This article was published in the daily newspaper The Sun Herald, of Gulfport, Mississippi, USA on Wednesday, April 9, 2003.
My file on the Pascagoula encounter is here.
By Gary Holland
The Sun Herald
GAUTIER - Charles Hickson, who made international news with an account of his encounter with robots and an unidentified flying object, recalled the Oct. 11, 1973, incident at a book signing Tuesday night.
"I have a gut feeling that it won't be many more years until everyone is going to understand there are other worlds out there with life, and I'll be glad when that time comes," he said at the Gautier Library before meeting a roomful of UFO enthusiasts.
Hickson, 72, a Gautier construction contractor, wrote his book, "UFO Contact at Pascagoula," in the 1980s and makes appearances to talk about it.
He doesn't fear the aliens.
"If they come, we shouldn't attack them, thinking they mean harm," he said. "It wouldn't do any good. They could destroy us and this world if they want to."
Hickson's book recalls the afternoon when he and his fishing partner, Calvin Parker Jr., left work at Walker Shipyard and were fishing in the Pascagoula River just south of the U.S. 90 drawbridge. In the account of his encounter, a craft hovered over the bank and three robot-like creatures took them aboard and scanned them with an eye-like instrument, let them go and flew away.
"I don't know anything else to tell you," he said. "That's what happened almost 30 years ago."
He said he had a couple of occasions where he again saw space crafts and through communications, which he doesn't explain, they let him know they would stay in contact.
"I still hear and see things but I don't talk about it. There is no reason to talk," he said.
Hickson thinks the aliens are closer than any distant galaxy. He agrees with psychic Jeane Dixon, who talked with him about his experience, that they came from a small planet just past Jupiter.
"They are a lot further advanced scientifically than we are," he said. "They could come here for a purpose, possibly to help us. I believe they were concerned about a threat of an atomic war between Russia and the United States that could cause a nuclear reaction that would affect them. The Cold War is over, but there is still the Middle East and North Korea."
Hickson said he is a Christian.
"I believe there is a God, not only the creator of this world but the creator of all of those out there."
