Pascagoula to Medjugorje – The Enigma of the Shared Vision

I missed out on the great UFO wave of October 1973.  I was in Israel at the time, there to write my dissertation on the “chariot” vision of the prophet Ezekiel.  (A UFO?  Some think it was.)  I’d stepped off the plane the previous August, wholly unaware–naturally–that in another two months a major Mideast war, known to history as “the Yom Kippur War,” was going to break out.

As battles raged just beyond borders not many miles away from me, about the last thing I cared to read about–assuming any newspaper in Israel would carry such a story–was the abduction of two Mississippi shipyard workers by a UFO, thousands of miles across the ocean.  Alien abductions were a fairly recent addition to the UFO repertoire anyway.  Even those who’d kept up with the field, which I hadn’t, weren’t sure what to make of them.

It’s not easy to say just what happened to Charles Hickson (age 42) and Calvin Parker (age 19) on the evening of October 11, 1973.  By their account, they were fishing off a dock in the Pascagoula River at Pascagoula, Mississippi, when they were approached by a 30-foot-long, football-shaped object that hovered just above a clearing by the river.  Three short humanoid figures, gray and wrinkled like mummies wrapped up in bandages, floated out to them.  These beings paralyzed Hickson with their touch and caused Parker to faint dead away.  They carried the helpless men aboard the UFO, where they subjected them to an examination, releasing them not long afterward.

There are excellent reasons for not believing Hickson and Parker’s story.  The dock where they had their encounter was near a busy highway.  If an extraterrestrial craft had landed there, at least a few motorists should have seen it coming or going, even if the dock itself wasn’t readily visible from the road.  No one did; or at least no one spoke up at the time to say that they had.  (A few purported witnesses have come forward very recently, over 45 years after the event.  The long time lapse casts doubt on their claims.)

And that’s not the only problem.  The alien kidnappers, as the two men described them, bore scant resemblance to any UFO occupants reported before or since.  Stick-like ears jutted out horizontally from the sides of their heads.  Their eyes, normally UFOnauts’ most prominent feature, were missing or at least not visible.  (As if in compensation, a huge disembodied eye like a football floated around the abductees while they were aboard the spacecraft, examining them.)  Add to this the fantastic nature of the report, and it seems all but impossible to take it as a literal account of an event happening in the physical world.

But the obvious alternative, that they made it up either as a lark or in quest of fame and funds, doesn’t work very well either.

Once their captors had released them (allegedly) and the UFO zoomed (allegedly) back up into the sky, Hickson and Parker tried to report their experience to a nearby Air Force base.  They were rebuffed and told to go to their local sheriff.  Which they did; and they were grilled first together and then separately in the sheriff’s office.  Then they were left in a room by themselves, a concealed tape recorder taking down every word they said.

The police listened to the tape afterwards, expecting to hear Hickson and Parker chortling to each other about how they’d fooled those dumb cops.  What they heard instead was this:

Hickson: “I’m telling you man, something like that scare you slam damn to death.  Jesus Christ!” …

Parker: “I liked to had a heart attack, now I ain’t kidding you.” …

Hickson: “Scared me to death too son.”

Parker: “I’m just damn near crying right now and I can’t help it.”

Hickson: “Hell, I know. It’s something you can’t get over in a lifetime, see.  Jesus Christ. … I thought I had been through enough of hell on this earth and now I have to go through something like this, see.  But they could’ve–well I guess they could have, well they could have owned us son, they had us.  They could’ve done anything to us, they even hurt me!”

Parker: “Reckon why they just picked us up?”

Hickson: “I don’t know, I don’t know.  I don’t know.  Don’t tell me, man, I can’t take much more of that.”

Parker babbles about going to a doctor for “nerve pills” so he can get some sleep.  “I’m just damn near crazy,” he says.  “I just froze like that, and I just couldn’t move, just like I had stepped on a damn rattlesnake.”  A moment later: “I can’t figure out the damn door.”

Hickson agrees: “I don’t know how it opened, son.”

But open it did; and “them damn son bitches,” says Parker, “just like that they come out. … I paralyzed right there.  I couldn’t move.”

You can listen to the tape for yourself on the documentary film “UFO’s Invade the US,” on Disc 1 of the DVD Aliens, Abductions & Extraordinary Sightings, at approximately 21′ 50″ – 26′ 04″.  (Courtesy Wendy Conners, Fadeddiscs.com.  My thanks to Martin Kottmeyer for directing me toward this resource!)  I don’t think you’ll come away with the impression you’re hearing a pair of hoaxers.  These are the voices of men who’ve gone through something harrowing, inexplicable, and are struggling to come to terms with it.

What could that have been?

I’ll call it a “vision,” in full awareness that pasting a label onto it falls far short of explaining it.  But it does have this advantage: it encourages us to see the experience as something that had meaning for Hickson and Parker.  Not an alien incursion that they just happened to be in the right place and time to encounter; it was something that came–from within them, we have to suppose, since no one else seems to have seen it–bearing significance for them.  Not just as two salt-of-the-earth white Mississippians, but as two exemplars of the species Homo sapiens.

In a fascinating paper originally published in 1978, reprinted in 1989, Tony Nugent reads the two men’s experience through Jungian lenses.  In the title of his paper, which he dedicates in their honor, he calls it “A Close Encounter with a Hermetic Eye.”  He finds the “Pascagoula abduction,” as the UFOlogists call it, chock-full of mythic allusions.

Sometimes Nugent seems to be stretching it, as when he links the aliens described by Hickson and Parker to the “scorpion-men” of the Epic of Gilgamesh.  But there’s at least one point where he hits the bull’s eye.  This is when he quotes a UPI press release of October 12 in which the UFO is described as “fish-shaped.”  He juxtaposes this with the men’s testimony that the UFO’s strange “door” (see above) “just appeared, not opened, it appeared.  It come out of the spacecraft like you open one of them rubber coin purses you squeeze.”

In other words, like a fish’s mouth.

In other words, two men who went forth to catch fish were themselves fished for by a greater Fish, swallowed Jonah-like into the Fish’s belly.  There’s nothing arbitrary or accidental about the details of their vision.  They mesh perfectly with who the experiencers were, what they were doing when that vision came upon them.

If you and I had been on that dock, I’m quite certain we would have seen two men.  No interplanetary spacecraft.  Any more than the crowd gathered around the visionaries at Medjugorje, about whom I’ve blogged in the last three posts, were able to see the divine Lady that appeared to the visionaries with such vivid clarity.  And as at Medjugorje, Hickson and Parker’s vision was inescapably, essentially religious.

The things they saw, felt, experienced had no reality in the physical world.  How then did they come to see, feel, experience the same things?  A hallucination–to use the somewhat less polite word for “vision”–is, as my old friend and fellow-UFOlogist Jerry Clark points out, “confined by definition to a single percipient.”

Except when it isn’t.

As at Medjugorje.  As at Pascagoula.  As in the famous “Miracle of the Sun” at Fátima on October 13, 1917, when tens of thousands saw something–the sun falling to earth–that can’t possibly have happened.

Bracketing these shared-vision enigmas together is not the same as solving them.  It’s a useful first step.

by David Halperin
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