March 4, 2026
380: The Pascagoula Incident
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Chilling reports of a UFO abduction are made in 1973 Mississippi.
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WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_01]: They come in peace.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Jason Horton.
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[SPEAKER_04]: I'm Rebecca Leib, and this is Ghost Town.
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[SPEAKER_04]: I'm just excited to know what's going on.
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[SPEAKER_04]: I'm going to put some stuff on.
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[SPEAKER_04]: I'm going to put some stuff on.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So that was footage of 45-year-old Charles Hickson, a man describing a 1973 alien encounter while under deep hypnosis.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And that kind of sets the scene for this episode here.
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[SPEAKER_03]: It is creepy, it's unnerving, it's specific.
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[SPEAKER_03]: This 45-year-old Mississippi shipyard worker would do everything imaginable to prove his story, including share these details under hypnosis.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He participated in hundreds of interviews, took lie detector tests, and even agreed to that, hipnotherapy session.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Historic begins on October 11, 1973, when Hickson and his co-worker 17-year-old Calvin Parker went fishing, picking their spot on the west bank of the East Passagula River in Jackson County, Mississippi.
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[SPEAKER_03]: as the dusk fell, the two heard something odd, a slight buzzing sound in the sky.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Looking up the season's fishermen saw something they could barely believe, a football-shaped craft hovering above them.
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[SPEAKER_03]: It's like the start of every UFO encounter, but this one would change their lives and become one of the most well-documented abductions of all time.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Today, on Ghost Town, the Pasca Gula Incident.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So what do you think when you think of a
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[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, the spaceship, you're getting abducted, it's in a field, or it's, it's rural.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So around 11pm, Hicksman Parker arrived at the Jackson County Mississippi Sheriff's office to report an extremely strange experience that they had just had.
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[SPEAKER_03]: According to law enforcement, the two were crazed almost in shock, nervous, but they told authorities that they had been fishing off of the Pascha-Gula River that evening.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And just a couple hours earlier, they heard a, like, a worrying, whizzing sound.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Then they saw two flashing blue lights in the sky, followed by an oval-shaped objects, approximately 30 to 40 feet across, and eight to 10 feet high.
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[SPEAKER_03]: terrifying, terrifying and even more terrifying the objects comes closer to them.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Out of the craft, three creatures glide down to the man, carrying them back to their space vehicle.
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[SPEAKER_03]: This is Hicks in in 1973.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Lulaia had had blue flashing lights as it was, you know, approaching the ground that the innate one out.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when the old man appeared, some source of light came from the inside.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was just all well planned.
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[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, for about three or four days, I had something like a bed well in flashing my eyes.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And then there was Parker who found himself paralyzed, but his terror was gone, he says.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Here is Parker talking about the event in 2019.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The fact is shot immediately or something in my arm and that just calm me is like a common agent.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So this thing cared me to stay up for the craft.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Hickson and Parker encountered three of these creatures, again, the ones that had ushered them inside with pinchers, as you heard during this episode's opening.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Here's Hickson talking again about it.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The creatures took them aboard the UFO and subjected them to an examination.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Hicks and said he was examined by a robotic eye, and Parker said he was given a kind of physical by one of the aliens.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Again, Parker doesn't feel fear during any of this.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He is calm, probably whatever injection he gave him.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He emphasized that a lot.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He felt no worries.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He was calm.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He was at peace with the world.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The beings, he said, wanted to be extremely clear that they,
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[SPEAKER_02]: And she took a right hand in the two middle finders on that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She started running down my throat.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I got the child choking.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I was having a hard time braven when she took out her fingers and just kind of stood there and kind of looked at it, but now she didn't say nothing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But mentally, I felt like she said, we're not going home.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Both men were deposited back on the riverbank and the spaceship just flew away.
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[SPEAKER_03]: and it was over, that was it.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And again, it sounds like the quintessential alien abduction story.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The men shaken, told police that they initially decided not to report the incident instead, because it was so late they went to the local Mississippi press office to tell the press about it.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Because the press office was closed, it was late, they decided to come back to law enforcement and maybe tell them to create some kind of report.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Glenn Ryder, who took the men's story, later told Press that he was initially skeptical and suspected a prank, but the men seemed so shook about the whole thing and so extremely sincere.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Parker kept wanting to pray during the visit to the police, thinking that what he experienced was an active spirituality.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Quote, with all I went through on this earth, Hickson said to Ryder, why should I have to see something like this?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Ryder smelled alcohol and Hickson's breath and Hickson explained to him that he had had whiskey, but only after the encounter to calm his nerves, the same to make sense to Ryder, who'd later told Press that the two were absolutely not drunk.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Officers then decided to just do this thing where they left Hickson and Parker in a room.
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[SPEAKER_03]: They had been secretly recording them in this room and they thought that maybe if the two were left alone, some kind of crack would appear in their story.
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[SPEAKER_03]: They'd say something, they'd say how they shot them or that it was all a joke, but they didn't.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The two were still absolutely freaked out alone in this room and their stories were consistent.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, they were sitting there not doing anything almost, still in shock from what they had experienced.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Captain Ryder himself was shaken in regards to the men's story.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Were they telling the truth and if so, what did it mean?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Because what Hicks and Parker didn't know was that this wasn't the first alien encounter Ryder had heard that night.
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[SPEAKER_03]: More after this break.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Around 11 p.m. October 11, 1973, a service station operator named Larry Booth had called the sheriff to report something very similar to what Hicks and Parker had, a strange craft with a blinking colored light that was passing above him.
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[SPEAKER_03]: At that point, writer shrugged it off as nothing, but after the men came into the station and told their story, well now it may be...began to be something.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The next morning, the Mississippi Press of Pascagula reported on that quote-unquote something, and the Associated Press and United Press International picked it up for worldwide distribution.
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[SPEAKER_03]: That afternoon, the two men scheduled a press conference retelling their exact same story.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The two and were also examined at Kessler Air Force Base, cleared of radiation exposure and released.
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[SPEAKER_03]: There were also many skeptics, of course, as there were believers in their abduction, but the sincerity of the two men seemed to charm the masses.
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[SPEAKER_03]: These two grizzled southerners, skeptics themselves in most ways, were saying what happened to them was definitively an undeniably real.
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[SPEAKER_03]: UFOologist James Harder and debunker turned promoter J. Alan Heineck even traveled to Mississippi and interviewed Hickson and Parker, separately under hypnosis.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Hickson's interview is what you heard at the beginning of this episode.
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[SPEAKER_03]: To the shock of writer and Mississippi officials, Harder and Heineck told press that the men's accounts were likely based on, quote, fact.
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[SPEAKER_03]: These men have had very real, very frightening experiences.
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[SPEAKER_03]: They are absolutely honest.
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[SPEAKER_03]: They've had a fantastic experience.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So, given all of this, what do you think?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Is it real?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Is it not real?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think that thing two things can be true.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Something could not happen and someone can believe that it happened.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, telling it off, how many times do you think when a police officer asks somebody, are you drunk?
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[SPEAKER_01]: That person said no, and they were lying.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the history of when?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think there's ever a time where they're just like, yeah, I'm drinking.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's cool.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I love it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a little bit of met, you know, where you can believe something and you can see something and then you can make your mind can make logical, like these kind of like leaps that this happened and maybe I fell asleep for a few seconds and I had a dream that something happened and when I woke up that dream seemed very, very real to me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like all these things kind of, I mean, 1973, I mean, that's pretty early on in like the you, you know, when we're talking about UFO stuff, but the 1970s was like hypnosis.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: New age stuff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There was, it's, you didn't have to, you didn't have to like really dream any of that up.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was really kind of given given to you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, do I believe that it happened?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'd be curious to know, I'm always curious to know like the lives of these people, how many times have they?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Is this the first time they've ever said, oh yeah, I saw UFO.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this is the 19th time I've seen a UFO.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And this is the time that like everything kind of happened where people were interested in kind of keeping this going.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I do I believe in that they think they were abducted sure.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you believe in the thought that they had.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, for sure.
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[SPEAKER_03]: They you believe in their belief.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, you would say also are they are they religious.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Um, if you're religious, you you might, uh, you might be willing to make those leaps in your mind.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps if you are religious is just something else that I'm thinking.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And I think to, you know, in a vacuum late at night, these two guys, they were out fishing at night.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Like, what do you do in your fish?
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[SPEAKER_03]: You drink a lot of the time.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Like, in the cultural scenarios that I understand.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like, in early morning, like we get a four or five to go fishing, not like, can you want to go fishing at like midnight?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and also the age gap between the two people.
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[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, okay, a 45-year-old in a 17-year-old are there spending time together, their love of fishing or whatever, you know, and it's like, oh, you could see how maybe if someone believed something a little bit more than the other, maybe that would persuade the other person to kind of go with that story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Or they're just, well, lying.
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[SPEAKER_03]: or they're just like quick.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're just too fishermen.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go to the press.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Straight to the press.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's very interesting to say that.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So back to our 24th press compared the case to the Betty and Barney Hill case, which we know we covered this an episode.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So just to recap that episode, which you should go back and listen to, it's really fascinating.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Barney and Betty Hill were an interracial American couple and civil rights activists who claimed that they were abducted by extraterrestrials from September 19th to 20th, 1961.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Do you remember that case?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's one of the first ones and one of the biggest ones.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And that kind of ushered in a lot of these other things, or at least the acceptability of people going to the press and talk about it.
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[SPEAKER_03]: A little bit about it.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: For these future ones.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_03]: But the believer might be like, there wasn't a lot of,
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[SPEAKER_03]: You know, if you would not heard about this, a lot of these stories sound similar to the Hill case, but also would they have known in rural Mississippi?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm actually taking that for granted, like the, you know, the access of information in the lack of it back then.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Local press reported that the two men had not been seen at their workplace prompting speculation that they were being paid to tell their story.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And on October 27, to dispel that rumor, Hicks and Took, a polygraph test.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The local polygraph examiner, who administered the test, concluded Hicks and Quote, told the truth as to what he believed.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Coshon and Quote, we do not say a spaceship landed or that creature's emerged from it.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Parker Hover refused to take the test at all.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Interesting.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Hicks and appeared on the Dicavit Show to tell the truth and the tonight show with Johnny Carson telling his story.
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[SPEAKER_03]: It seemed to be the pinnacle of press around the matter, and yet other firsthand accounts around the Pascagula River would also feel this fire, including a November 8th, a fisherman and his 14-year-old son told Press that they saw an illuminated object underwater in that exact same river.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Things just keep getting stranger.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In January, Hicks and was arrested for public drunkenness after being found wandering along a highway.
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[SPEAKER_03]: April, he told the press that he was in ongoing contact with the beings, having had three different encounters.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Hicks and T's that the beings would soon provide a message along with proof of their existence, which he would relay to Washington.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Hicks and spread the gospel of his encounter, now encounters, for everyone that would listen.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, he became a bit of a UFO celebrity, while Parker preferred hanging back and returning to his regular life.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, there were many non-believers, skeptical investigator, skeptic investigator Joe Nichol wrote that Hickson's behavior was quote questionable.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Nichol speculated that Hickson may have fantasized the alien encounter during a hypnagogic waking dream state, and suggested that Parker's corroboration of the tale was likely due to sugestibility, because he suggested in summary, because he said in some interviews that he, quote, passed out at the beginning of the incident and failed to regain consciousness until it was over.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And yet, Jackson County Sheriff's Captain Rider still staunchly believed that the two men were telling the truth.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He told the Washington Post in 1975, quote, if they were lying to me, they should be in Hollywood.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So given that new information has your belief changed around it, what are you thinking?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's made me more of a skeptic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, when you're like, I'm getting some attention of this, and eventually that attention runs out because it's like the stories over, then you're like, oh wait, but wait, there's more and it's always but wait, there's more when you're getting attention or maybe you're making money or it's giving you some kind of identity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What do you do when you stop, as are what we heard the stories like wait, but there's three more times.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to relay a message to Washington DC now that I am the direct contact with the alien beings.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the sheriff, I, you know, could also believe it, but who wants to say like, no, I was dupped.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think I was dupped.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And they also want to be part of the story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: People like being, I mean, I think there's an inherent like like to be asked and part of something bigger than you already are.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And again, you talked about faith too.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I bet that hearing the excitement around these stories and having all this attention, it kind of accesses a point of faith.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Also, where it's like, oh, maybe there is something bigger than us.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe if I believe in this, which is also very exciting, kind of sexy.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe that creates more order in my own universe and my own religious belief system.
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[SPEAKER_03]: whatever.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And then also interesting that Parker didn't say as much, right?
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[SPEAKER_03]: So one person was more vocal, the other person was like, maybe not.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because a two people are talking the stories won't line up, or that the odds of the story is not lining up in a significant way increases.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And also what you believe at 17 versus years late decades later could be very different, you know, in September 2011, Hicks and died of a heart attack.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He was 80 years old.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In 2018, again, much later, Parker, who had been diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer, decided he wanted to finally share his truth in its entirety.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Parker released his book entitled Pascagula, The Closen Counter, My Story, which is quote the first full account of the event given by Parker, along with how it affected his life.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In it, he asserts that the two had been abducted, and that the whole thing was completely real, not made up, and that all of this haunted him his whole life.
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[SPEAKER_03]: He then began giving interviews some of which are in this episode.
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[SPEAKER_03]: On June 22nd, 2019, a historical marker was unveiled at the site of the alleged abduction, funded by the local historical society.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Parker attended the unveiling as did Hicks and Sun and Family.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Parker stated, quote,
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[SPEAKER_03]: I can't really describe it because I would break out in tears if I do.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I wish when I died I could be buried right here underneath this plaque.
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[SPEAKER_03]: That would explain it best.
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[SPEAKER_03]: It is quite an honor.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Parker died from kidney cancer in August 2023 at the age of 68.
16:13.890 --> 16:19.037
[SPEAKER_03]: In his 2019 interviews, he clearly wants to set the record straight.
16:19.017 --> 16:27.959
[SPEAKER_03]: The city of Pascaguila also hosts a festival every year in October to mark the anniversary of this incident, and the plaque still stands commemorating the encounter.
16:28.581 --> 16:36.621
[SPEAKER_03]: It gives Pascaguila residents hope that something might actually be out there, something peaceful and intelligent, observing us from the great beyond.
00:00.031 --> 00:01.372
[SPEAKER_01]: They come in peace.
00:01.933 --> 00:02.693
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Jason Horton.
00:02.954 --> 00:28.857
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm Rebecca Leib, and this is Ghost Town.
00:29.123 --> 00:46.744
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm just excited to know what's going on.
00:46.764 --> 00:47.386
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm going to put some stuff on.
00:47.406 --> 00:48.027
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm going to put some stuff on.
00:48.445 --> 00:56.875
[SPEAKER_03]: So that was footage of 45-year-old Charles Hickson, a man describing a 1973 alien encounter while under deep hypnosis.
00:57.556 --> 00:59.999
[SPEAKER_03]: And that kind of sets the scene for this episode here.
01:00.039 --> 01:04.104
[SPEAKER_03]: It is creepy, it's unnerving, it's specific.
01:05.045 --> 01:13.255
[SPEAKER_03]: This 45-year-old Mississippi shipyard worker would do everything imaginable to prove his story, including share these details under hypnosis.
01:13.235 --> 01:20.428
[SPEAKER_03]: He participated in hundreds of interviews, took lie detector tests, and even agreed to that, hipnotherapy session.
01:21.289 --> 01:33.471
[SPEAKER_03]: Historic begins on October 11, 1973, when Hickson and his co-worker 17-year-old Calvin Parker went fishing, picking their spot on the west bank of the East Passagula River in Jackson County, Mississippi.
01:33.451 --> 01:37.978
[SPEAKER_03]: as the dusk fell, the two heard something odd, a slight buzzing sound in the sky.
01:38.639 --> 01:44.507
[SPEAKER_03]: Looking up the season's fishermen saw something they could barely believe, a football-shaped craft hovering above them.
01:45.208 --> 01:52.959
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like the start of every UFO encounter, but this one would change their lives and become one of the most well-documented abductions of all time.
01:53.620 --> 01:56.344
[SPEAKER_03]: Today, on Ghost Town, the Pasca Gula Incident.
01:57.045 --> 02:01.652
[SPEAKER_03]: So what do you think when you think of a
02:01.818 --> 02:08.334
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, the spaceship, you're getting abducted, it's in a field, or it's, it's rural.
02:08.695 --> 02:08.996
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
02:10.098 --> 02:10.479
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
02:10.499 --> 02:18.038
[SPEAKER_03]: So around 11pm, Hicksman Parker arrived at the Jackson County Mississippi Sheriff's office to report an extremely strange experience that they had just had.
02:18.018 --> 02:25.869
[SPEAKER_03]: According to law enforcement, the two were crazed almost in shock, nervous, but they told authorities that they had been fishing off of the Pascha-Gula River that evening.
02:26.229 --> 02:30.195
[SPEAKER_03]: And just a couple hours earlier, they heard a, like, a worrying, whizzing sound.
02:30.856 --> 02:39.908
[SPEAKER_03]: Then they saw two flashing blue lights in the sky, followed by an oval-shaped objects, approximately 30 to 40 feet across, and eight to 10 feet high.
02:39.888 --> 02:43.933
[SPEAKER_03]: terrifying, terrifying and even more terrifying the objects comes closer to them.
02:44.534 --> 02:50.221
[SPEAKER_03]: Out of the craft, three creatures glide down to the man, carrying them back to their space vehicle.
02:51.042 --> 02:52.204
[SPEAKER_03]: This is Hicks in in 1973.
02:52.784 --> 02:57.230
[SPEAKER_00]: Lulaia had had blue flashing lights as it was, you know, approaching the ground that the innate one out.
02:57.871 --> 03:01.255
[SPEAKER_00]: And when the old man appeared, some source of light came from the inside.
03:01.796 --> 03:02.957
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just all well planned.
03:03.198 --> 03:07.363
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, for about three or four days, I had something like a bed well in flashing my eyes.
03:07.343 --> 03:11.953
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there was Parker who found himself paralyzed, but his terror was gone, he says.
03:11.973 --> 03:14.819
[SPEAKER_03]: Here is Parker talking about the event in 2019.
03:14.839 --> 03:23.698
[SPEAKER_02]: The fact is shot immediately or something in my arm and that just calm me is like a common agent.
03:24.438 --> 03:29.291
[SPEAKER_02]: So this thing cared me to stay up for the craft.
03:29.371 --> 03:37.172
[SPEAKER_03]: Hickson and Parker encountered three of these creatures, again, the ones that had ushered them inside with pinchers, as you heard during this episode's opening.
03:37.714 --> 03:40.742
[SPEAKER_03]: Here's Hickson talking again about it.
03:40.722 --> 03:44.626
[SPEAKER_03]: The creatures took them aboard the UFO and subjected them to an examination.
03:44.666 --> 03:51.354
[SPEAKER_03]: Hicks and said he was examined by a robotic eye, and Parker said he was given a kind of physical by one of the aliens.
03:51.914 --> 03:54.317
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, Parker doesn't feel fear during any of this.
03:54.377 --> 03:57.360
[SPEAKER_03]: He is calm, probably whatever injection he gave him.
03:57.380 --> 03:59.042
[SPEAKER_03]: He emphasized that a lot.
03:59.122 --> 04:00.264
[SPEAKER_03]: He felt no worries.
04:00.284 --> 04:01.024
[SPEAKER_03]: He was calm.
04:01.064 --> 04:02.466
[SPEAKER_03]: He was at peace with the world.
04:03.207 --> 04:08.873
[SPEAKER_03]: The beings, he said, wanted to be extremely clear that they,
04:10.270 --> 04:13.733
[SPEAKER_02]: And she took a right hand in the two middle finders on that.
04:13.793 --> 04:15.375
[SPEAKER_02]: She started running down my throat.
04:15.415 --> 04:17.157
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I got the child choking.
04:18.478 --> 04:28.447
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was having a hard time braven when she took out her fingers and just kind of stood there and kind of looked at it, but now she didn't say nothing.
04:29.008 --> 04:33.152
[SPEAKER_02]: But mentally, I felt like she said, we're not going home.
04:33.212 --> 04:37.476
[SPEAKER_03]: Both men were deposited back on the riverbank and the spaceship just flew away.
04:37.456 --> 04:39.059
[SPEAKER_03]: and it was over, that was it.
04:39.099 --> 04:43.127
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, it sounds like the quintessential alien abduction story.
04:44.349 --> 04:54.688
[SPEAKER_03]: The men shaken, told police that they initially decided not to report the incident instead, because it was so late they went to the local Mississippi press office to tell the press about it.
04:54.668 --> 05:01.701
[SPEAKER_03]: Because the press office was closed, it was late, they decided to come back to law enforcement and maybe tell them to create some kind of report.
05:02.463 --> 05:13.183
[SPEAKER_03]: Glenn Ryder, who took the men's story, later told Press that he was initially skeptical and suspected a prank, but the men seemed so shook about the whole thing and so extremely sincere.
05:13.163 --> 05:19.131
[SPEAKER_03]: Parker kept wanting to pray during the visit to the police, thinking that what he experienced was an active spirituality.
05:20.112 --> 05:24.838
[SPEAKER_03]: Quote, with all I went through on this earth, Hickson said to Ryder, why should I have to see something like this?
05:26.120 --> 05:37.855
[SPEAKER_03]: Ryder smelled alcohol and Hickson's breath and Hickson explained to him that he had had whiskey, but only after the encounter to calm his nerves, the same to make sense to Ryder, who'd later told Press that the two were absolutely not drunk.
05:37.835 --> 05:42.460
[SPEAKER_03]: Officers then decided to just do this thing where they left Hickson and Parker in a room.
05:43.221 --> 05:49.547
[SPEAKER_03]: They had been secretly recording them in this room and they thought that maybe if the two were left alone, some kind of crack would appear in their story.
05:49.567 --> 05:54.833
[SPEAKER_03]: They'd say something, they'd say how they shot them or that it was all a joke, but they didn't.
05:55.073 --> 05:59.938
[SPEAKER_03]: The two were still absolutely freaked out alone in this room and their stories were consistent.
05:59.978 --> 06:06.205
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, they were sitting there not doing anything almost, still in shock from what they had experienced.
06:06.185 --> 06:09.414
[SPEAKER_03]: Captain Ryder himself was shaken in regards to the men's story.
06:09.695 --> 06:12.342
[SPEAKER_03]: Were they telling the truth and if so, what did it mean?
06:13.004 --> 06:19.181
[SPEAKER_03]: Because what Hicks and Parker didn't know was that this wasn't the first alien encounter Ryder had heard that night.
06:19.984 --> 06:21.207
[SPEAKER_03]: More after this break.
06:22.739 --> 06:35.595
[SPEAKER_03]: Around 11 p.m. October 11, 1973, a service station operator named Larry Booth had called the sheriff to report something very similar to what Hicks and Parker had, a strange craft with a blinking colored light that was passing above him.
06:35.635 --> 06:44.747
[SPEAKER_03]: At that point, writer shrugged it off as nothing, but after the men came into the station and told their story, well now it may be...began to be something.
06:44.727 --> 06:53.404
[SPEAKER_03]: The next morning, the Mississippi Press of Pascagula reported on that quote-unquote something, and the Associated Press and United Press International picked it up for worldwide distribution.
06:53.985 --> 06:58.293
[SPEAKER_03]: That afternoon, the two men scheduled a press conference retelling their exact same story.
06:59.355 --> 07:04.525
[SPEAKER_03]: The two and were also examined at Kessler Air Force Base, cleared of radiation exposure and released.
07:04.505 --> 07:11.403
[SPEAKER_03]: There were also many skeptics, of course, as there were believers in their abduction, but the sincerity of the two men seemed to charm the masses.
07:12.045 --> 07:20.708
[SPEAKER_03]: These two grizzled southerners, skeptics themselves in most ways, were saying what happened to them was definitively an undeniably real.
07:20.688 --> 07:29.236
[SPEAKER_03]: UFOologist James Harder and debunker turned promoter J. Alan Heineck even traveled to Mississippi and interviewed Hickson and Parker, separately under hypnosis.
07:29.856 --> 07:32.178
[SPEAKER_03]: Hickson's interview is what you heard at the beginning of this episode.
07:33.199 --> 07:40.005
[SPEAKER_03]: To the shock of writer and Mississippi officials, Harder and Heineck told press that the men's accounts were likely based on, quote, fact.
07:40.566 --> 07:43.689
[SPEAKER_03]: These men have had very real, very frightening experiences.
07:44.069 --> 07:45.410
[SPEAKER_03]: They are absolutely honest.
07:45.751 --> 07:48.433
[SPEAKER_03]: They've had a fantastic experience.
07:48.413 --> 07:51.077
[SPEAKER_03]: So, given all of this, what do you think?
07:51.197 --> 07:51.618
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it real?
07:51.658 --> 07:52.259
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it not real?
07:53.500 --> 07:57.626
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that thing two things can be true.
07:57.666 --> 08:02.694
[SPEAKER_01]: Something could not happen and someone can believe that it happened.
08:02.714 --> 08:09.203
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, telling it off, how many times do you think when a police officer asks somebody, are you drunk?
08:09.443 --> 08:11.246
[SPEAKER_01]: That person said no, and they were lying.
08:11.506 --> 08:12.548
[SPEAKER_01]: In the history of when?
08:12.568 --> 08:13.589
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely.
08:13.629 --> 08:13.970
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
08:13.990 --> 08:16.413
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think there's ever a time where they're just like, yeah, I'm drinking.
08:16.434 --> 08:16.834
[SPEAKER_01]: It's cool.
08:16.894 --> 08:17.475
[SPEAKER_01]: I love it.
08:17.455 --> 08:36.072
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a little bit of met, you know, where you can believe something and you can see something and then you can make your mind can make logical, like these kind of like leaps that this happened and maybe I fell asleep for a few seconds and I had a dream that something happened and when I woke up that dream seemed very, very real to me.
08:36.052 --> 08:48.446
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like all these things kind of, I mean, 1973, I mean, that's pretty early on in like the you, you know, when we're talking about UFO stuff, but the 1970s was like hypnosis.
08:48.727 --> 08:49.668
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah.
08:49.888 --> 08:50.849
[SPEAKER_01]: New age stuff.
08:51.290 --> 08:56.576
[SPEAKER_01]: There was, it's, you didn't have to, you didn't have to like really dream any of that up.
08:56.596 --> 08:58.658
[SPEAKER_01]: It was really kind of given given to you.
08:58.678 --> 09:03.544
[SPEAKER_01]: So, do I believe that it happened?
09:03.524 --> 09:08.391
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd be curious to know, I'm always curious to know like the lives of these people, how many times have they?
09:08.752 --> 09:12.077
[SPEAKER_01]: Is this the first time they've ever said, oh yeah, I saw UFO.
09:12.097 --> 09:14.421
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this is the 19th time I've seen a UFO.
09:15.402 --> 09:23.254
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is the time that like everything kind of happened where people were interested in kind of keeping this going.
09:23.690 --> 09:26.415
[SPEAKER_01]: I do I believe in that they think they were abducted sure.
09:26.435 --> 09:28.057
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you believe in the thought that they had.
09:28.478 --> 09:29.099
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, for sure.
09:29.119 --> 09:30.561
[SPEAKER_03]: They you believe in their belief.
09:30.581 --> 09:33.246
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, you would say also are they are they religious.
09:33.947 --> 09:42.541
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, if you're religious, you you might, uh, you might be willing to make those leaps in your mind.
09:42.602 --> 09:46.368
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps if you are religious is just something else that I'm thinking.
09:46.408 --> 09:46.508
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
09:46.488 --> 09:46.969
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
09:46.989 --> 09:53.239
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think to, you know, in a vacuum late at night, these two guys, they were out fishing at night.
09:53.420 --> 09:54.381
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, what do you do in your fish?
09:54.441 --> 09:56.144
[SPEAKER_03]: You drink a lot of the time.
09:56.204 --> 09:59.750
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, in the cultural scenarios that I understand.
10:00.251 --> 10:06.201
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like, in early morning, like we get a four or five to go fishing, not like, can you want to go fishing at like midnight?
10:06.181 --> 10:09.025
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and also the age gap between the two people.
10:09.125 --> 10:25.449
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, okay, a 45-year-old in a 17-year-old are there spending time together, their love of fishing or whatever, you know, and it's like, oh, you could see how maybe if someone believed something a little bit more than the other, maybe that would persuade the other person to kind of go with that story.
10:25.889 --> 10:27.852
[SPEAKER_01]: Or they're just, well, lying.
10:28.000 --> 10:31.264
[SPEAKER_03]: or they're just like quick.
10:31.644 --> 10:32.766
[SPEAKER_01]: We're just too fishermen.
10:33.687 --> 10:34.548
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go to the press.
10:36.430 --> 10:36.910
[SPEAKER_03]: Straight to the press.
10:36.930 --> 10:38.753
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's very interesting to say that.
10:39.674 --> 10:45.580
[SPEAKER_03]: So back to our 24th press compared the case to the Betty and Barney Hill case, which we know we covered this an episode.
10:45.600 --> 10:49.485
[SPEAKER_03]: So just to recap that episode, which you should go back and listen to, it's really fascinating.
10:49.465 --> 10:58.555
[SPEAKER_03]: Barney and Betty Hill were an interracial American couple and civil rights activists who claimed that they were abducted by extraterrestrials from September 19th to 20th, 1961.
10:58.675 --> 10:59.476
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you remember that case?
10:59.496 --> 11:03.300
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's one of the first ones and one of the biggest ones.
11:03.440 --> 11:03.840
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
11:03.880 --> 11:10.227
[SPEAKER_03]: And that kind of ushered in a lot of these other things, or at least the acceptability of people going to the press and talk about it.
11:10.247 --> 11:11.048
[SPEAKER_03]: A little bit about it.
11:11.068 --> 11:11.228
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
11:11.828 --> 11:12.689
[SPEAKER_01]: For these future ones.
11:13.090 --> 11:13.730
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
11:13.791 --> 11:15.232
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
11:15.552 --> 11:18.055
[SPEAKER_03]: But the believer might be like, there wasn't a lot of,
11:18.035 --> 11:26.367
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, if you would not heard about this, a lot of these stories sound similar to the Hill case, but also would they have known in rural Mississippi?
11:26.507 --> 11:31.654
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm actually taking that for granted, like the, you know, the access of information in the lack of it back then.
11:31.895 --> 11:37.282
[SPEAKER_03]: Local press reported that the two men had not been seen at their workplace prompting speculation that they were being paid to tell their story.
11:38.063 --> 11:42.169
[SPEAKER_03]: And on October 27, to dispel that rumor, Hicks and Took, a polygraph test.
11:42.149 --> 11:48.164
[SPEAKER_03]: The local polygraph examiner, who administered the test, concluded Hicks and Quote, told the truth as to what he believed.
11:48.946 --> 11:52.996
[SPEAKER_03]: Coshon and Quote, we do not say a spaceship landed or that creature's emerged from it.
11:53.718 --> 11:56.024
[SPEAKER_03]: Parker Hover refused to take the test at all.
11:56.505 --> 11:57.407
[SPEAKER_03]: Interesting.
11:57.387 --> 12:02.613
[SPEAKER_03]: Hicks and appeared on the Dicavit Show to tell the truth and the tonight show with Johnny Carson telling his story.
12:03.153 --> 12:17.809
[SPEAKER_03]: It seemed to be the pinnacle of press around the matter, and yet other firsthand accounts around the Pascagula River would also feel this fire, including a November 8th, a fisherman and his 14-year-old son told Press that they saw an illuminated object underwater in that exact same river.
12:18.650 --> 12:20.552
[SPEAKER_03]: Things just keep getting stranger.
12:20.612 --> 12:25.858
[SPEAKER_03]: In January, Hicks and was arrested for public drunkenness after being found wandering along a highway.
12:25.838 --> 12:31.383
[SPEAKER_03]: April, he told the press that he was in ongoing contact with the beings, having had three different encounters.
12:31.904 --> 12:38.050
[SPEAKER_03]: Hicks and T's that the beings would soon provide a message along with proof of their existence, which he would relay to Washington.
12:38.651 --> 12:44.036
[SPEAKER_03]: Hicks and spread the gospel of his encounter, now encounters, for everyone that would listen.
12:44.076 --> 12:51.323
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, he became a bit of a UFO celebrity, while Parker preferred hanging back and returning to his regular life.
12:51.303 --> 12:58.930
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, there were many non-believers, skeptical investigator, skeptic investigator Joe Nichol wrote that Hickson's behavior was quote questionable.
12:59.490 --> 13:20.128
[SPEAKER_03]: Nichol speculated that Hickson may have fantasized the alien encounter during a hypnagogic waking dream state, and suggested that Parker's corroboration of the tale was likely due to sugestibility, because he suggested in summary, because he said in some interviews that he, quote, passed out at the beginning of the incident and failed to regain consciousness until it was over.
13:20.328 --> 13:26.296
[SPEAKER_03]: And yet, Jackson County Sheriff's Captain Rider still staunchly believed that the two men were telling the truth.
13:26.897 --> 13:32.745
[SPEAKER_03]: He told the Washington Post in 1975, quote, if they were lying to me, they should be in Hollywood.
13:33.346 --> 13:38.333
[SPEAKER_03]: So given that new information has your belief changed around it, what are you thinking?
13:38.493 --> 13:39.855
[SPEAKER_01]: It's made me more of a skeptic.
13:39.835 --> 13:55.044
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, when you're like, I'm getting some attention of this, and eventually that attention runs out because it's like the stories over, then you're like, oh wait, but wait, there's more and it's always but wait, there's more when you're getting attention or maybe you're making money or it's giving you some kind of identity.
13:55.886 --> 13:59.633
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you do when you stop, as are what we heard the stories like wait, but there's three more times.
13:59.613 --> 14:00.054
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
14:00.094 --> 14:06.183
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to relay a message to Washington DC now that I am the direct contact with the alien beings.
14:06.223 --> 14:11.631
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the sheriff, I, you know, could also believe it, but who wants to say like, no, I was dupped.
14:11.831 --> 14:12.632
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I was dupped.
14:13.153 --> 14:14.475
[SPEAKER_01]: And they also want to be part of the story.
14:14.836 --> 14:21.165
[SPEAKER_01]: People like being, I mean, I think there's an inherent like like to be asked and part of something bigger than you already are.
14:21.145 --> 14:21.566
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
14:21.586 --> 14:23.688
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, you talked about faith too.
14:23.708 --> 14:30.877
[SPEAKER_03]: I bet that hearing the excitement around these stories and having all this attention, it kind of accesses a point of faith.
14:31.017 --> 14:33.059
[SPEAKER_03]: Also, where it's like, oh, maybe there is something bigger than us.
14:33.120 --> 14:36.424
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe if I believe in this, which is also very exciting, kind of sexy.
14:36.884 --> 14:41.770
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe that creates more order in my own universe and my own religious belief system.
14:41.750 --> 14:42.872
[SPEAKER_03]: whatever.
14:42.932 --> 14:47.198
[SPEAKER_03]: And then also interesting that Parker didn't say as much, right?
14:47.278 --> 14:50.063
[SPEAKER_03]: So one person was more vocal, the other person was like, maybe not.
14:50.083 --> 14:57.834
[SPEAKER_01]: Because a two people are talking the stories won't line up, or that the odds of the story is not lining up in a significant way increases.
14:57.954 --> 14:59.016
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
14:58.996 --> 15:09.153
[SPEAKER_03]: And also what you believe at 17 versus years late decades later could be very different, you know, in September 2011, Hicks and died of a heart attack.
15:09.213 --> 15:10.436
[SPEAKER_03]: He was 80 years old.
15:11.357 --> 15:21.274
[SPEAKER_03]: In 2018, again, much later, Parker, who had been diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer, decided he wanted to finally share his truth in its entirety.
15:21.254 --> 15:32.125
[SPEAKER_03]: Parker released his book entitled Pascagula, The Closen Counter, My Story, which is quote the first full account of the event given by Parker, along with how it affected his life.
15:32.729 --> 15:41.362
[SPEAKER_03]: In it, he asserts that the two had been abducted, and that the whole thing was completely real, not made up, and that all of this haunted him his whole life.
15:41.983 --> 15:45.168
[SPEAKER_03]: He then began giving interviews some of which are in this episode.
15:45.989 --> 15:53.200
[SPEAKER_03]: On June 22nd, 2019, a historical marker was unveiled at the site of the alleged abduction, funded by the local historical society.
15:53.701 --> 15:56.605
[SPEAKER_03]: Parker attended the unveiling as did Hicks and Sun and Family.
15:57.206 --> 15:59.850
[SPEAKER_03]: Parker stated, quote,
15:59.830 --> 16:02.694
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't really describe it because I would break out in tears if I do.
16:02.714 --> 16:06.319
[SPEAKER_03]: I wish when I died I could be buried right here underneath this plaque.
16:06.820 --> 16:07.901
[SPEAKER_03]: That would explain it best.
16:08.302 --> 16:09.363
[SPEAKER_03]: It is quite an honor.
16:10.285 --> 16:13.810
[SPEAKER_03]: Parker died from kidney cancer in August 2023 at the age of 68.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In his 2019 interviews, he clearly wants to set the record straight.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The city of Pascaguila also hosts a festival every year in October to mark the anniversary of this incident, and the plaque still stands commemorating the encounter.
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[SPEAKER_03]: It gives Pascaguila residents hope that something might actually be out there, something peaceful and intelligent, observing us from the great beyond.
