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11-11-90 BILOXI, Miss. Space aliens're just make-believe, Eddie Hickson's father told him. Years later, the elder Hickson said those same space aliens'd snatched him from the banks of the Pascagoula River in Jackson County & took him on board their dome-shaped craft. Charles Hickson Sr., a modest Gautier man & a retired shipfitter foreman at Ingalls Shipyard, told a crowd of about 200 conventioneers at the Great Gulf Coast UFO Gathering in Biloxi about the day that changed his life. Hickson, now 59, & fellow shipfitter Calvin Parker were fishing at an abandoned shipyard Oct. 11, 1973. "All of the sudden I heard some kind of hissing sound like steam leaking out of a pipe," Hickson said. "I saw some kind of craft hovering about 18 inches about the ground. I didn't know what to do. It appeared round with a dome on top & there were two blue pulsing lights on what appeared to be its front. A door opened & a very brilliant light came out, then three things came out & two of them took a hold of me & one took Calvin. When the one took hold of my left arm, it hurt, & then I didn't feel anything but my eyes. They were about 5-foot, 6-inches tall & they'd elephant-like skin, grey & very wrinkled. The skin ran horizontal. Their arms were very long in proportion to the rest of their bodies." His book, UFO Contact in Pascagoula, may soon be made into a movie. Once the beings released him inside the craft, Hickson became suspended in midair & watched an electronic eye come out of the craft's wall, scan his body, then retract into the wall.
After hypnosis unlocked his subconscious, Hickson recalled the faces of three male human-looking beings, who observed the examination from behind a window. "I kept wondering what they were going to do to me. They glanced at my eyes; then they carried me back & out through the brilliant light & put me down on the ground. Calvin was lying there on the river bank, his arms outstretched, & he seemed to be going into shock. I'd to slap him & scream at him to get his attention," said Hickson, a Jones County native & Army veteran of the Korean War.
Parker now lives in south Louisiana & has suffered two nervous breakdowns since the incident. Fearing they would be labeled insane, Hickson & Parker considered keeping their experience a secret, but reported it to the Jackson County Sheriff's Department that night. Since that eerie evening, the aliens have communicated with Hickson telepathically. Rubbing a flat, gray, quarter-sized object, Hickson explained that the disc heats up before he receives telepathic messages. Hickson's undergone numerous psychological evaluations. "I know these things sound very strange & I don't expect you to believe them, but I hope one day you will." Eddie Hickson, 36, has never thought his father was insane. He's watched him turn down handsome cash offers for his story over the years, fearing people'd think it a hoax. "I know in my heart & my mind that daddy didn't make this up."
