Remembering Charlie Hickson, a rare Pascagoula UFO abduction
by Antonio Huneeus (*) September 16, 2011 in Open Minds.
Charles E. Hickson, Sr., better known as Charlie Hickson, passed away in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, last Friday September 9 at the age of 80. A foreman at the now closed Walker Shipyard in Pascagoula, which built U.S. Navy ships, Hickson is best remembered as the key protagonist of a famous UFO abduction incident in Pascagoula on the early night of October 11, 1973. He was then 42 years old and on that fateful night was fishing on the Pascagoula River with his buddy Calvin Parker, a 19-year old welder at the yard. Little they knew that what they were about to experience would make them world famous.
The Pascagoula case quickly became one of the three classic alien abductions (together the Betty and Barney Hill case of 1961 and the Travis Walton case of 1975) in the era before this subject gained a wider public exposure thanks to the works of Budd Hopkins, Whitley Strieber, David Jacobs, Dr. John Mack and others. Included below is a rare transcript from a lecture given by Charlie in Mississippi in 1991.
As Hickson and Parker went about the normal pastime of fishing off a pier at Shaupeter Shipyard, they heard a buzzing noise behind them. When they turned their heads they could see an egg-shaped craft hovering about 40 feet above the Pascagoula River and about 30 feet long and 8 feet high, with blue lights on its front. A door opened in the craft and three creatures emerged and floated towards them. Charlie was a decorated Korean War veteran who fought in five major battles, but this was something else. The beings didn’t look human at all! Nor did they look like the so-called gray humanoids which have become associated with so many alien abductions. If anything, they looked like a wrinkled Egyptian mummy.
In one of the first articles about the case published in The Mississippi Press, Hickson said “the beings had legs but did not use them. They were about 5-feet-tall, had bullet-shaped heads without necks, slits for mouths, and where their noses or ears would be, they had thin, conical objects sticking out, like carrots from a snowman’s head. They had no eyes, grey, wrinkled skin, round feet, and claw-like hands.” No wonder Charlie was paralyzed in fear and Parker just passed out.
Both shipyard workers were captured by the entities and taken inside the craft. Charlie remembers being alone in a room where he was examined by some kind of “mechanical eye.” They were otherwise not harmed and some 20 minutes later found themselves back in the pier. After deliberating for a while, they decided to report the incident to Jackson County Sheriff Fred Diamond. The sheriff listened to their story but was initially skeptical (there was very little exposure to alien abduction stories back in 1973), so he put them in a room with a hidden recording device. Parker and Hickson didn’t know they were being recorded and the sheriff thought he might catch them lying, but instead the transcript of the recording released later showed the two men were really bewildered and totally disoriented by the experience.
Here are a couple of samples:
Parker: My damn arms, my arms, I remember they just froze up and I couldn’t move. Just like I stepped on a damn rattlesnake.
Hickson: They didn’t do me that way.
Parker: I passed out. I expect I never passed out in my whole life.
Hickson: I’ve never seen nothing like that before in my life. You can’t make people believe.
Parker: I don’t want to keep sitting here. I want to see a doctor.
Hickson: They better wake up and start believing. They better start believing.
It’s not totally clear how the story got out to the press, but by the next day a real media frenzy descended over Pascagoula. The Mississippi Press published so many articles in one week that they even put out a special booklet of all their coverage for $1. The shipyard hired a local attorney, Joe Colingo, to deal with the unending media requests. More importantly, two prominent researchers, Dr. James Harder of APRO and Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the former Project Blue Book consultant who had just established the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Chicago, showed up in Pascagoula to investigate the case when it was really fresh. Harder did hypnotic regression with both Hickson and Parker, and the scientists were quoted in the press saying “there was definitely something here that was not terrestrial.”
One of the more interesting documents about Pascagoula in my files is a 17-page transcript of the “Official Keesler [Air Force Base] Field UFO Interrogation of Hickson and Parker” of 12 October 1973, conducted by Lt. Colonel Derrington of the Security Police, Colonel Amdall, Chairman of the Department of Medicine, and several other health and security officers. Detective T. E. Huntley of the Sheriff’s Office and attorney Colingo were also present. This document—I received a signed copy from Charlie himself as you can see from the cover page—is of particular interest for at least two reasons: 1) It was done in late 1973, almost three years after Project Blue Book was closed and the USAF was officially out of the UFO business; and 2) It seems to be the only known government document showing an official investigation of a UFO abduction case. (There is an interesting 1967 FBI memo about an abduction in Chesapeake, Virginia, but it’s just one page without any indication that there was a subsequent investigation.) The Keesler Interrogation also establishes the fact that there were additional witnesses who saw a UFO on the night of October 11, 1973, including a Probation and Parole Officer called Raymond Broadus. Other witnesses emerged later on, including retired Navy chief petty officer Mike Cataldo. You can read a good interview with Cataldo made in 2001 by seasoned UFO investigator Kenny Young.
In 1983, Charlie Hickson wrote with college professor William Mendez a complete account of the case, UFO contact at Pascagoula, published by Wendelle Stevens in Tucson. It contains tons of information, including many photos, transcripts of interviews and regressive hypnosis, and a description of far lesser known contacts experienced later by Charlie in a wooded area near his home in Gautier. Out of the many websites describing the Pascagoula case, we found the one published in the excellent French website ufology.net one of the best (don’t worry, the link here is to the English version); it contains too all the main newspaper stories at the time and a transcript of the third interrogation of the witnesses three hours after the event done by sheriff Diamond and Captain Ryder. The Keesler Interrogation transcript was published many years ago in the MUFON UFO Journal Number 195 (May-June 1984), which can be downloaded from The Black Vault Internet Archive. Many excerpts of Charlie Hickson’s various TV interviews are also available on YouTube.
I got to know Charlie Hickson fairly well and interacted with him often particularly in the period between 1987 and 1992. I was even involved briefly (as a potential writer/researcher) in a movie project with Midge Soderbergh, the mother of the famous Hollywood movie director Steven Soderbergh, who had a strong interest in the paranormal. Unfortunately, the project never took off but it gave me at least the opportunity of seeing the sites in Mississippi and to spend some time with Charlie. I went twice to Mississippi, the first time to lecture at a conference in Biloxi on March 23, 1991, which was organized by Charlie himself. The other speakers (besides Charlie and me) were Stanton Friedman and Budd Hopkins, who also passed away recently and who thought highly of the Pascagoula case. We are publishing below as an exclusive for Open Minds an edited transcript of Charlie’s 1991 Biloxi lecture, which you won’t find anywhere else. It describes the original incident, his visit to Keesler AFB, how the experience affected his life, his Baptist upbringing, and some additional contacts he had as well as his “predictions” for some kind of “open contact” in 1992. True, events didn’t happen as he predicted, but I have no doubt that Charlie was totally sincere about this. Besides, there is a long history in ufology of failed predictions allegedly given by aliens to contactees which don’t come true or happen only partially or open to ambiguous interpretations. The best portrayal of this phenomenon was given by the late John Keel in his famous book—later turned into a movie with Richard Gere—The Mothman Prophecies.
EXCERPTS OF LECTURE BY CHARLES HICKSON
Biloxi, Mississippi, March 23, 1991
(Transcription & Editing by Antonio Huneeus)
CHARLES HICKSON: (After describing his original incident in Pascagoula)…
Talks about the terrible threat of nuclear energy and the threat of war with Russia that could have destroyed the world until not long ago; talks also about the free energy that moves the planets… and they couldn’t sit there in their world and allow us to blow this world up which could cause a chain reaction and could affect their lives on their world, that’s why they were coming down to do something about it. (Talks about how past civilizations have done that, civilizations have been destroyed before and we were on the verge of doing it again). I told people a while ago that communism would be no more, that the nuclear threat would disappear, so most of those threats are gone and we are heading in the right direction… and we’re going to have contact in 1992, there is 30 people that’s gone have open contact with alien beings, and after 1992 there is not going to be any question in anybody’s mind, there is going to be physical evidence, but they are not going to interfere with our problems, we got to solve it our own way, they are not going to meddle in what we’re doing, we have to always remind ourselves that we can’t do anything that’s going to harm their world, they are not going to allow that. Now, they are still in contact with me, a lot of people don’t believe this, but there is something that I have to live with and I will until the day I die, but there is a world out there somewhere with living beings on it that look almost like we do that can contact me at their will, they told me many things that has come to pass, I don’t claim to be a psychic but I do know that I am in contact with something that is not from this world…
(*) Antonio Huneeus is Open Minds Investigative Reporter. He has covered the UFO field from an international perspective for over 30 years. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications in the U.S., Latin America, Europe and Japan. He was also the co-author of the Laurance Rockefeller-funded “UFO Briefing Document – The Best Available Evidence” and edited the book “A Study Guide to UFOs, Psychic & Paranormal Phenomena in the USSR.” Huneeus studied French at the Sorbonne University in Paris and Journalism at the University of Chile in Santiago in the 1970s. He has lectured at dozens of UFO Conferences all over the world and been interviewed by many media outlets including The Washington Post, the Sy-Fy and History Channels, Nippon-TV, etc. He received the “Ufologist of the Year” award at the National UFO Conference in Miami Beach in 1990 and the “Courage in Journalism” award at the X-Conference in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in 2007.
