments online

that, oh, what were these two Southern guys drinking?

Well, you know, they either weren't drinking, but

even if they have, you know, anybody watching

this today, have you been drunk at any point?

Did you hallucinate an alien abduction?

I don't think so.

So, but they weren't drinking anyway.

It's as simple as that.

The press office directed them to speak with

the police, as their story was impossible to

believe and therefore wasn't newsworthy.

So we called the sheriff's department and they

told us to wait, to wait right here for them.

I was on patrol and I heard some chatter on the radio and I heard some

officer talking about it.

And I didn't understand everything, but they were

talking about someone had been abducted by a UFO and everything.

Personally, at that point, I thought it was just a joke or the guys were just

talking about it.

Officers at night, late at night, and we all did, we would do funny things.

We'd get bored and, you know, we'd put

out different traffic on the radio, just to

make everybody laugh and keep them awake.

And they showed up just a few minutes later.

And that's when they, of course, we was in my car and I was driving.

They walked up to the door.

They looked in the car.

They asked me to see the driver's license and to step out.

I stepped out of the car.

They told me to stand on my left leg, raise my right leg, and bend my

head back, touch my nose, close my eyes,

and count to 200 backwards and jump up and down.

Of course, I told them I couldn't do that sober, much less if I was drinking.

But they put me through the meal.

There's a little sobriety test.

We walked around and all.

And finally, Glenn Ryder said, you sober enough to drive anyway.

Follow us to the police sheriff's department.

Walking into the Jackson County Sheriff's Department, the

two probably knew their story would be tough for anyone to believe.

But for Charles, it was a story he needed to tell.

I was with the Pascagoula Police Department in

1973 when all of the UFO stuff happened.

This is my riot shotgun.

It gave a lot of people religion.

Bill Gennaro worked for Pascagoula PD and then

later on, he worked with me in the

Jackson County Sheriff's Department in the early 90s.

In some places, I was referred to as the M.F. with the silver shotgun.

He was a pretty good investigator.

I can't tell you nothing bad about the man.

He was right here in the midst of everything.

And I'm sure he'd know things I'd never know.

I'd never met Calvin, but you know, Charlie,

due to his drinking, was pretty well known to the law enforcement in the area.

Probably if he'd have been the only one

that came in reporting the abduction, they probably

would have just laughed at him.

But Calvin, no, he, you know, straight up,

not a drinker at all is what I understand.

And that lent a lot of credence to it.

When inside the Sheriff's Department, the two men

were taken to separate interrogation rooms where they

were questioned on what had happened.

They kept saying, well, Calvin, you can tell the truth now.

You won't be in no trouble right now.

But if we keep on, you're going to be, this is a hoax.

You're going to be in a lot of trouble.

Of course, it wasn't no hoax, so I wouldn't tell them nothing.

Whilst Calvin stayed quiet, Charles was in the

other room relaying his story of abduction to the police.

You know, you see something like that, it’ll scare you to death!

And I couldn’t believe it.

And, you know, you think you’re dreaming about something like that, you know.

And Calvin just-he went hysterical, you know.

I was scared to death.

Two of ‘em just floated around behind me

and lifted me off the ground.

You said they had some kind of instrument on you, didn’t you?

Some kind of instrument I don’t know what it was.

I’ve seen instruments, but I’ve never seen, nothing like that before in my life.

There ain’t no way to describe it.

It didn’t try to communicate with you?

It looked like an eye.

You know, like a big eye.

Unsurprisingly, it was hard for the police department

to believe what they were being told.

The story of two men being abducted by

aliens felt more like a Hollywood movie plot than a real life event.

I personally never saw any physical evidence for

me to be convinced to believe it.

I'm not saying it's not true.

I'm talking about me.

Unconvinced by their story, the police devised a

plan to get the men to admit that this was all a hoax.

They set up a secret audio recorder in

an interrogation room and sent both Calvin and Charles in.

And they wanted to hear us talk to each other.

They thought we'd laugh and tell how we got off on them.

But neither the sheriff nor his deputies could

have imagined what would come next.

I never heard it, but I understand it would stand a hair upon the back of

your head.

The way they were talking, it was, it was no scam.

They were scared to death.

(dramatic music)

All I remember is just a blur.

Just like you looked through that wall right

there, I seen a ghost or something come through.

I don’t know where-I was just so scared or what.

When we get through us, we'll go by the perimeter.

I'll get you something to settle you down so you can get some damn sleep.

I can't sleep yet like it is. I’m just damn near crazy.

I remember my arms, they just froze up just like that.

I couldn't move. Just like I stepped on a damn ratlesnake.

I paralyzed right there.

They were surprised when they heard us talking.

You know, Calvin's literally crawling up the walls, almost crying.

I think he says a prayer at one point.

And it was that that convinced the sheriff

and his deputy that something, something, you know,

unusual had happened to these two gentlemen.

They weren't lying.

They weren't hoaxing.

You know, it's a powerful piece of evidence.

It really is.

(dramatic music)

I'm Dr. Irina Scott.

I'm an investigator of the Pascagoula case.

I've been investigating some aspects of it since about the 1980s.

There was a big supply of mysteries in 1973 in the fall, much more than at

any normal time.

And so Pascagoula wasn't exactly strange because it

was happening all over the country.

In UFO circles, we use a term called a flap.

And basically what a flap is, is a

high concentration of UFO sightings from a particular

area or geographical location over a certain period

of time, like an increase in reported sightings.

And 1973 was the year of such a flap.

One of these reports was coming from over 200 miles away.

And this one was just as strange and

extraordinary as Charles and Calvin's encounter.

I don't know if it was the same craft or it was a different craft, but

it did happen that same night.

There were constant sightings being reported from California,

through Oklahoma, through Texas, through Missouri, through Arkansas,

that there was a good chance if we went out, we would see something.

And not be knowns to me, that night happened to be October 11th, 1973.

I told my friend, if we go out tonight, we may see something.

So we went way out away from the town where we live, away from the city

lights.

There was no distractions.

We ended up way, way out in the

countryside, where there was an abundance of cow

pastures and no paved roads, just gravel roads.

And we stopped on the gravel road in the middle of nowhere.

We got out of the car and I looked up and there was a red light

and it was moving from west to east across the sky.

All of a sudden it stopped and it

turned a green, an emerald green with no

sound.

And it started to come down on an angle, about a 45 degree angle.

When we came up the other side, it was coming down across the road and it

turned yellow in front of us.

I told my friend, drive faster.

He was driving so fast, it was like we were hydroplaning on the gravel.

I told my friend, blink your lights off and on.

He said, it looked like something dropped out of it.

It turned purple and I didn't see that.

He stopped the car.

We got out of the car.

We were on the side of the road again.

There was a ditch and a fence.

There was another cow pasture.

And this, whatever it was, was above that

cow pasture, no more than 50 yards from us, not more than 100 feet in the air.

And it was pulsating green, red, orange, green,

red, orange in the most vibrant colors.

It has the ability to change colors.

And you couldn't make out the shape of the craft because when the red would go,

the orange is there.

And when the oranges go, the green was there.

I mean, it was blood red and emerald green.

It was incredible.

And there wasn't a breeze.

There wasn't a sound.

We were standing in total darkness, watching this amazing thing.

And I'll never forget the words.

I turned to my friend and I said,

you're looking at something from another world.

Even further afield was Rosario Nail, who on

the same October night in 1973, witnessed something

extraordinary in the night sky.

It still scares me to talk about it.

I mean, I feel my heart rate,

you know, picking up and stuff, because I just don't know what it was.

Her encounter with the extraterrestrial marked an eerily

similar resemblance to what Charles and Calvin witnessed.

Were they connected?

Or was it just a coincidence?

I was 20, 21.

I had gone to a girlfriend's house.

And so we're sitting on her porch and it's about, it had gotten dark, so it

was about 8, 39 o'clock.

And in that part of the country is pitch black.

There's no street lights because it was very rural.

We were out in the country.

And so when I say we're sitting on the porch looking at the stars, I mean,

you could see the stars are brilliant because

there's nothing to interfere with that.

So we're sitting there talking and we're looking up.

And all of a sudden I went, oh, wow, look, do you see the fallen star?

And I pointed to it.

And she said, yeah, I see it.

Well, then as it's coming down, then I realized it's going across the sky.

And I'm like, wait, that can't be a fallen star.

But it was big.

And then all of a sudden three lights emitted from it.

But you could see three figures coming out of the light.

And I'm like, oh, wow.

Because then I'm thinking that it's a meteorite

and then it exploded or something.

But what happened next would prove that whatever

Rosario was looking at, it definitely wasn't a meteor.

But these three separate balls emitted

from it and they went that way, which

would have been south.

It comes down and the farther down it

comes, I mean, it literally looked like the sun.

It was that big.

And then when it's coming down, I could

hear dogs in the distance, like everybody in the country has a dog.

But these dogs were barking like

they were trying to attack something.

And then it moved across the sky about that far.

And then it shot straight up.

I mean, like that.

Like, holy crap.

Didn't have any kind of weird feeling or anything until it went in reverse.

Then I was terrified at that point.

I don't know why.

I knew it wasn't normal and it wasn't a natural phenomenon.

But that's what happened that night.

I did not know at the time, but the next day in the paper, there was

an article printed about a whole family in

a small community to the north of where we were standing.

That saw the same object.

Another sighting of a UFO was reported to

the DI, which is the local paper called

the Daily Iberian, by an area resident Friday.

The Iberia is probably about 200 miles to

the west of Pascagoula in coastal Louisiana.

It would be west of New Orleans.

Curly Miguez Jr. of Lydia said he and

his wife, Kenneth Robichaux, and a host of

Robichaux neighbors sighted a UFO Thursday night.

Miguez said he observed what was certain to

be some type of aircraft, which increased its

speed at times, hovered, and sometimes even zigzagged.

1973 was a very busy year for UFO activity all over the states as well as

the world.

And also the interesting thing about that is

that sometimes these flaps seem to appear when

there's a lot of geopolitical things happening.

For example, in 1973, you had Watergate going

on, you had issues with Iran, and you had the energy crisis was beginning.

All of these things were happening, and there's

a UFO flap that's sort of underneath it,

under the news of everything that's going on.

Well, in 1973, if you said you saw

a UFO, you were immediately considered a crackpot.

You know, yeah, oh, those crazy people that see UFOs.

Yeah, no, we don't want to talk to you.

You know, we don't, well, thank you, see ya.

No one wanted to admit they had seen something.

I didn't admit what I had seen for years.

I'm J.

Michael Long.

I'm a documentary film producer in Waco, Texas,

but I grew up in Ellisville, Mississippi, which

is about 90 miles north of Pascagoula.

I was 12 years old when this happened,

and we had gone to Laurel, Mississippi to

Sears, and I bought, I got a football.

By the time we got home, it was getting dark, and I couldn't get out in

the yard and play with the football, so I just went out into the street in

front of the house where there was a

streetlight, and I was throwing the football up

in the air and catching it, and at one point, I threw the ball up, wind

blew it or whatever, and it landed over in my yard, so I walked up the

little slope, and I reached down to pick the football up, and as I did, I

looked to the north, and there was this orange ball in the sky, and I didn't

know what that was.

I mean, I was 12 years old.

I didn't know anything about UFOs or anything

of that nature, and this ball was moving

very, very slowly, but it was just tracking

across the sky, and I remember, as I

stood there watching it, I was riveted, and

I couldn't move, and I was watching it, and when it got directly in front, I

remember thinking to myself that you could put

my mother's car inside this thing at least twice.

I believe that there was probably something solid

that was emanating, you know, illuminating the light,

but it was so bright, it was difficult

to see anything that might have been inside it, and he said it was like being

in an extremely bright light bulb, and it

continued to drift and drift and drift until finally it went to the horizon.

It looked like a little star in the distance, and it went over the horizon, and

it was headed south to the coast.

Whatever it was that J.

Michael saw, it was now heading in the direction of Pascagoula.

Could it have been the same thing that Charles and Calvin saw?

The adults were snickering and joking and laughing

about the two guys in Pascagoula that claimed

they were abducted by aliens, and that's when

I, you know, I realized that the night that what I saw was the same night

that they were abducted.

(dramatic music)

By the following morning, the local press had

a hold of the story, and now Calvin

and Charles' experience was the talk of Pascagoula.

It was just a few minutes' drive to the shipyard where we was working.

We pulled up.

There was TV trucks with the uplinks stuck up in the air and all.

There was a bunch of them.

The guy that owned the shipyard said, Calvin

Parker and Charlie Hickson come to the office.

He said, y'all gonna have to give a press release or something because we can't

even use the phones, and I realized then the story was out.

It really hit me.

Everybody knew then.

With Charles' and Calvin's story now out in

the open, other eyewitnesses started to realize that

what they'd seen wasn't an anomaly.

It was really exciting up until I heard on the news.

They called it an alien encounter that had happened the previous night.

Calvin and Charlie had been abducted.

It was all on the front page.

And they described what they saw, and both seemed to be in a state of shock.

And that's when it really bothered me.

My heart jumped up in my throat.

I'm thinking, you know, that could have been us.

People were scared.

People were spreading rumors.

For many, the story of Charles Hickson and

Calvin Parker's encounter with an unknown craft seemed

almost too extraordinary to believe.

But for the two men at the center of the experience, the ordeal was very real.

Word of their encounter quickly reached authorities, and

before long, the two men were summoned to Keesler Air Force Base.

It was a step neither man had sought out, but one they felt compelled to take

as the world around them began to close in.

Both gents went to Keesler Air Force Base to be checked for radiation.

The same Keesler Air Force Base on the night before the tournament got lost.

Daddy told me that they had people in radiation suits at the gate.

And they not got our counters, but something they had to detect radiation.

They run it over.

They found a little bit.

You know, why be in radiation suits if you didn't think something happened?

I worked in the oil field, and I worked around on gamma rays and all that.

Plus, welding puts out a certain amount of

radiation, and I had been welding all day.

They said, all clear.

Everybody pulled their suits off.

They said, some of the brass wants to see you in the back.

I said, while you're there, gents, why don't

you sit down and tell us what's happened?

We followed them down the hall.

It seemed like it took hours to get.

It was just a matter of five minutes, probably.

But it seemed like it took hours to get walked out hall.

And we opened the door, and there was

all kind of brass in there, which officers.

And it was the police department from every

major city on the coast, the sheriff's department,

and some of the military brass.

And it was mainly Charlie talking, you know.

And we know that because we have a transcript of the meeting.

(dramatic music)

Charlie was my spokesman by then, and I let him make the fool, what I thought,

make the fool out of himself.

And I'm going to go on, and everybody forget about me in a day or two,

you know.

And that wasn't the case.

Fred Diamond, which was a sheriff, said for

us not to leave, that somebody was there to see us, which was Dr. Heineck and

Dr. Harder.

Of all the men in the UFO field today, the name of Dr. J.

Allen Heineck tops the list.

The former Blue Book investigator for the Air

Force and current head of the astronomy department at Northwestern University.

Heineck was over Project Blue Bull, and he had flown in from California.

How he found out about it and got there that fast, I don't know.

Because really, it didn't hit the media until

that same morning, and he was there that evening.

And that was just unheard of, to come from California that far in a day's time.

Because of his expertise in the field of

UFOs, Dr. Heineck is called to the scene of every major UFO sighting.

He was summoned to Pascagoula, Mississippi last October,

hours after two shipyard workers, Charles Hickson and

Calvin Parker, stumbled into a sheriff's office and

said they had been taken aboard a flying saucer.

Dr. Heineck really is the one that got me out of the shell to start with.

I talked to him about it.

I would call him, and he would call me and check on me probably once a week.

Dr. Heineck also talked about other cases going on.

I guess he was doing that to try to relax, relax me and get me where

it opened me up and get me where I would talk about it.

(dramatic music)

But he was a blessing.

It was the only good thing that come out right when that happened.

We got to work that morning, and Dr.

Heineck pulled me in.

Dr. Harder pulled Charlie in.

And then Charlie and I traded spots, and

Dr. Harder tried to, well, he did hypnotize me.

No reason to be afraid. Just tell us what happened.

Three creatures came out of the door.

Scared.

Tried to block it out of my mind.

When this first happened, I would tell everybody I just passed out.

I didn't know nothing.

I didn't remember nothing.

And I couldn't say, you know, distinctly, because

I was at the point where I passed out.

Did you get any sensation at all of hear, or cold?

No.

I’m scared.

I don't even so much remember being hypnotized too much.

I know I got chills running up my spine, and I started shaking real bad.

That's when he brought me out.

I probably wasn't under it for 30 minutes.

Just enough to relax.

I remember him tying balloons to me and floating off.

That was about it.

(dramatic music)

The ship is gone.

It disappeared.

They keep coming back in my mind.

They just keep coming back in my mind.

This is something that you’ve got to know about

Calvin, it’s not going to be something that’s going to continuously worry you.

You’re gradually going to get over this.

It brought back some memories, and I guess

he was trying to bring back memories there

that scared me, because I sure didn't want to remember it.

I believe my subconscious mind might have blocked

it out, because back then I couldn't handle it.

I mean, I can handle about anything, and I wasn't scared of nothing, but I was

scared of that.

I went down to Pascagoula completely negative, but

I worked with those men for quite a while.

I listened to tapes that had been taken

where they didn't know they were being taped.

I saw how Charlie behaved under hypnosis, and finally the lie detector test.

All of those things convinced me that he was not making it up.

They had an experience, period.

You have to then judge by his past

reputation, how he's regarded in the community.

Would he have any reason to do it?

All that sort of thing.

But it’s such a pattern, you see, that's not an isolated case.

We have a catalog now of well over 800 such cases.

Charles and Calvin's story sent Pascagoula into a

frenzy, with hundreds of people taking to the

streets and beaches to catch a glimpse of

whatever it was that abducted the two men.

And for Bill Gennaro, his involvement in the

case was about to become a whole lot more personal.

This was the third day after the abduction.

The west end of the beach, there were, I don't know, a hundred or more people

for the first two nights.

But on the third night, there was only two women and a 14-year-old boy.

And I was just, you know, patrolling.

And I pulled up and said, have you seen any little green men?

I mean, we got a laugh.

And then the 14-year-old pointed and said, what's that?

(dramatic music)

Got out and started looking.

Looked like a blue cigar.

And I noticed a reflection off the water, some hazy blue light.

Basically, there was no other shape to it than that.

We were watching it.

And it was there for a couple minutes.

And then it headed west in an arc.

It came to rest 180 degrees behind us,

where the abduction was supposed to have happened.

And we watched it for a little bit.

Then it came back 90 degrees west and went gone.

Now, it made no sound.

There were no flashing lights.

Weather balloons don't fly that way.

Helicopters make noise.

I don't know what it was.

I didn't think of any other reason for them to be in that area except to

be looking for somebody else to pick up.

Women wanted a report.

And I said, I'll tell you what.

You come to the station with me and tell the captain.

Then I'll write a report.

And I did.

And the procedure at the time was that

the media did not get reports until the clerks cleared it.

Unfortunately, one of the newspaper reporters got there

early and grabbed the reports.

And when it hit the paper, I had to hide.

I was dodging media left and right.

The chief obviously was not overly happy.

And his opinion was, keep your eyes on the ground, don't look up.

Whatever it was Bill Gennaro saw was eerily

similar to what Charles and Calvin had experienced

just three nights previously.

Something strange was happening in Pascagoula and nobody knew why.

Amid the growing frenzy of eyewitness accounts and

widespread speculation, Dr. Heinecke decided to visit the

site where Charles and Calvin had reported their abduction.

But by the time he arrived, the location had already been overrun.

He wanted to go to the site to see what it was.

I didn't walk on the site with him, but I went out there anyway.

And I remember him being mad because the

police department didn't have it ribboned off.

The site was now contaminated, littered with footprints,

disturbances and signs of human activity.

Whatever clues the original scene might have held

were lost, making it even harder to separate fact from fiction.

And people were stomping all over there.

Reporters was all over it.

The law enforcement was all over it trying to get the reporters off.

(dramatic music)

Kids had rode a bicycle over there.

And I remember the law running them off.

And later on, way down the road, one of the kids that rode the bicycle had

told me about, they went over and seen a spot on the ground where this thing

had landed.

With another eyewitness coming forward, albeit decades later,

the story of Charles and Calvin's encounter was becoming harder to dismiss.

(dramatic music)

My whole name is Bratton Claybrook Caldwell.

I go by Clay Caldwell.

I was born here in Pasco, Mississippi.

My father was an attorney at Ingalls Shipbuilding at the time.

He had got a phone call.

I suppose they were concerned about the fact

that two men had been abducted by a

UFO and had reported that, that worked there at the Ingalls Shipbuilding.

My mother was sitting there and she was

like, what, you know, what are they saying?

What are they saying?

You know, so he was explaining to my

mother, well, it happened down there at the

river, at the little fishing pier, just south of the drawbridge.

So immediately I knew where he was talking

about because we used to go fishing ourselves as kids.

That Friday, I spoke with some of my friends and said, hey, do y'all want

to go see where the aliens landed?

Would y'all like to go see that?

You know, I know where it is.

One or two of them were like, yeah, but what if something happens?

You know, they come get us.

What if they, what if they're still there?

And then it started coming up, what if they dropped something?

You know, so as kids, we're thinking, oh, we're going to find a ray gun or

we're going to find something from another planet, you know?

So that's what we did.

And we knew we had to be quick.

We had to be fast because we knew that, you know, if this was ever found

out, we're in hot water.

So we got out there to where the pier was.

We kind of scattered around all on the ground, went out on the pier, you know,

looking, we're looking for anything that, you know,

may have been left by an alien.

And we decided, you know, well, where did it land?

We decided, well, let's go out here and look in the weeds and the tall grass

and stuff, you know?

I say I used to go out in the woods all the time.

I wasn't scared to go out in a little bit of tall grass and weeds.

So we made our way through.

And I'll just never forget.

It was just a feeling when we first saw it.

We were like, whoa.

(dramatic music)

It was about a 30 foot, 25, 30

foot wide circle of nothing all of a sudden.

It was just flat.

You would have had to gone in and just cut literally with scissors.

Something so sharp.

I've never been able to imagine what kind

of machine could do that and leave nothing behind.

You know, it's not like it was just

pushed over, like something just landed on top of it.

It was like, it's though something came from above and just removed everything.

We just kind of never really talked about it because we didn't want to get in

trouble from being somewhere we weren't supposed to be.

And over the years as I grew older and up, you know, I never really even

told my wife about all this until that day we were going to go see this

Platte that was being put at the river.

And on the way, I opened up to her.

Oh, I'm sorry.

But it kind of disturbs me.

It's like anything else you've held inside of you for all these years.

And I didn't expect to do this.

For Clay Caldwell, his memory of what he

saw that day had lingered unresolved, a burden he carried alone for decades.

His story, like so many others tied to

the Pascagoula abduction, was a reminder of how

deeply this event affected those who came close to it.

Pascagoula was just beginning to settle back into

normalcy after the chaos of the abduction story.

The town was still buzzing with speculation,

but life had started to move on.

And then, just weeks later, another strange event

shook the community when a mysterious object was

reportedly seen in the waters nearby.

Three little boats gone out fishing and they

see something under the water.

It's circular.

It's illuminated.

It was segmented.

They said it looked like one of the old-fashioned parachutes.

It was segmented.

And they got so close to it that they could hit it with an oar and

it went plunk.

And one of those fishermen, there's only one

of that party that went out that night still alive.

There was eight, I believe, all together.

This chap called the old Ryan.

We know what we see at night.

And my daddy, he was going to go down to the dock and look down and

see what was going on.

He was going to tell them what it was.

And he kept poking that, poking that.

It sounded like it hit a piece of metal.

That's when the light went off.

So we went down to come and get back out there and work with that.

Then they got to pull the light went off again.

It is a very bizarre sighting, if you like, in its own right.

But this happened again just after the events

in question with Charlie and Calvin in the same part of the river, but just a

little bit further out.

And fortunately, there is a photograph of all

those present, all the civilians that was taken by the Coast Guard.

They've lined them up on the side, taken a photograph of them.

And the good thing for us, although their

names are mentioned in the documents, the names

are all on the back of the photograph.

(dramatic music)

The U.S. Navy were brought in the next day.

They sent a gentleman and Mr. Ryan Hill.

Ryan, one of the witnesses showed him where the incident happened.

And he said that the Navy were going to look into it and issue a full report.

But some Naval workers aboard a ship on

the Pascagoula River had already experienced something similar.

I had top secret clearance when I was in the Navy.

And this is one reason why I never talked about it in the Navy.

We could see six spherical, shiny, silver, metallic

-looking, aluminum-looking objects in the water under the surface.

We're traveling about, I would have to say,

35 to 40 knots.

They were traveling at a very rapid rate of speed.

They came from a southeasterly point, came to

the northwest and curved right up into the river.

And then when they came back out, I assumed it was the same six, but six

more came back out and they went straight into the gulf.

And from our vantage point here, we saw

them, detected them when they were right about here.

And like I said, it was only a few minutes before they were out of sight

as they were traveling extremely, extremely rapid.

That night, the Coast Guard saw objects just like we did.

A lot of the fishermen out in the gulf that had seen them described the same

exact type of craft.

So it's a powerful, powerful batch of evidence, if you like.

If you were just looking at this case on its own, it'd be, wow, this is

fascinating.

But of course, it comes in the wake of what happened just a few weeks earlier.

The mystery of what happened in Pascagoula in

1973 remains unsolved to this day.

Decades later, the questions linger, but with all

the eyewitnesses and the compelling accounts that have

come out over the years, the events in Pascagoula stand out as one of the most

credible and fascinating glimpses into the unknown, offering

a story that continues to captivate and challenge

our understanding of the world around us.

Whatever happened in 1973, the shared experiences of

the residents of Pascagoula and those who witnessed

things further afield will connect them forever.

(dramatic music)

And while Calvin Parker's story may have seemed

increasingly plausible as more and more witnesses came

forward over the years, the truth remained that

his life could never truly return to what it once was.

I had my plan for life.

When I was 18 years old, I had everything planned out the way that I wanted.

And I've always said I was gonna get

married, buy a house, have children, have grandchildren, retired.

And that was a simple life.

That's all I wanted.

Since this happened, I chased the media.

The media's chased me.

Uh, they're set up at night and wonder why.

Or worry about this stuff.

And your worrying brings on sickness.

And I really believe, uh, you can worry yourself sick.

And I think that's so much wrong with me.

So I wanted my life to be stable.

I wanted my marriage to be stable.

And it is now.

And, uh, I got a great family.

I got a wonderful wife, wonderful kids.

Uh, wonderful son-in-law.

And everything's stable now.

Then I got sick.

So another curveball comes in.

So it's just something you have to deal with.

And I'm making plans now for them.

I'm not planning for myself because I don't feel like I'm gonna be around.

Nobody never knows.

But, uh, I don't want to leave this whole world and leave everybody in a bind.

I don't want to owe nobody nobody.

I don't want to lie.

And to do right by your family and friends and to live by your conscience.

(dramatic music)

No, I'm not afraid of it at all.

Everybody's gonna die.

So I'm not scared of dying.

I wouldn't be sitting here fixing to die and lying about it all.

So anyhow, I want to say goodbye and goodnight to everybody.

Everybody, goodnight.

And I hope y'all enlightened somehow.

(dramatic music)

(dramatic music)