U.S. men held by space visitors have passed lie detection examination

PASCAGOULA, Miss. (AP) - A weird thing happened to Charles Hickson and Calvin parker Jr. as they stood casting for croakers in the Pascagoula River.

They said a spaceship hovered nearby and three pale, wrinkled creatures seized them, took them inside for an examination, then let them go.

Mystified investigators found no logical way to debunk the story.

Authorities said whatever happened undoubtedly was a soul-searing experience for Hickson, a 45-year-old shipyard foreman, and his young visitor, the son of a family friend.

It took place last Oct. 11 near the beginning of a great flap over Unidentified Flying Objects - UFOs - along the Gulf Coast.

"I've done everything I can to prove I'm telling the truth," Hickson said recently.

He is a slightly stooped man of middle height with a monkish fringe of hair, a slow and serene Mississippi drawl. He has four children and lately has been working two jobs, which occupy him from 8 a.m. until 9:30 p.m.

"As long as I'm working, I don't have any problems, but when I don't have anything to do, I sit and think," he said.

"I don't reckon I'll ever get over trying to figure out where they came from and why they picked me."

Hickson's report, briefly stated, was:

He and Parker, 19, were fishing at an old shipyard site which has since been scraped clean for new construction. At the time, it bore the run of a barge drydock, two rusty iron piers, a jumble of auto hulks, empty bottles and beer cans.

Though it seemed an isolated spot, it was not. Pascagoula is directly across the 100-yard-wide river. Huge shipyard cranes loom a mile to the south; a busy highway is 150 yards to the north.

A soft darkness had fallen as the men cast their lures. An oblong luminous blue blob circled, descended, hovered nearby.

BOTH MEN STUNNED

Hickson said he and Parker were too stunned to run, and in any case there was no place to flee.

An opening - not a door, simply an indescribable opening - appeared in the side and three pale creatures came out, paralyzed him, floated him into the craft, rotated him before an instrument resembling a big eye, then put him back on the pier.

Parker, reported almost in shock when officers questioned him three hours after the alleged encounter, said he blacked out as the creatures approached and remembers no more of it.

"They weren't lying," said Howard Ellzy, chief investigator for the Jackson County sheriff's department. "Whatever it was, it was real to them."

Ellzy's evaluation was later backed up by a polygraph test given both men.

Since then, Parker, a shy, lanky, unsophisticated youth who came here to work at the shipyard with Hickson, has returned home to Laurel, Miss.

Joe Colingo, counsel for the shipyard, said Parker was first treated at a hospital for the stress of a "complete physical and emotional breakdown."

For Hickson, things have been a bit better than he expected when he decided that, "though I'll be the laughing stock of the country," he had to tell the story so government officials would know of it.

Government officials didn't show much interest. But Hickson, convinced his UFO came from another world, said he was surprised by the number of people who accepted that as logical.

He said he hadn't pondered the matter before Oct. 11 but "I don't see why God would put life on just this one small speck and no other place."

Say saucer 'victim' in hospital

HOLBROOK, Ariz. (AP) - Travis Walton who is alleged to have disappeared after being struck by a ray of light from an unidentified flying object, was "on a craft of some sort" and made contact with strange creatures, his brother said Tuesday.

Duane Walton, 26, said he found Travis, 22, who now is in hospital. However, he refused to say where.

Meanwhile, Navajo County sheriff Martin Gillespie said five men who claimed they had seen Travis Walton struck by a ray of light last week in northeast Arizona passed a lie-detector test Tuesday. But Gillespie said he still wants to speak with Walton himself.

The sheriff has described both brothers and their mother as long-time students of UFOs. He also said he still had "not overlooked the possibility" that the story is a hoax.

LEFT TRUCK

Travis Walton disappeared last Wednesday. His six companions said he left the truck they were riding in near Heber to pursue an unidentified flying object in the woods.

The men said they were still in the truck about 25 yards away when Walton was struck by "a ray of bluish light."

They said they drove off, frightened, but returned shortly afterward and found no trace of Walton.

Sighters say saucer swallowed their chum

HEBER, Ariz. (Reuters) - Six forestry workers were to be given lie detector tests today to verify their story that a co-worker disappeared after being struck down by a blue ray from an object resembling a flying saucer.

After questioning the men about the incident, Navaho County sheriff Marvin Gillespie told reporters: "I am not a total disbeliever in the men's story."

The six men, working as a timber-thinning team in the Apache national forest, 120 miles north of Phoenix, said they were returning home at dusk Wednesday when they saw the object hovering over the road ahead.

Travis Walton, 22, a seventh worker with the group, jumped from the truck and ran forward to get a closer look.

Gillespie said the men reported that Walton was struck by a blue light from the hovering object and fell to the ground.

The men were so frightened they drove away, leaving Walton lying there, the sheriff said. When they returned about 15 minutes later, both Walton and the flying object were gone.

Police searched for Walton on Thursday without success. A second search during the weekend also failed to locate him.

UFO SIGHTINGS DEFENDED
Spins across galaxy recalled under hypnosis

TORONTO (CP) - Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist at Wyoming University, says he has hypnotized people who have seen unidentified flying objects and now is convinced that "we are not alone - humans are only a small part of the whole system."

Sprinkle, a guest speaker at the 86th annual convention of the American Psychological Association, says he thinks he can prove UFO watchers are not kooks.

During the last five years he says he has hypnotized 50 persons who said they were given mystery tours aboard alien spaceships. Before hypnosis, the subjects had never been able to remember what happened to them when they went for a spin around the galaxy, Sprinkle said.

He said the subjects told him everything went blank as soon as they made eye contact with the unearthly visitors.

After many hours of hypnosis, half the UFO watchers said they could recall precise details of their black-out period, Sprinkle said.

Carl Higdon, 42, a Wyoming oil-well driller, told Sprinkle he was on a hunting trip when he tried to shoot his rifle. The shot travelled only 15 metres, then bounced off an invisible wall. When Higdon turned around, he was facing a strange creature.

DESCRIBES ALIENS

Sprinkle said Higdon later described the creature as a humanoid with frizzy hair and two small antennae, dressed in an astronaut's jump suit. Instead of hands, it had cones which could beam objects from one place to another.

Sprinkle said that under hypnosis, Higdon told of being taken into a cubicle and transported to a master ship, a huge illuminated structure shaped like a Christmas tree.

"Whenever Carl described this under hypnosis, his eyes actually watered because the ship's glare was so bright," Sprinkle said.

But once inside the master ship, Higdon recalled he was told: "You're not what we want - you can go back."

Friends found him later that night wandering almost delirious in dense forest.

"Carl was a hard-working, strong, silent type of guy and not at all crazy," Sprinkle said. "I have concluded tentatively there is little evidence to support the psychosis hypothesis that only kooks see flying saucers."

Sudbury, Ontario, STAR, 5 August 1981, page 27

DESCRIBES HER DATES WITH 'REAL MONSTERS'

Betty Ann Luca in Chesire, Conn., poses during the twelfth annual Mutual Unidentified Flying Object Symposium held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. with representations of 2 extraterrestrial creatures she claims she encountered. Luca reports she was abducted aboard a UFO in 1967.

UFOs to blame for woman's 'missing time'

CALGARY (CP) - Many people have "missing time" in their lives they can't account for, says a woman from Langley, B.C., who believes she was abducted by aliens in a UFO.

"People who have undergone trauma may not be able to remember it. It's like missing time," says Linda Taylor, a registered nurse and trauma counsellor.

"It may have been that they suffered from sexual abuse or an accident or illness when they were young and it's been blocked from their consciousness."

Taylor says that until she was in her 30s she was plagued by the feeling that something traumatic happened to her when she was four.

"I thought I'd been a sexual abuse victim."

When she confronted her parents about it, they told her she'd been abducted by humanoids in a UFO near Langley and examined on a table.

Since then, she's had "spontaneous recall" of that event and subsequent other times aliens followed and contacted her.

"Aliens treat us like we treat bears," she says. "They give us a shot, take us away, tag us, then drop us miles from where they originally knocked us out."

Taylor says she feels more at peace with her experiences since going public with them several months ago and by helping other victims of aliens, childhood incidents and sexual attacks.

Taylor and Ed Hicks lectured about UFO experiences at the ninth annual Psychic ESP Fair at the Calgary Convention Centre, which also includes talks by psychics.

Hicks, from Tofield, Alta., says that crop circles found in Alberta fields are mathematical signs given to us by aliens that Earth is going through major weather, crop and environmental changes.

He says an alien gave him an idea for his invention, the Dream Dome, a canopy put over a bed which reportedly aids sleep.

But not everyone is convinced spaceships have landed in Alberta. There have been few UFO sightings in Calgary in recent years, says Bill Peters, executive director of the Alberta Science Centre.

"No one has convinced me that we're being visited by Little Green Men," he says. "Most things that people see in the sky have logical explanations."

Sightings around North America have dropped off in the past five years, partly because of lack of evidence of UFOs, which has "devolved the subject from science down to the checkout counter tabloids."

"We live in a big, complex universe. We've learned in 5,000 years of astronomy not to set up our world as special and unique."

Fire in the sky hero hounded by skeptics

PHOENIX (AP) - Travis Walton, whose UFO abduction story is told in the movie Fire in the Sky, says he's hounded by people who doubt him and seven fellow loggers.

Walton, 40, was a logger in northeastern Arizona when he said he was lifted into the sky by an extraterrestrial beam of light on Nov. 5, 1975. He said he reappeared five days later.

The movie has prompted a new attack on Walton's claim by the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which debunks supernatural claims.