Charles Hickson’s Legacy
Charles Hickson’s recent death reminded me of an earlier post at ufomystic about the problem of UFO witnesses who claim more than one sighting. Not many UFO students realize that Charles Hickson had at least three more contacts with what he thought were the same entities he saw near Pascagoula, Mississippi on the night of October 11th, 1973. Wikipedia has a good entry on the case for those unfamiliar with it.
While some researchers (most famously J. Allen Hynek) have stated that repeat witnesses lose credibility, the phenomenon is common enough that we can theorize that either UFO experiences are recursive (i.e. will self-generate given the right environmental and psychological conditions) or (to me, less likely) the UFOs themselves are interested in certain people. By “self-generate” I mean a spectrum of specific conditions may produce either the mental ability to create false UFO sightings, or more likely, cause certain people to become more sensitive to the conditions under which anomalous experiences occur. There is also the distinct possibility that some individuals possess the ability to more easily experience what most of us call the “paranormal.”
This reasoning may become more evident with a look at the Pascagoula abduction case, and more specifically, its effect on Hickson as recounted in his 1983 book UFO Contact at Pascagoula, co-written with William Mendez. Hickson garnered most of the media spotlight over the years because of his wish to communicate how the experience had changed his life. His friend and co-witness Calvin Parker was far more traumatized by the events and the aftermath that he did not revisit them publicly until two decades later.
By January of 1974, Hickson was tired of all the publicity surrounding his experience and went on a hunting trip alone in the backwoods of Mississippi. He was resting against a tree with his shotgun in his lap when he noticed that:
I hadn’t seen any movement at all around me–not even any birds, that seemed real strange. I saw it then, the same craft Calvin and me had seen before, about seventy five yards away in a small clearing, hovering above the ground. Before I could even think, a “radio” seemed to come on in my mind:
“We mean you no harm. We mean no one any harm. You may communicate with us later. You have endured. You have been chosen. There is no need for fear, we will communicate again.”
The “radio” was tuned off, the craft was gone. I had not moved. The shotgun was still laying across my lap. I seemed to be relieved of a terrible strain here in the middle of a seven hundred acre wooded area, alone. The fear had been taken away; it must be for a reason.
This was no more than four months after the original incident. Was this a true sighting and encounter, or was Hickson under so much strain that he confabulated the scenario, possibly in some altered state, to give himself permission to stop worrying, or some combination of these factors?
But this was not the end of the “visits.” The next month (February of 1974) Hickson said that he went outside late at night after being awakened by a dog barking. As he walked behind the apartment building where he lived, he saw the dog run away “as if something was chasing it.” At this point, he claimed to receive another message in his mind, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. He did say that he felt as if something was around or watching him. The message was a surprisingly standard “space brother”-type indicating that the beings responsible for his abduction would return and would help the world “in the future before it’s too late.”
These incidents could be labeled as confabulation, but the phenomenon wasn’t through with Hickson, and this time there were five other witnesses. In May of 1974, Hickson was driving home at night with his family when a light paced their car and landed or hovered about 200 yards away. Hickson wanted to go to the craft, but his wife and others were so frightened that he relented, particularly when he received another telepathic message: “Go. There will be another time. Another place.”
There never was. The phenomenon seemed to forget about Charles Hickson, but he didn’t forget, and spent the rest of his life talking to others about his experiences and what he thought they meant to him and the rest of the human race.
Calvin Parker refused to talk about the incident for many years, but apparently spoke on camera in 1993, although I cannot locate a link to the video. Archive.org has a wealth of audio connected to the case, including hypnosis sessions and interviews with the local police immediately following their experience.
Repeat UFO witnesses may have entered some sort of mental, physical, metaphysical or paranormal state through simple and accidental contact with the anomalous and be “primed” for further experiences–internal, external, or a combination of both. The Pascagoula case would definitely benefit from a thorough re-evaluation.
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Nov 04 2011 
November 5th, 2011 at 9:35 am
We should probably remember that it was until the late 1960s that UFOlogists began to take seriously UFO cases in which the objects landed on the terrain. Prior to that Blue Book even automatically discarded those cases into the “psychological category”!
The same can be said about cases in which entities were reported, and the many type of interactions between them and the witnesses –from non-verbal communication to sexual intercourse. Each time UFOlogists had to be dragged kicking and screaming into broadening their expectations about what kind of UFOlogical manifestations were “permissible.”
That’s why the UFO has perennially remained one step ahead of us, like a mirage in the desert.
November 7th, 2011 at 8:22 am
I mentioned your comments on the show tonight and also pointed out that the Lorenzen’s “Flying Saucer Occupants” was controversial in 1967, since UFO research sort of swept entity cases under the rug up to that point. At least, that’s what Coral Lorenzen wrote in the introduction, if I remember correctly. I think it was the first time that the Villas-Boas case was published in book form as well.
The phenomenon seems to lead us in certain directions, but we need that novelty and we may be leading it as well as an artist becomes inspired by new projects. At some point, no one knows who is doing the leading any more.