PASCAGOULA-THE CLOSEST ENCOUNTER: MY STORY

by Calvin Parker

  I can’t even go to the store without everyone asking me a lot of questions. I understand the curiosity but I just feel like I need some time to let it sink in then it would be alright. I would be able to handle it all. It was all just becoming too much for me. After getting off work one night I took a shower and laid down. Then, for some reason, I don’t know why, I started shaking uncontrollably and couldn’t stop. I lay there for about an hour and the shaking just got worse. Never have I experienced anything like this before or since. My brother was asleep in the other room, he was the only one at home that evening. He must have heard me as for some reason he got up at around 11:30pm and came to check on me. I was thinking that I might have got a virus from the abduction. I did not relate this shaking to stress because the media was leaving me alone at the time. Seeing me shaking really scared my brother so he loaded me up into the car and took me to the ER at the hospital in Laurel (South Regional). On the way there the shaking was just getting worse. My brother dropped me off at the door, got out of the car with me and called for someone to come and get me. I couldn’t even walk very well by this time.

  A couple of nurse’s came out with a wheelchair and rolled me inside and began asking the usual questions about who I was, what was wrong, have I been drinking, what meds I was on and a few more questions after which they just rolled me into a corner and left me instead of taking me back to a room. I looked around the ER and there wasn’t more than two or three people in there. About an hour passed by and I still had no help. To me I seemed to be getting worse instead of better. Now I was freezing and shaking and I couldn’t talk very well either. So, my brother went to the window and asked them how much longer it would be . They told him they would get to me when they got to me. That really pissed me off so I told him to go home but he refused. I asked my brother to go out to the car see to see if could find my jacket as I was freezing. I knew I was going to raise hell but I didn’t want him to get into trouble because of me.

  When he walked out of the door I got up and I was hell-fire angry at the way I was being treated. I stood up and threw the wheelchair against the desk where it would get their attention. It didn’t take but a minute when the hospital security officers had me down on the floor and in restraints. Then some doctor showed up and asked what was going on. They told him I was out of control so he checked me out and gave me some kind of shot that settled me down a little. I told the doctor what had happened and how I had been there over two hours with no one helping me. I heard the doctor, he walked out and chewed them out and said that I was in seriously bad shape and that they should never make anyone wait any more when in that kind of state. My blood pressure was 205/105 my heart rate was 160 bpm (beats-per-minute). The doctor ordered an E.C.G. He gave me a couple of shots, asked me a few questions such as have I been under any stress lately. So I answered as honest as I could . Finally all my vitals got back to normal and I quit shaking. The doctor said I was going to kept in hospital for a day or two just to be on the safe side. I told him I had to go to work so I couldn’t stay and that if I had any problems I would come back.

  The doctor informed me that it was not a good idea and that I had an emotional breakdown and if I didn’t get treatment it would just get worse. He recommended a doctor that I should see, gave me a prescription and told me to go the doctor tomorrow .When I walked out the door I threw this in the trash and thought I would just deal with it myself.

  In hindsight I now know how wrong I was and that I should have done what the doctor told me to do. The doctor said that stress would trigger my emotions and that it could all get completely out of control. The E.C.G. was normal but I had to control the stress. My brother drove me home and by the time we arrived back my family were there. I told my brother not to mention to anyone what had happened. But of course my brother didn’t listen to me and told everyone what had happened. He told my mom and dad what happened and what the doctor had advised. They just agreed with what the doctor had said and that I had to find a way to try and cope with the stress. I knew right then and there I would have to control the stress because if I didn’t I could end up back in the hospital.

  My family told Waynett about my trip to the hospital and she tried every way she could to help relieve the stress. Sometimes just sitting down and talking helped. Waynett and I have always been able to talk about everything then and now. If we have a problem we talk about it no matter how bad it is and we are honest with each other and that helps both of us and not just me. We have no secrets from each other and it’s really good to have a relationship like that as some time it’s hard to be honest. We always tell the truth and there is nothing we can’t talk about. Well, after this episode at the hospital I sat her down and told her my feelings about everything and she did the same. This started our marriage off on the right track because if we hadn’t have talked about all of this then our marriage would have never made it.

  Somehow we got over the breakdown illness and I just accepted it for what it was I still didn’t know why me. I’m still trying to figure it out in 2018 but God, has a plan for everything and I no longer question it.

  As planned we got married on November 9th, 1973. We just had family and a few friends in a small church wedding. Her grandparents had a big house in Laurel, close to where I had to go to work the next day, so we could sleep there. It was vacant so we stayed the night there on our honeymoon. It was a great night, our first night together. I told her we would take a honeymoon later. Well, later hasn’t made it yet so one day we plan to do it, it’s just been four or five years that’s all.

  I decided to sit most of the family down and tell them about the abduction and how it had affected me. So the next day after work my parents and Waynett’s all met at our house for dinner. This is when I told them the story about what happened to Charlie and me and about the nervous breakdown I’d almost had and my trip to the hospital. Our families didn’t say too much in response as they knew I’d been through enough, but at least now they knew and that was a weight off my shoulders.

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  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Other witnesses? Although no one came forward directly to me and Charlie after our experience was plastered all over the press, but surely there could well have been other witnesses to the event back in 1973. I’m not very knowledgeable about the UFO subject but I have learnt that apparently 1973 was a big year for UFO sightings in the USA.

  Charles Hickson and his co-author William Mendez did detail one witness to a UFO sighting on the same day as our experience. He was Larry Booth. This was published in their book ‘UFO CONTACT AT PASCAGOULA’ and I have the publisher’s permission to reproduce it here.

  Added to this my publisher Philip Mantle, who is also a UFO researcher in the UK, had an incident reported to him which again happened the day before our event. I have Philip’s permission to reproduce this sighting here. Last but not least there is the testimony of a retired US Navy officer who witnessed something on the same night as we did on October 11th, 1973.

  THE BOOTH SIHTIN Pascagoula, October 11th, 1973 The Pascagoula abduction was not the only UFO incident reported to have occurred on the evening of October 11, 1973. One of the most impressive sightings was made by Larry Booth, a Pascagoula service station proprietor. Mr. Booth, 48 and a World War II ‘Air Corps’ veteran, was interviewed in August 1974, at his home in Pascagoula. The following is an edited transcription of that taped interview.

  Larry Booth: Well, what happened, I was watching Kung Fu, which comes on TV at 8.00 P.M…..course when the program was over (9.00 P.M.) - just a habit - check the front door before you can go to bed when I turned all the lights off I just walked over to the door to turn the outside light off….I just happened to glance out the front door through this long glass (window) at the top of the door. That’s when I saw this big object which; I’d say - five to eight feet above the telephone pole out there, above the street light.

  The object was standing still, it wasn’t moving at all when I saw
it. But all the lights around the outside of it were turning - clockwise motion. And they were all red, no green, no other colours; all red - but no wings or no offset - no outer shape or nothin', just a huge object. Just to say how big it was, I don’t know, but I would say it was larger than the props on a helicopter, you know how big helicopters are with the large props? I would say it was bigger around than that.

  The main thing you could see were the lights all the way around it, a lot of them, close together and they seemed to be circling - I would say, slower than an ambulance light turns….about half that fast. But as the object got further off, naturally, I could only see the rear end of it and it looked - say, you’d see eight or ten (lights) and it decreased to six. Then, when it got way on out - instead of being’ right here, when you look up at a large object - lights all way around It - you can see 'em on both sides. So what caught my eye was just to look up, I couldn’t hear a sound. A helicopter would’ve jarred everybody in here out of the house and if it had been an airplane, it’d fall, 'cause I was in the Air Corps - and they have to be travellin' at a certain speed even to stay in the air.

  So, I started to go back and call my wife - just about the time I went to move, well, it started to move off in a slow motion, real slow, right over the pine tree. So I got over to the edge of the door and watched it 'till it went plum out of sight. And as it got off out away - more in the dark I would say, it seemed to me - a dome shape of some sort, you couldn’t tell. It reminded me sort of - you see these pickups, campers, with a little dome on top of it so the light can get inside of it. Well that’s what it looked like; it looked like the light was sort of reflected up from the inside. Those lights and the turning of it and that on top was all the shape you could really tell. But you could tell it was round and - I thought nothing of it. It didn’t bother me at all, really. I said, 'I’ve see a strange object.' I said, ‘Well, Keesler or Pensacola they always - helicopters and ferryin’ and doin’ all that back and forth - and I said, They’re running some kind of experiment through here, see.

  So, I wake up the next mornin’ and I started to work. Well, I always listened to the news, five minutes to seven news, out of Biloxi. And here comes this about what happened out here on the road (the abduction).

  So I began to time the television program, the time - what time I saw it and the directions that he said it went. And the way that it took off and the way the people of Pinecrest televisions acted up and the way that the people of Pinecrest said they saw it, different ones - and everything that happened in this direct path that's when I like to swallow my tongue! I got worried then, about what it was.

  Course, I’ve been questioned - friends and everything some have come up and just read about it and said, “Well, I know Larry, I been knowin’ him for years, I know he’s not tellin’ a tale.” Well, I’m not tellin’ any kind of tale, I don’t know what it was; I don’t have any idea what it was. But there are two things I figure; that it wasn’t an airplane and it wasn’t a helicopter.

  Yet another witness to a UFO event was reported to UFO researcher Philip Mantle in 2017.

  The day before the Pascagoula encounter

  I (Philip Mantle) received from Evan (full name on file) who responded to my interview On Open Minds radio in 2017. This is what Evan had to say. “I listened to your interview on Open Minds (radio) recently. I was 12 years old when the Hickson/Parker abduction took place. There was a UFO flap on the Mississippi coast at the time. Several stories were reported in the local newspapers before the Pascagoula event. I lived on a farm in Stone County with my parents. Stone is diagonally adjacent to Jackson County where Pascagoula is located. About an hour before the Hickson/Parker event took place a UFO flew over our farm. If you can imagine a sodium vapour street lamp silently and slowly floating overhead then you get the idea. My dad happened to be outside and screamed for us to come outside fast. We watched it until it was almost out of sight then it shrank to a red dot and darted south like it was shot out of a rifle. Although it was about the color of a street light, it was not at all harsh and didn’t cause spots before my eyes. The next day the Pascagoula story was in the news. For 2 or 3 weeks this thing flew a similar route near the farm but never as close as that first night and I never observed it turn red again. It was always before 8pm. On several occasions it travelled below the tree-line. You could see it pass behind individual tree trunks. I’m surprised MUFON in Mississippi didn’t know about this. Makes me wonder what else they don’t know.

  I’ve fished at the spot where this happened. It is near Ingall' s shipyard and Highway 90. At the time there was a shipyard security camera pointed in the general direction of where the UFO should have been. It was later reported that nothing unusual was observed on the camera footage at the time of the event. One reason the story never caught on in my opinion is that Mississippi is at the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. We are in 50th place. A lot of people joked about Hickson and Parker as a couple of drunken illiterate slack-jawed yokels with overactive imaginations. They weren’t intellectuals but they certainly deserved better treatment than that. I’m definitely getting the book. I’ve always been disappointed it wasn’t acknowledged as one of the significant abduction stories.” Evan.

  The third UFO witness that I would like to details here is Former US Navy officer Mike Cataldo. Here is what Mr. Cataldo reported.

  Mike Cataldo, US Navy retired Pascagoula 11thOctober 1973 Mike Cataldo, now long retired from the Navy, served in 1973 as a chief petty officer in Mississippi. Like most of the country, he was familiar with the Hickson-Parker report and never met or spoke with either man, but for all the years that followed he shared with friends and family another side to the story, something of vital significance that he finally decided to impart publicly late last year. He tried to locate a reporter in Pascagoula who wrote the original UFO story and eventually was put in touch with Natalie Chambers of the Associated Press.

  Natalie Chambers' interview with Cataldo appeared in The Northeast Mississippi

  Daily Journal of October 21 2001, but it failed to make the coast-to-coast splash it should have, though even famed radio commentator Paul Harvey realized Cataldo's importance and devoted part of his Saturday, October 27 national broadcast to Natalie Chambers' shocker.

  "When Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker told the world in 1973 they were abducted by aliens while fishing on the Pascagoula River, few believed them," her article began. "Now, after 28 years, it appears they weren't alone in their experience on that October 11thnight." Indeed, at about the same time and in the same area as the UFO incident, Cataldo and fellow crew mates Ted Peralta and Mack Hanna were driving on U.S. 90, heading to Ocean Springs. Cataldo was in the back seat.

  "We saw a very strange object in the horizon going from northeast across Highway 90," Cataldo recalled. "It was going pretty fast. It went down into a wood area and into the marsh. It hovered over the tree line for maybe a minute. We actually pulled off the road and watched it. We said, 'My God, what is that?'" Cataldo said the thing looked like a large tambourine with little lights flashing on it. "As quickly as we saw it, it just vanished." Some daylight still remained as dusk approached, so the men got a good look at the object. But Cataldo tells of a second sighting minutes later, this time in St. Andrews, as he neared his home. "It wasn't as high up as we saw the first time. It was real."

  Almost hyperventilating when he ran inside to tell his wife, Cataldo knew he had to tell Navy officials. As a member of the pre-commissioning crew of the USS Tunney, under construction at Ingalls Shipyard, he reported for work the next morning and immediately contacted his executive officer to make a statement. After the weekend, he contacted Keesler AFB in Biloxi and left his phone number. However, if Cataldo expected tea and sympathy, he was mistaken. "My executive officer and crew members thought we were just lunatics, just whacked out," he told Chambers. "It never came up again. Keesler never called or did anything."

  UFO researcher Kenny Young (Author's April, 20
07 notation to this 2002 article: Mr. Young is now deceased) also contacted Cataldo following Natalie Chambers' article, also attempting - so far unsuccessfully - to locate his two fellow Navy witnesses. Cataldo provided a few more details of the object, perhaps the most intriguing being that it "was less than half a mile away and looked as big as any big American airliner I've ever seen." He also confirmed that other motorists had slowed down to look at the seemingly inexplicable sky object. "We were the only ones on the road to stop and look at it though," he advised.

  Importantly, Cataldo admitted, "I never knew of the Hickson-Parker abduction until days later. It happened on Thursday and it was not until the following Sunday that I saw the headline in the morning paper about two men taken aboard a flying saucer, I'm telling you I about died." He emphasizes that he can't be absolutely sure that his UFO and the fishermen's were the same, but the place and time were so close that the relationship must surely be taken seriously.

  A fourth sighting that I would like to add in this chapter happened just a few miles away and just four days before our encounter. What is peculiar is the object sighted this time was underwater and was witnessed by civilians and the Coast Guard. I would like to thank UFO researcher Paul Dean for supplying this information and the official documents from the Pascagoula Coast Guard.

  PASCAOULA USO Unidentified Submersible Obect Tuesday thNovember, 1973, 9.30 pm. Round Island,