Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: On the night of October eleventh, nineteen seventy three, a
Speaker 1: forty two year old shipyard worker named Charles Hickson sat
Speaker 1: down in front of a tape recorder in the Jackson
Speaker 1: County Sheriff's office in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and spelled his last
Speaker 1: name out loud, letter by letter so there'd be no
Speaker 1: confusion about who was saying what came next. He'd already
Speaker 1: told the story twice that night, he told the deputies
Speaker 1: he knew nobody was going to believe him, that even
Speaker 1: if they laughed him out of Jackson County, he was
Speaker 1: going to say it anyway. And then he told them
Speaker 1: that a blue light had come down over the bayou
Speaker 1: and three things had floated out of it and carried
Speaker 1: him and a young man named Calvin Parker into a machine.
Speaker 1: When the sheriff and his captain finished the interview, they
Speaker 1: got up, walked out, and left the two men alone
Speaker 1: in that room. What they didn't tell Hickson and Parker
Speaker 1: was that the recorder was still running. We've been working
Speaker 1: our way around this country, one strange county at a time,
Speaker 1: and I want to tell you where we are before
Speaker 1: I tell you what happened here, because the geography matters
Speaker 1: on this one. The Pascagoula River drains about eight thousand
Speaker 1: square miles of southeastern Mississippi. It's formed where the Leaf
Speaker 1: and the Chickasaw Hay come together up around George County,
Speaker 1: and it runs south through pine flats and hardwood bottoms
Speaker 1: and black water swamp until it dumps into the Mississippi
Speaker 1: Sound at the town that shares its name. It's frequently
Speaker 1: described as the largest river system in the lower forty
Speaker 1: eight States with no dams on its main stem, which
Speaker 1: means it still floods where it wants to and moves
Speaker 1: where it wants to. There are stretches of that river
Speaker 1: bottom where the tree canopy closes over the top of
Speaker 1: you and the water goes the color of strong tea,
Speaker 1: And there are stretches down at the mouth where the
Speaker 1: whole thing opens up into industrial waterfront, shipyards, grain elevators, cranes,
Speaker 1: and the smell of cut steel. Both of those things
Speaker 1: are true about Pascagoula at the same time, deep swamp
Speaker 1: on one end, heavy industry on the other, and about
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes of driving between them. The rivers had a
Speaker 1: reputation for a long time. There's an old story on
Speaker 1: the Gulf Coast about the Singing River, and the version
Speaker 1: that got printed and reprinted in local histories and tourism
Speaker 1: copy for most of the twentieth century says that a
Speaker 1: band of Pascagoula people walked into the water, holding hands
Speaker 1: and singing, drowning themselves rather than be taken by a
Speaker 1: rival band.
Speaker 2: It's a folk.
Speaker 1: Narrative that got polished by a lot of hands, and
Speaker 1: I've never seen a version of it that traces cleanly
Speaker 1: back to a native source. What I can tell you
Speaker 1: is that people down there have reported hearing a low
Speaker 1: humming sound coming off the water on still late summer
Speaker 1: evenings for well over a century, that it got written
Speaker 1: up in newspapers and in state histories, and that the
Speaker 1: town leaned into it hard enough to name a high
Speaker 1: school and a mall after it. Whether that sound is
Speaker 1: insects or fish, or gas moving through the bottom or
Speaker 1: something in the sand, nobody's ever been able to nail
Speaker 1: it down.
Speaker 2: Pascagoula also had a.
Speaker 1: Run of something genuinely ugly in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: forty two, back when the ingles yard was pulling in
Speaker 1: war workers by the thousand and the town's population was exploding.
Speaker 1: Somebody was getting into houses at night and cutting hair
Speaker 1: off of sleeping people, women, and in at least a
Speaker 1: couple of reported cases children, He'd come in through a window,
Speaker 1: take a handful of hair, and go. The papers called
Speaker 1: him the Phantom barber. A chemist named William Dolan was
Speaker 1: eventually convicted in connection with an assault on an older couple,
Speaker 1: and there's a long running argument about whether Dolan had
Speaker 1: anything to do with the hair at all. The town
Speaker 1: was so wound up that summer that people slept with
Speaker 1: the lights on and ingles. Workers were reportedly patrolling their
Speaker 1: own neighborhoods. I bring that up for one reason. When
Speaker 1: something impossible gets reported out of Pascagoula, it isn't landing
Speaker 1: in a place with no history of strange. This town
Speaker 1: has had strange in the water for a long time. Now,
Speaker 1: let's talk about the fall of nineteen seventy three, because
Speaker 1: the calendar is part of the evidence here. That autumn
Speaker 1: produced one of the heaviest waves of unidentified flying object
Speaker 1: reports in American history. It ran across the South and
Speaker 1: up through the Ohio Valley, and researchers who studied it
Speaker 1: later started calling it the Year of the Humanoids because
Speaker 1: so many of the reports involved people claiming they'd seen
Speaker 1: something get out of the thing. Newspapers all over Mississippi
Speaker 1: and Tennessee and Louisiana were running siding stories through September
Speaker 1: and into October. The Greenwood Commonwealth ran a piece in
Speaker 1: early October about a possible object near Fort Pemberton. A
Speaker 1: Tennessee sheriff told a reporter he'd seen them himself, and
Speaker 1: that his office had turned into an unofficial clearinghouse for calls.
Speaker 1: The Mississippi Press, which is the Pascagoula paper, ran a
Speaker 1: story on October seventh with the headline about a deputy
Speaker 1: trying to figure out whether he should write a ticket
Speaker 1: to a UFO, So four days before anything happened on
Speaker 1: that riverbank, the local paper was already joking about it
Speaker 1: on the front page. And on the evening of October eleventh,
Speaker 1: before Hickson and Parker ever walked into the sheriff's office,
Speaker 1: a service station operator in the area named Larry Booth
Speaker 1: called the Jackson County Sheriff's Department to report that something
Speaker 1: with a blinking colored light had gone over. That call
Speaker 1: came in around eight o'clock. It's in the Mississippi Press
Speaker 1: coverage from the next morning. Booth isn't a famous name.
Speaker 1: He never wrote a book, he never went on television,
Speaker 1: and as far as I can tell, he never had
Speaker 1: anything to gain from making that call. He just called
Speaker 1: it in a couple of hours before the thing that
Speaker 1: made the town famous. Charles Hickson was a shipyard worker
Speaker 1: at Walker's Shipyard in Pascagoula, He was raised in Jones County,
Speaker 1: up in the Piney Woods, about one hundred miles north,
Speaker 1: where he still had a farm and a home. He
Speaker 1: was married. His wife's name was Blanche. By the accounts
Speaker 1: of the people who worked with him, he was a
Speaker 1: foreman type, an older hand, and he'd been in the service.
Speaker 1: Calvin Parker was young, and he was also from Jones
Speaker 1: County and worked with Hickson. The Mississippi Press on October twelfth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, reporting within hours of the event, gave
Speaker 1: Hickson's age as forty five and Parker's age as seventeen.
Speaker 1: They went fishing after work. The first spot was down
Speaker 1: below the grain elevator on the river. They caught a
Speaker 1: few hardheads and a couple of croakers, so he told
Speaker 1: Calvin they ought to move up by the old shop
Speaker 1: at her shipyard, because he'd taken redfish and speckled trout
Speaker 1: in there before. That's an abandoned pier on the west
Speaker 1: bank of the Pascagoula River, inside the town, with the
Speaker 1: working waterfront on one side and buy you on the other.
Speaker 1: It's not wilderness. It's the kind of place two men
Speaker 1: who've just come off shift go to stand in the
Speaker 1: dark and throw a line in. They set up, and
Speaker 1: they fished. And Hickson's account is that at some point,
Speaker 1: and he thought both of them saw it at roughly
Speaker 1: the same moment, there was a blue light. He told
Speaker 1: the sheriff. It circled a little. He couldn't just the
Speaker 1: altitude with any confidence. It wasn't two or three miles off,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't right on top of them. And when
Speaker 1: the sheriff pushed him, he estimated twenty five or thirty yards,
Speaker 1: maybe thirty five or forty. Then it came down over
Speaker 1: the bayou and hovered a couple of feet off the
Speaker 1: ground without touching it. The sound he described was a
Speaker 1: light buzzing. He made the noise into the recorder. He
Speaker 1: was very specific that there was no blast, no exhaust,
Speaker 1: no rush of air, nothing that would suggest thrust in
Speaker 1: the way an engine makes thrust. The object he described
Speaker 1: was oblong rather than round. He said it was about
Speaker 1: eight feet tall, with an opening at one end. The
Speaker 1: only light he saw on the outside was that blue one.
Speaker 1: When he described the inside later, he said there were
Speaker 1: no bulbs anywhere he could see. The whole interior just glowed,
Speaker 1: and it was bright then, according to Hickson, an opening
Speaker 1: appeared at the end of it, and three figures came out,
Speaker 1: and they weren't walking. He said it twice in different words.
Speaker 1: They weren't on the ground. His description of them was rough,
Speaker 1: and I think the roughness is worth something. He put
Speaker 1: them at about five feet tall. He said they were pale.
Speaker 1: He said their skin might have been wrinkled, or it
Speaker 1: might have been something fitted over them, and he couldn't
Speaker 1: tell which. He said they had no visible neck, that
Speaker 1: the head appeared to sit directly on the body. He
Speaker 1: said there was something protruding from the middle of the face,
Speaker 1: roughly where a nose would go on a person. He
Speaker 1: said there was a slit below it that he never
Speaker 1: saw open. He said there were structures on the sides
Speaker 1: of the head that resembled ears, but weren't ears the
Speaker 1: way we understand ears. And when the sheriff asked him
Speaker 1: how many eyes they had, Hixon didn't give him an answer.
Speaker 1: He said there could have been eyes, but he didn't
Speaker 1: see any. He was asked whether they had hair. He
Speaker 1: said he didn't know. He said that part was blank
Speaker 1: in his mind. He was asked whether they breathed. He
Speaker 1: said he didn't know that either. The feet, he said,
Speaker 1: weren't feet, no toes, something round on the end of
Speaker 1: a leg, if you'd even call it a leg. The
Speaker 1: hands were the detail that stuck to this case forever.
Speaker 1: Hickson described pincers claws or pincers mitten shaped, and that's
Speaker 1: the image that ended up in every artist rendering that
Speaker 1: got printed in the papers over the following weeks. Two
Speaker 1: of them came around behind him and lifted him off
Speaker 1: the ground by the arms. He was insistent on the
Speaker 1: tape that they didn't hurt him, no force, no pain,
Speaker 1: no sensation of being gripped. He simply came off the ground,
Speaker 1: he said. Calvin passed out. Then he was moved into
Speaker 1: the object. He described it as gliding, all of them
Speaker 1: moving as though they were floating inside. There were no seats,
Speaker 1: there was nothing to sit on and nothing to be
Speaker 1: strapped into. He was simply held in position, moved around,
Speaker 1: tilted back, and raised up again. And he couldn't resist
Speaker 1: any of it, he said. His eyes were the only
Speaker 1: part of him that would move. And then there was
Speaker 1: the instrument. The sheriff asked him if it was like
Speaker 1: an X ray machine. Hixon said no, he said, it
Speaker 1: looked like an eye, a big eye with some kind
Speaker 1: of attachment to it, and it moved and it went
Speaker 1: over his.
Speaker 2: Body, up and down.
Speaker 1: Then the three of them left him alone in there.
Speaker 1: Hixon didn't know how long. He told the sheriff flat
Speaker 1: out that he didn't wear a watch. Pressed for an estimate,
Speaker 1: he said twenty to thirty minutes. He wasn't certain he
Speaker 1: stayed conscious, but he thought he did. When they came back,
Speaker 1: they laid him over again, and then it was over.
Speaker 1: He asked them questions while he was in there. He
Speaker 1: said so on the tape, and he said the only
Speaker 1: thing he ever got back was a buzzing sound out
Speaker 1: of one of them. Whatever put him down, put him
Speaker 1: down on the riverbank, and the object made that buzzing
Speaker 1: noise again, and it was gone. Here's what he did next,
Speaker 1: and this is where the case starts becoming a police
Speaker 1: story instead of a monster story. Calvin Parker was standing there.
Speaker 1: Hixon said it took him a while to get the
Speaker 1: young man back to his sin And the first thing
Speaker 1: Hickson said he told him was that nobody was ever
Speaker 1: going to believe this, so they ought to keep it
Speaker 1: to themselves. Then he got in the vehicle and thought
Speaker 1: about it and changed his mind. He drove to the
Speaker 1: offices of the Mississippi Press and beat on the door.
Speaker 1: A man at the desk told him there wouldn't be
Speaker 1: a reporter in until morning. Sheriff Fred Diamond asked him
Speaker 1: later why he'd gone to the newspaper before he'd gone
Speaker 1: to law enforcement, and Hickson's answer was that he figured
Speaker 1: the sheriff's department wouldn't believe him and the police department
Speaker 1: wouldn't believe him either. Diamond, who I suspect had been
Speaker 1: doing this long enough to be irritated by that, asked
Speaker 1: him how he knew unless he tried. Hickson apologized and
Speaker 1: said that was just his thinking. He also tried Keesler
Speaker 1: Air Force Base, which is over in Biloxi, about forty
Speaker 1: minutes west along the coast. Keesler told him to call
Speaker 1: the sheriff. The Air Force had shut down Project Blue
Speaker 1: Book in nineteen sixty nine and was out of the
Speaker 1: business of taking these calls. And somewhere along the way
Speaker 1: before they made it to the Sheriff's office, Hickson drank
Speaker 1: some whiskey. He volunteered that himself under questioning before anybody
Speaker 1: accused him of anything. He said he hadn't been drinking beforehand,
Speaker 1: and that in the forty five minutes to an hour
Speaker 1: before he called the Sheriff's office, he'd had a drink
Speaker 1: to settle his nerves. Captain Glenn Ryder later told the
Speaker 1: press that he'd smelled alcohol on Hickson. Writer also told
Speaker 1: the press that neither man was drunk. They arrived at
Speaker 1: the Jackson County Sheriff's Office somewhere between half past ten
Speaker 1: and eleven o'clock that night. I've sat on the other
Speaker 1: side of a lot of interview tables and I wanted
Speaker 1: to walk you through what the officers there were actually doing,
Speaker 1: because it gets described in a lot of retellings as
Speaker 1: though the sheriff was being clever. He wasn't being clever.
Speaker 1: He was running a completely standard technique. You take the statement,
Speaker 1: you take it again. You separate people if you can,
Speaker 1: and if you've got two subjects and you think one
Speaker 1: of them is going to crack, you find a reason
Speaker 1: to leave them alone in a room together, because people
Speaker 1: who are lying use that time to sync up their story,
Speaker 1: and people who are telling the truth use that time
Speaker 1: to be terrified. Sheriff Fred Diamond and Captain Glenn Ryder
Speaker 1: conducted the interview at approximately eleven o'clock. By Hickson's own
Speaker 1: count on the recording, it was the third time he'd
Speaker 1: told it that night. Listen to the questions because the
Speaker 1: questions tell you what the officers were thinking. How high
Speaker 1: was it? How close was it? Was there a noise
Speaker 1: to it? Did they walk up to you? Did they
Speaker 1: have feet? How many eyes did they have? Did they
Speaker 1: have hair? Did they breathe? What color were they? Was
Speaker 1: it like an X ray machine? How long did they
Speaker 1: leave you? How much did you have to drink? Why
Speaker 1: did you wait until this time of night to call us.
Speaker 1: That's not a couple of country deputies humoring a drunk,
Speaker 1: that's a probe.
Speaker 2: Every one of those.
Speaker 1: Is designed to give a liar enough rope to contradict
Speaker 1: himself on a physical detail. And every one of them
Speaker 1: is the kind of question that a person recounting a genuine,
Speaker 1: perceptual event tends to answer badly, because real memory is
Speaker 1: full of holes. An invented memory usually isn't. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: Hixon answered a lot of them with some version of
Speaker 1: I don't know. When it was over, Diamond asked him
Speaker 1: to come back in the morning and give a complete
Speaker 1: formal statement. Hickson said he didn't want publicity and he
Speaker 1: didn't want his family upset. Then Diamond and Ryder walked
Speaker 1: out and left the two of them in the room
Speaker 1: and the recorder kept running. What's on that portion of
Speaker 1: the tape is not two men laughing. It's not two
Speaker 1: men rehearsing. It's a forty something year old man and
Speaker 1: a teenager coming apart in different directions. Here's about three
Speaker 1: minutes of that recording from nineteen seventy three. But Reverdy,
Speaker 1: something in the United States, have it there? Non me
Speaker 1: now that I wouldn't done about what we see or
Speaker 1: about what.
Speaker 2: We see it. It's something in the air force gone
Speaker 2: on us up there to see. And this ain't gonna
Speaker 2: be the only time that's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: In the sus I that alrd to.
Speaker 2: Take that sup one one and one day and a
Speaker 2: scared any dear to something I.
Speaker 1: Just learned, crying, I don't I can't tell so that.
Speaker 2: To so you can't you do it? Enough time to
Speaker 2: see Jesus crimes the bad back it by bad leaves.
Speaker 2: It's round of gold. I had been through enough a
Speaker 2: hell on this birth and now I have to go
Speaker 2: do something like that.
Speaker 1: But they would have you know that. I guess see.
Speaker 2: When they could have armed us on anything, they could.
Speaker 1: Have done anything to us and then hurt me ybody.
Speaker 2: They just do that and I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't like that. Poota which morning. I know you.
Speaker 1: I'm going to.
Speaker 2: Bury this norse because or some seven doctor or something.
Speaker 1: I can stay there.
Speaker 2: I'm after and bust. I'll tell you better when you
Speaker 2: get through us through the wather, or give you something
Speaker 2: to say that you get some man asleep. I can
Speaker 2: slaver that.
Speaker 1: I can do that.
Speaker 2: I'm unders band, you're crazy.
Speaker 1: I can when it brought you out of that and anything,
Speaker 1: and when it brought me up, I left.
Speaker 2: And they want to tell you that can I never
Speaker 2: he'll got you straightened up? Man, I don't I didn't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know my art. I just traveled that just
Speaker 1: like it. I couldn't do it, just like this sat
Speaker 1: now else they didn't.
Speaker 2: Uh, they didn't do me ple movie. I passed out.
Speaker 1: I passed out of ast.
Speaker 2: That's how never tasted that my life.
Speaker 1: Do shutting them there he is.
Speaker 2: I never see that I get before in my life.
Speaker 2: Here you shure you you can't make people bleing that though.
Speaker 2: I show you that because that they had a wake up,
Speaker 2: was struck bleeding them right, I wake up, was struck.
Speaker 2: Then listen away, I sing those leave.
Speaker 1: I can't fie that to.
Speaker 2: Day until you say at that door will come in.
Speaker 2: And let's say, you say, I don't.
Speaker 1: I hope my so don't.
Speaker 2: I don't see the doorslay with that open. I don't
Speaker 2: see though.
Speaker 1: I just see it so late from the man from
Speaker 1: the blue lights up. So bitch, you just just knock
Speaker 1: yet to come out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't believe it. You can't make people breathing
Speaker 2: my paralyzed that there. I couldn't be won't they won't
Speaker 2: bleed it? Twenty days they don't leave me. Twenty days
Speaker 2: it might be too late.
Speaker 1: Parker's the one who sounds worse. He wants to go home,
Speaker 1: he wants to go to bed, he wants nerve pills,
Speaker 1: he wants a doctor. He says he's about to go
Speaker 1: half crazy. He says he passed out and that he'd
Speaker 1: never passed out in his life before He describes his
Speaker 1: arms freezing up so he couldn't move them, and he
Speaker 1: reaches for the only comparison a Mississippi country boy would
Speaker 1: reach for, which is stepping on a rattlesnake. Hixon is
Speaker 1: trying to manage him. He tells him he'll get him
Speaker 1: something to settle him down so he can sleep. He
Speaker 1: says he's never seen anything like it in his life.
Speaker 1: He keeps coming back to the same complaint, which isn't
Speaker 1: about the creatures at all. It's about being believed. He
Speaker 1: says people won't believe it, and then he says they'd
Speaker 1: better start believing it. And then he says he'd known
Speaker 1: all along that there were people from other worlds up there,
Speaker 1: and that he never thought it would happen to him.
Speaker 1: Then Hickson gets up and leaves the room, and the
Speaker 1: recorder is still going, and Calvin Parker is by himself,
Speaker 1: and Calvin Parker starts to pray. Captain Glenn Ryder gave
Speaker 1: The Washington Post an interview about the case in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy five, two years down the road with the circus
Speaker 1: already over, Rider said his people had done everything they
Speaker 1: knew how to do to break those stories and then
Speaker 1: he said that if the two of them were lying
Speaker 1: to him, they belonged in Hollywood. Of course, the tape
Speaker 1: doesn't prove that a craft landed that night on the river.
Speaker 1: What it establishes, to my satisfaction and to the satisfaction
Speaker 1: of two career law enforcement officers who had every reason
Speaker 1: to want the opposite result, is that Charles Hickson and
Speaker 1: Calvin Parker were not sitting in that room enjoying a prank.
Speaker 1: Whatever the origin of the experience, the distress was not
Speaker 1: manufactured for an audience they didn't know they had. The
Speaker 1: Mississippi Press ran it on the front page on October twelfth.
Speaker 1: The Associated Press and United Press International picked it up
Speaker 1: the same day, and by that evening it was in
Speaker 1: papers from Vicksburg to Los Angeles. A press conference was
Speaker 1: scheduled for a quarter past eleven that morning and then canceled.
Speaker 1: The two men were taken to Keesler Air Force Base
Speaker 1: and checked for radiation exposure. They were cleared and released.
Speaker 1: Contemporary coverage doesn't report any abnormal findings. Local officials started
Speaker 1: demanding a federal investigation, which was never going to happen
Speaker 1: because there was no longer any federal office whose job
Speaker 1: that was what came instead were two scientists. Doctor James
Speaker 1: Harder was a civil engineering professor at Berkeley who worked
Speaker 1: with the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. Doctor j Allen Hinek
Speaker 1: was an astronomer at Northwestern who had spent roughly twenty
Speaker 1: years as the Air Force's scientific consultant on Bluebook, in
Speaker 1: which capacity he had personally explained away an enormous number
Speaker 1: of sightings, and who had spent the years since publicly
Speaker 1: arguing that the Air Force's handling of the subject had
Speaker 1: been sloppy. Heineck's involvement is the reason this case has
Speaker 1: the profile that has. He was not a believer by temperament.
Speaker 1: He was the man who coined the term swamp gas.
Speaker 2: And got hammered for it.
Speaker 1: He had, by the early seventies become convinced that a
Speaker 1: residue of cases existed that ordinary explanations didn't touch, and
Speaker 1: Pasca Goula got his attention fast. The two of them
Speaker 1: came to Mississippi and interviewed Hickson and Parker separately. They
Speaker 1: also used hypnosis. Harder conducted regressive hypnosis on both men.
Speaker 1: Parker's session was cut short because he was in no
Speaker 1: condition for it. Hickson session went forward. As far as
Speaker 1: I can determine, there's no surviving recording of that first
Speaker 1: hypnosis attempt. Both men told the press afterward that they
Speaker 1: believed the accounts were based on something real. I'll tell
Speaker 1: you what I think about the hypnosis. Hypnotic regression is
Speaker 1: not a reliable memory retrieval tool. It has been studied extensively,
Speaker 1: and what it reliably produces is confident memory, not accurate memory.
Speaker 1: A person under hypnosis is highly suggestible. They will fill
Speaker 1: gaps and they will come out the other side more
Speaker 1: certain of the filled in version than they were of
Speaker 1: what they actually remembered. Going in courts across the country
Speaker 1: restricted or excluded hypnotically refreshed testimony for exactly that reason. So,
Speaker 1: for my money, everything Hickson and Parker said before anybody
Speaker 1: hypnotized them is worth more than everything either of them
Speaker 1: said afterward. And the good news for this case, and
Speaker 1: it's a genuinely unusual piece of good luck in the
Speaker 1: abduction literature, is that we have a substantial primary account
Speaker 1: recorded roughly three hours after the event by law enforcement,
Speaker 1: before any researcher, hypnotist, or reporter got near them.
Speaker 2: That's rare.
Speaker 1: In most of these cases, the earliest version you can
Speaker 1: get your hands on is already contaminated. The story moved
Speaker 1: fast after that, and it moved in directions that complicated.
Speaker 1: By the seventeenth, the papers were tracking a rash of
Speaker 1: copycat sightings around the country. On the nineteenth, a piece
Speaker 1: ran in the local paper under Hickson and Parker's names,
Speaker 1: arguing that the creatures had been robotic and friendly. On
Speaker 1: the twentieth, an artist's conception ran in Biloxi. They agreed
Speaker 1: to speak to the local rotary club. On the twenty fourth,
Speaker 1: the Saint Louis Post Dispatch was comparing the case to
Speaker 1: Betty and Barney Hill. That same day, the Birmingham News
Speaker 1: reported that neither man had been seen at the shipyard,
Speaker 1: and the local speculation was that somebody was paying them
Speaker 1: for their story. On the thirtieth, a Los Angeles radio
Speaker 1: station was advertising an exclusive interview, and on the thirty first,
Speaker 1: the polygraph result came out. This is one of the
Speaker 1: most misrepresented pieces of the whole case, so here's what
Speaker 1: was actually reported at the time. A local polygraph examiner
Speaker 1: concluded that Hickson had told the truth as to what
Speaker 1: he believed. The examiner also went out of his way
Speaker 1: to add a caution, which was that this did not
Speaker 1: mean a spaceship had landed or that creatures had come
Speaker 1: out of it. That's an honest statement from an examiner,
Speaker 1: and it is exactly the limit of what a polygraph
Speaker 1: can offer. A polygraph measures physiological arousal under ideal conditions
Speaker 1: with a skilled operator. It can indicate whether a subject
Speaker 1: believes what he's saying. It cannot tell you whether what
Speaker 1: he believes is true. And the reliability of the instrument
Speaker 1: as a lie detector took a beating through the seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties to the point where it's inadmissible in most
Speaker 1: American courtrooms. Calvin Parker didn't take one through an attorney,
Speaker 1: He declined unless Hixon specifically asked him to. The attorney
Speaker 1: also disclosed that Parker had recently been hospitalized. Two days later,
Speaker 1: on November two, Charles Hickson was on the Dick Cavot Show.
Speaker 1: Now we get to the part of this case that
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people who tell it leave out.
Speaker 1: On November eighth, the Mississippi Press reported that a fisherman
Speaker 1: and his fourteen year old son had seen a lit
Speaker 1: object under water in the same river. Hixon taped an
Speaker 1: appearance on the game show to Tell the Truth on
Speaker 1: November twenty twentieth. He appeared with Mike Douglas on the
Speaker 1: twenty ninth. He later appeared on Carson. In January of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four, Charles Hickson was arrested for public drunkenness
Speaker 1: after being found wandering along a highway. In April, he
Speaker 1: traveled to Detroit to address a UFO group. That same month,
Speaker 1: he told the press that he'd been an ongoing contact
Speaker 1: with the beings, that he'd now had three separate encounters,
Speaker 1: and that a message was coming along with proof of
Speaker 1: their existence, which he intended to relay to Washington. Later
Speaker 1: that April, he met with Eric von danikin The Ancient
Speaker 1: Astronaut author By October of nineteen seventy four, the papers
Speaker 1: were calling him a UFO celebrity and reporting that he'd
Speaker 1: be featured in an NBC documentary. In nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: he self published a book about it. Here's my honest
Speaker 1: opinion on what came after that night on the river.
Speaker 1: The ongoing contact claims damage him. They damage him a lot.
Speaker 1: There's a well worn path in this field, where a
Speaker 1: person has one genuinely inexplicable experience gets swarmed by attention
Speaker 1: and by a community that rewards escalation and starts producing sequels.
Speaker 1: The sequels are almost always worse evidence than the original,
Speaker 1: and they retroactively poison the original in the eyes of
Speaker 1: anybody looking at it from outside. But the sequels don't
Speaker 1: get to reach backward and change what's on a tape
Speaker 1: recorder in a county sheriff's office at eleven o'clock on
Speaker 1: the night of October eleventh, nineteen seventy three. Those are
Speaker 1: two separate evidentiary questions. A man can have an unexplained
Speaker 1: experience and then spend twenty years embroidering it. That's not
Speaker 1: a contradiction. That's a pattern, and it's a pattern I've
Speaker 1: watched play out in this field more times than I
Speaker 1: can count. What I can say is that after nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four, Charles Hickson's testimony stops being useful to me,
Speaker 1: because from that point forward, I can't separate what he
Speaker 1: experienced from what he'd been rewarded for saying. Philip Class
Speaker 1: was an aviation journalist, a senior editor at Aviation Week
Speaker 1: and for about thirty years, the most aggressive debunker in
Speaker 1: the country. He went through Hickson's accounts, found what he
Speaker 1: described as discrepancies between versions, and made a great deal
Speaker 1: of the polygraph question. Class's position was that Hickson had
Speaker 1: declined to take a polygraph administered by a genuinely experienced
Speaker 1: examiner and had taken one from somebody less qualified instead.
Speaker 1: Class concluded the case was a hoax. Joe Nicholl, who
Speaker 1: investigates for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, came at it differently,
Speaker 1: and I find his version more interesting. Nicholl's argument is
Speaker 1: that Hixon's behavior over the years was questionable and that
Speaker 1: he altered and embellished his claims, which is not a
Speaker 1: hard case to make. But Nichol's core explanation for the
Speaker 1: original night is hypnagogia. That's the state between waking and sleep,
Speaker 1: and it can produce vivid hallucinations, an overwhelming sense of
Speaker 1: presence in the room, and critically sleep paralysis, where the
Speaker 1: body remains immobilized while the mind is running. Look at
Speaker 1: what Hixson described immobility with the eyes still working, floating
Speaker 1: beings that appear without an approach, a sense of being
Speaker 1: handled without pain, those are textbook features of sleep paralysis
Speaker 1: with hypnagogic imagery. Nichols believed that Parker was suggestible and
Speaker 1: that his later corroboration came from picking up Hickson's account,
Speaker 1: since Parker had originally told police he passed out at
Speaker 1: the very beginning and didn't come around until it was over.
Speaker 1: Hickson himself supported that version when he appeared on to
Speaker 1: tell the truth. That last point is the one that
Speaker 1: gives me the most trouble with the case. And I
Speaker 1: want to be straight about why. If Calvin Parker was
Speaker 1: unconscious for the entire event, then this case has one
Speaker 1: witness to the substance of it, not two. Everything Parker
Speaker 1: contributed to the record about what happened inside that object
Speaker 1: came later, after publicity, after hypnosis, after decades of li
Speaker 1: living inside the story. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 2: We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: On the tape, Parker appears to be terrified, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't make him an independent, corroborating observer of the interior
Speaker 1: of a craft and the counter to Nickel, the thing
Speaker 1: his hypnagogia explanation has to account for is that two
Speaker 1: men were fishing awake standing up on a riverbank at
Speaker 1: a spot they'd moved to on purpose. Sleep paralysis happens
Speaker 1: to people who are lying down, going to sleep, or
Speaker 1: waking up. It does not typically happen to a man
Speaker 1: standing on a pier holding a spinning reel, and Hickson
Speaker 1: mentioned that reel on the tape unprompted in the middle
Speaker 1: of describing how frightened he was. So we've got an
Speaker 1: explanation that fits the phenomenology extremely well and fits the
Speaker 1: circumstances poorly.
Speaker 2: That's where the case sits.
Speaker 1: And Calvin Parker did something after nineteen seventy three that
Speaker 1: Charles Hickson never did. He disappeared. Parker had a breakdown.
Speaker 1: He stopped talking about it publicly. For the better part
Speaker 1: of forty five years. He worked, he lived, he moved around,
Speaker 1: and when people found out who he was, he generally left.
Speaker 1: He did start a company in nineteen ninety three that
Speaker 1: was going to produce television material about the subject, and
Speaker 1: he showed up at conventions here and there. But the
Speaker 1: sustained public life that Hickson led, the lectures and the
Speaker 1: television and the ancient astronaut circuit, Parker didn't do it
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen, he published a book giving his own
Speaker 1: full account for the first time, working with the British
Speaker 1: researcher Philip Mantle, and that book pulled somebody out of
Speaker 1: the woodwork. Maria Blair and her husband Jerry had been
Speaker 1: sitting in a nineteen sixty nine Pontiac gto on the
Speaker 1: river's edge that night. They were parked in a lot
Speaker 1: belonging to a seafood company where Jerry worked, waiting on
Speaker 1: a boat captain who was running late and was supposed
Speaker 1: to take him off shore. They sat there for hours,
Speaker 1: and as it got dark, he told the Clarion Ledger
Speaker 1: they saw blue lights over the far side of the river.
Speaker 1: Maria Blair went further than that in the years that followed.
Speaker 1: She said she'd seen the abduction itself. She and Jerry
Speaker 1: both told Mantle and the researcher doctor Irena Scott, that
Speaker 1: they'd seen a gray humanoid figure in.
Speaker 2: The water near them.
Speaker 1: Jerry Blair was very ill and wanted to get his
Speaker 1: account on the record before he died, which he did
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one. Maria Blair underwent regressive hypnosis in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two. In more recent interviews, she said she
Speaker 1: had experiences of her own after that night that she'd
Speaker 1: never told anybody about. In March of twenty nineteen, WLOX
Speaker 1: filmed Maria Blair and Calvin Parker meeting face to face
Speaker 1: for the first time at the.
Speaker 2: River at the spot. I'd love to tell you this
Speaker 2: closes the case.
Speaker 1: It doesn't, and I'd be doing you a disservice if
Speaker 1: I pretended otherwise.
Speaker 2: A witness who comes.
Speaker 1: Forward forty five years after an event that has been
Speaker 1: continuously in the news, in books, on television, and on
Speaker 1: a highway marker in her own region is not the
Speaker 1: same evidentiary animal as Larry Booth calling the sheriff two
Speaker 1: hours before anybody had heard of Charles Hickson. Memory doesn't
Speaker 1: sit in a jar. It gets rewritten every time it's retrieved,
Speaker 1: and forty five years of exposure to a famous account
Speaker 1: is about as contaminating an environment as you can construct
Speaker 1: at hypnosis. On top of that, and I can't treat
Speaker 1: the later material as independent confirmation of anything. I don't
Speaker 1: say that to attack Maria Blair. She waited decades and
Speaker 1: got nothing out of it, and by her account, her
Speaker 1: husband discouraged her from ever coming forward because he was
Speaker 1: afraid of being ridiculed, which is the single most common
Speaker 1: reason people sit on this kind of thing. I believe
Speaker 1: she's telling the truth about what she remembers. I just
Speaker 1: can't tell you what that memory was made of. There's
Speaker 1: also at least one further firsthand witness. Mantle in Scott's
Speaker 1: say they located a man who was on his way
Speaker 1: to high school the following morning, whose name they've kept confidential.
Speaker 1: On June twenty second, twenty nineteen, a historical marker went
Speaker 1: up at the site. The Historical Society funded it, and
Speaker 1: the city approved the placement. Calvin Parker was there, so
Speaker 1: was Charles Hickson's son and Hickson's family. Parker told the
Speaker 1: press it was emotional for him, that he couldn't really
Speaker 1: describe it without breaking down, and that he wished when
Speaker 1: he died he could be buried right there under that plaque,
Speaker 1: because that would explain it better than anything he could say.
Speaker 1: Charles Hickson had died of a heart attack in September
Speaker 1: of twenty eleven at eighty years old. Calvin Parker died
Speaker 1: of kidney cancer in August of twenty twenty three, at
Speaker 1: sixty eight. The City of Pascagoula now holds a festival
Speaker 1: in October to mark the anniversary. Netflix covered the case
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty four. There's a docuseriies built on Mantle's research.
Speaker 1: The town that Hickson was so certain would laugh him
Speaker 1: out of, Jackson County put up a sign, Now let's
Speaker 1: get off the pier and into the woods, because that's
Speaker 1: the other half of what we came to Mississippi for.
Speaker 1: The Pascagola River basin is one of the least broken
Speaker 1: large river systems in the eastern United States. There are
Speaker 1: cypress and tupelo bottoms in there where the ground is
Speaker 1: water most of the year, and there are pine uplands
Speaker 1: around it. And to the west you've got the DeSoto
Speaker 1: National Forest, the Pearl River Corridor, the Bogue Chiddo, and
Speaker 1: the enormous flat green sprawl.
Speaker 2: Of the Delta.
Speaker 1: On the other side of the state, there's a great
Speaker 1: deal of Mississippi that has almost nobody in it, and
Speaker 1: people in this state have been reporting a large, upright
Speaker 1: hairy animal in that country for a very long time.
Speaker 1: Mississippi is Choctaw Country. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians
Speaker 1: is still there, headquartered near Philadelphia in Nashoba County, and
Speaker 1: the Choctaw have a body of traditional stories that ethnographers
Speaker 1: began writing down in the eighteen hundreds. Henry Halbert collected
Speaker 1: a good deal of it in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: David bush No.
Speaker 1: Junior interviewed a Choctaw elder named Pessitantema in nineteen ten
Speaker 1: in Louisiana and recorded her descriptions in detail. John Swanton
Speaker 1: later compiled a large body of Choctaws social and ceremonial
Speaker 1: material for the Bureau of American Ethnology. Several beings show
Speaker 1: up in that material. Nelusiphalia, which translates roughly as the
Speaker 1: long black being, was described as resembling a man, but
Speaker 1: with a shriveled face, very small eyes, and long pointed ears.
Speaker 1: In some accounts, it prefers to approach a person by
Speaker 1: sliding along on its belly like a snake. It frightens hunters.
Speaker 1: It can transfer its power to do harm to a
Speaker 1: person who encounters it. Bushnail's account from Pisa Tantima puts
Speaker 1: it at about the height of an average man, which
Speaker 1: is worth noting because most of the Internet versions of
Speaker 1: this story have inflated it to eight feet tall. Champay
Speaker 1: is a different creature. Champay is described as large, hairy,
Speaker 1: and foul smelling, and as something that hunts and abducts people.
Speaker 1: The related Chickasaw tradition has a being called Lofa, and
Speaker 1: the name itself carries the meaning of skinner or flare.
Speaker 1: Lofa is sometimes a giant and sometimes described as a
Speaker 1: big hairy man who smells terrible and carries people off.
Speaker 1: Kashahut Apollo is part man and part deer, admired for speed,
Speaker 1: and it likes to get behind hunters and scream at them.
Speaker 1: Koe and Nakasha are the little people of the forest.
Speaker 1: Those aren't sighting reports. They're not depositions. They're religious and
Speaker 1: cultural material gathered by outsiders, translated, filtered, and in some
Speaker 1: cases collected a century or more after the disruptions of
Speaker 1: removal had already scattered the people who carried them. It's
Speaker 1: genuinely true that the Choctaw have old, documented traditions about
Speaker 1: a large, hairy, foul smelling being that takes people. It
Speaker 1: doesn't constitute evidence of a breeding population of undescribed primates
Speaker 1: in Mississippi. What it does tell you is that the
Speaker 1: concept is old in this landscape. It didn't arrive with
Speaker 1: Patterson and Gimlin in nineteen sixty seven, and it didn't
Speaker 1: arrive with cable television. That matters, and it's the honest
Speaker 1: version of the claim. Let's talk about the modern record,
Speaker 1: and let me start with a number that's going to
Speaker 1: annoy some people. If you go looking for Mississippi Bigfoot
Speaker 1: content online, you will find article after article claiming that
Speaker 1: the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has documented over three hundred
Speaker 1: sidings in Mississippi. I've seen that number recycled across at
Speaker 1: least half a dozen sides, all of them citing each
Speaker 1: other in a circle.
Speaker 2: I went and counted.
Speaker 1: As of my check, the BFRO database lists twenty seven
Speaker 1: total reports for the entire state of Mississippi. Twenty seven,
Speaker 1: not three hundred. The counties with entries are Adams, Almight, Atala, Bolivar, Clark, Franklin,
Speaker 1: George Hancock, Hines, Jackson, Lamar, Lauderdale, Lownds, Marshall, Panola, Pearl River, Pike,
Speaker 1: and Tishamingo. Clark County had four, Lauderdale County has four.
Speaker 1: Most of the rest have won apiece. I'm not raising
Speaker 1: that to run down Mississippi. I'm raising it because the
Speaker 1: sloppiness of the secondary sources in this field is a disease,
Speaker 1: and the only way to treat it is to go
Speaker 1: count the reports yourself. When somebody inflates a number by
Speaker 1: a factor of ten to make a state sound more exciting,
Speaker 1: they're not helping the subject. They're making it easier to dismiss. Now,
Speaker 1: twenty seven public entries in one database is not a census.
Speaker 1: The Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization, founded by researchers including
Speaker 1: Jim Lansdale, has worked this part of the country hard
Speaker 1: and maintains its own files, and their stated volume is
Speaker 1: much higher. Plenty of people never report to anyone at all,
Speaker 1: and I've talked to enough of them over the years
Speaker 1: to know that the reporting rate is terrible. But twenty
Speaker 1: seven is what's actually posted in the public record, with
Speaker 1: locations and dates and follow up. And that's what I
Speaker 1: can put in front of you and let you evaluate.
Speaker 1: Longest Mississippi report in that database in my assessment, is
Speaker 1: out of Franklin County in the Homa Chiddo National Forest
Speaker 1: near Knoxville off Bunkley Road. The date was November twenty eighth.
Speaker 1: The witness wasn't certain whether the year was nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: eight or nineteen seventy nine. He was a teenager not
Speaker 1: old enough to drive, and he jumped at a chance
Speaker 1: to go deer hunting with a couple of his older
Speaker 1: brother's friends. They got to the area well before daylight.
Speaker 1: The walk into the stands ran a mile to a
Speaker 1: mile and a half. They dropped one man at his stand,
Speaker 1: and the boy and the second man went on until
Speaker 1: they reached his The man told him about good buck
Speaker 1: sign in a creek bottom about three hundred yards off,
Speaker 1: and the boy set off across a small field in
Speaker 1: the dark to take a stand in the far timber.
Speaker 1: Halfway across that field, he stopped because he had the
Speaker 1: feeling of being watched. He shined his flashlight along the
Speaker 1: tree line and saw nothing, and he kept going about
Speaker 1: one hundred yards and side the woods. He found a
Speaker 1: big tree with a good backrest and settled in to
Speaker 1: wait for light. It was cold, there'd been a heavy
Speaker 1: frost the night before, and he said the fallen oak
Speaker 1: leaves were impossible to move through without making a tremendous racket.
Speaker 1: Around nine in the morning, he spotted a deer on
Speaker 1: a small knoll seventy five or eighty yards away, standing motionless,
Speaker 1: staring straight at him.
Speaker 2: He held still. The deer bolted.
Speaker 1: Anyway into a thicket away from him.
Speaker 2: That bothered him.
Speaker 1: And here's why it bothered him, and it's the detail
Speaker 1: that makes this report for me. There was a steady
Speaker 1: breeze in his face, so the deer couldn't have winded him,
Speaker 1: and he hadn't so much as blinked. He told the
Speaker 1: BFRO investigator later that the deer took three or four
Speaker 1: steps straight backward, whirled and ran, and that in a
Speaker 1: lifetime of hunting he'd never seen a deer do that
Speaker 1: before or since. He also said the woods had gone
Speaker 1: completely silent just before it, no squirrels, no birds. While
Speaker 1: he was still trying to work out what had spooked
Speaker 1: the deer, he began to hear heavy breathing behind him.
Speaker 1: It wasn't close at first, but it got louder. He
Speaker 1: looked over his left shoulder and he could see three
Speaker 1: shadows laid out on the ground in the low morning sun,
Speaker 1: his own, the trees, and a large upright one directly
Speaker 1: behind him. He jumped up and side stepped away from
Speaker 1: the tree, and not five feet from him, something was
Speaker 1: standing there looking at him. He described medium length hair
Speaker 1: the color of pine straw, a face with no hair
Speaker 1: on it apart from what he called a mustache, arms
Speaker 1: hanging down to the knees, and sunken coal black eyes
Speaker 1: with no white in them at all. He put it
Speaker 1: around seven feet when the investigator, a Mississippi native named
Speaker 1: John Callender, went through it with him at length. The
Speaker 1: witness estimated six to seven hundred pounds, described a heavy
Speaker 1: brow ridge with the eyes set back under it, a flattened,
Speaker 1: pushed in nose that turned up slightly at the end,
Speaker 1: no visible neck, and shoulders that leaned forward without the
Speaker 1: whole body being hunched.
Speaker 2: He said it stood really erect. He said he could
Speaker 2: have reached out and touched it.
Speaker 1: They made eye contact for a couple of seconds, and
Speaker 1: then he was gone, running yelling the entire way, and
Speaker 1: he left his rifle lying at the base of the tree.
Speaker 1: When Calendar asked him why he dropped the gun, his
Speaker 1: answer was that he figured he could run faster without it.
Speaker 1: One of the men heard him hollering and was already
Speaker 1: out in the field when the boy came busting out
Speaker 1: of the tree line. They collected the third man and
Speaker 1: went back for the rifle, and the two of them
Speaker 1: picked at him and laughed the whole way there. But
Speaker 1: they stopped laughing when they checked the area around the tree.
Speaker 1: In the leaves next to where the gun was lying,
Speaker 1: there were very large tracks about fourteen inches long, four
Speaker 1: to five inches wide, and three toes. They could follow
Speaker 1: the direction of travel through the disturbed leaves, and they
Speaker 1: did for about seventy five yards, and nobody said a
Speaker 1: word the entire time. The trail came to a creek
Speaker 1: and dropped off the bank, and from the top they
Speaker 1: could see the tracks clearly in the sand below, and
Speaker 1: they could see where the thing had slid down the
Speaker 1: face of the drop off. They left immediately. The witness
Speaker 1: says he has never gone back to that particular spot.
Speaker 1: The same witness passed along a second hand account he'd
Speaker 1: heard about two teenagers hunting in Anna's Bottom a little
Speaker 1: north of Natchez, who saw a large, dark colored figure
Speaker 1: about four hundred yards off across a soybean field, and
Speaker 1: put it at eight or nine feet. It turned and
Speaker 1: went into the far tree line. That's flood country off
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River full of standing water and swamp. When
Speaker 1: the river's up, come forward almost fifty years and go
Speaker 1: southwest down to the Louisiana line. On the night of Saturday,
Speaker 1: January eighteenth, twenty twenty five, around midnight, a man named
Speaker 1: Michael Stockstill and his girlfriend were driving in the buffer
Speaker 1: zone around the Stennis Space Center in Hancock County, between
Speaker 1: the Possum Walk Trail and the Logtown Cemetery near Purlington.
Speaker 1: A tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. That buffer zone is a genuinely unusual
Speaker 1: piece of ground. In the nineteen sixties, the federal government
Speaker 1: bought out and emptied several small communities so NASA could
Speaker 1: static fire Apollo rocket stages without deafening anybody. And the
Speaker 1: land was never redeveloped. So there are ghost towns in there,
Speaker 1: and old homesteads with artesian wells still running, and a
Speaker 1: sawmill site and a native midden more than a thousand
Speaker 1: years old that a boat launch turnaround now sits on
Speaker 1: top of the Pearl River runs through it. The Navy
Speaker 1: trains on that water. There are a black bear in there,
Speaker 1: and there are a lot of alligators stock still knows
Speaker 1: the area well. His family's been connected to that ground
Speaker 1: since the seventeen hundreds on one side and for two
Speaker 1: thousand years on the other, and he says outright in
Speaker 1: his report that he made a habit of detouring through
Speaker 1: there at night to look for something because the area
Speaker 1: has a local swamp monster legend, and he knew people
Speaker 1: who'd had experiences on the river. What he and his
Speaker 1: girlfriend saw was eye shine on the right side of
Speaker 1: the road, up in a tree about one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty feet ahead. He drove closer and angled the truck's
Speaker 1: headlights at it. It was sitting in the fork of
Speaker 1: a live oak, roughly eight feet off the ground. His
Speaker 1: first thought was that it was a great horned owl,
Speaker 1: and he said so out loud to his girlfriend, but
Speaker 1: by her tone he could tell she wasn't buying it.
Speaker 1: Then the eye moved out of sight to the left
Speaker 1: and came back. He waited for the second eye. It
Speaker 1: never appeared. He'd watched the ark. That single eye traveled
Speaker 1: when it moved, and the ark was too long. On
Speaker 1: a possum or a raccoon, both eyes would have been
Speaker 1: in the beam. He described it as looking like a
Speaker 1: man leaning out into the fork of a tree to
Speaker 1: get a look at them. He put a six hundred
Speaker 1: lumen light through the windshield trying to find a face,
Speaker 1: and couldn't find one, and he later concluded the head
Speaker 1: wasn't against the trunk at all, but a few feet
Speaker 1: behind it. He never took out his phone. He says
Speaker 1: he thinks he was in shock. After a few minutes,
Speaker 1: he'd had enough and drove past the tree, and on
Speaker 1: the way back through the turnaround they saw nothing behind it.
Speaker 1: He's blunt about why he didn't put the spotlight on
Speaker 1: the backside of the tree as he went by.
Speaker 2: He says he was afraid.
Speaker 1: He also describes an earlier incident about one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty yards from that spot, on a trail at night,
Speaker 1: when the frogs and the insects cut out all at
Speaker 1: once and both of them got the sensation of being
Speaker 1: watched and heard something moving through the palmeadows and they left.
Speaker 1: He's six feet tall, and he says the eye was
Speaker 1: two feet above where his own head would have been.
Speaker 1: I like the report because of what it doesn't claim.
Speaker 1: He never says he saw a sasquatch. He says he
Speaker 1: saw one large eye at a height and an angle
Speaker 1: he can't account for, and that he's been back to
Speaker 1: that tree in daylight repeatedly trying to make it make sense,
Speaker 1: and he can't. Animal planets finding Bigfoot shot an episode
Speaker 1: in Mississippi they called the booger Hole, which is a
Speaker 1: good regional word because booger is what a lot of
Speaker 1: older folks in the Deep South called the thing long
Speaker 1: before anybody in Mississippi said Bigfoot out loud booger or
Speaker 1: would booger or the booger man. And it did not
Speaker 1: originally mean a monster from a movie. It meant something
Speaker 1: that was out there beyond the databases. We get a
Speaker 1: lot of emails. Wendell wrote to us about the DeSoto
Speaker 1: National Forest southeast of Wiggins. In the fall of nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six. He was pulling a trailer of firewood out
Speaker 1: on a logging road.
Speaker 2: Before daylight and his truck died.
Speaker 1: He'd had the alternator go out on him before, so
Speaker 1: he wasn't alarmed. He was aggravated. He got out with
Speaker 1: a flashlight and put the hood up. He says he
Speaker 1: heard something walking on the road behind the trailer, and
Speaker 1: he assumed it was a hog, and he beat on
Speaker 1: the fender to move it along, but it didn't move along.
Speaker 1: It came up the far side of the trailer and stopped.
Speaker 1: He couldn't see over the load. What he could see,
Speaker 1: and this is the part he keeps coming back to,
Speaker 1: is that the load was stacked about six feet high,
Speaker 1: and whatever was on the other side of it was
Speaker 1: breathing above the top of it. He got back in
Speaker 1: the truck and sat there until it was light. The
Speaker 1: truck started on the first try when he tried it
Speaker 1: again at daybreak, and he has never had an explanation
Speaker 1: for why it wouldn't start at four in the morning.
Speaker 1: Chari wrote to us from the Delta about the Delta
Speaker 1: National Forest near Rolling Fork. She grew up on a
Speaker 1: place with a bean field that backed into the bottoms,
Speaker 1: and she says that from the time she was small,
Speaker 1: her grandmother had a rule that nobody crossed the field
Speaker 1: after supper, not a warning about snakes, a rule she
Speaker 1: said her grandmother never explained it and got short with
Speaker 1: anybody who pushed. In the summer of two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: home from college, Chari was walking back from a cousin's
Speaker 1: house at dusk and cut the field because it was faster,
Speaker 1: and about two thirds of the way across, something stood
Speaker 1: up out of the bean rows ahead of her, and
Speaker 1: she says it stood up the way a person stands
Speaker 1: up out of a chair, all at once. She turned
Speaker 1: around and went a long way. She never described it
Speaker 1: to her grandmother. Her grandmother died in twenty sixteen, and
Speaker 1: Cherry says she still doesn't know how much the old
Speaker 1: woman knew.
Speaker 2: Ray sent us a.
Speaker 1: Note about the Pearl River above Columbia, where he ran
Speaker 1: trot lines for years. His account isn't a sighting. It's
Speaker 1: a sound, and it's a sound he spent a long
Speaker 1: time trying to source. He described something between a woman
Speaker 1: screaming and a heavy limb tearing off a tree, repeated
Speaker 1: at intervals of about a minute, moving down river faster
Speaker 1: than a man could walk the bank in the dark.
Speaker 1: He says he's heard panther, he's heard bobcat. He's heard
Speaker 1: barred owl and screech owl and coyote and every hog
Speaker 1: noise there is. And he says he's heard people insist
Speaker 1: to him that it was all of those things. He
Speaker 1: says he doesn't argue with them anymore. He also says
Speaker 1: he stopped running lines at night that year and never
Speaker 1: went back to it. Pat wrote to us about the
Speaker 1: Tom big B National Forest near Akerman September of twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: He and a buddy were scouting for the season and
Speaker 1: came across what he calls a lean to, a set
Speaker 1: of green saplings bent over and interlaced into another tree
Speaker 1: at about head height in a spot where nobody was
Speaker 1: building a deer stand out of live saplings. What he
Speaker 1: says happened next is that while they were standing there
Speaker 1: looking at it, something came through the brush toward them,
Speaker 1: making a sound he compared to a freight train, not fast,
Speaker 1: just heavy and continuous and completely unconcerned about being quiet.
Speaker 1: They didn't see it. They went back to the truck
Speaker 1: and left. And Sheila wrote to us about Knaksubi National
Speaker 1: Wildlife Refuge in the spring of twenty nineteen, where she
Speaker 1: was doing bird survey work along a road at first
Speaker 1: light and found a line of tracks in wet clay.
Speaker 2: She measured them.
Speaker 1: She got fifteen and a half inches by six and
Speaker 1: a half With a stride she paced at right around
Speaker 1: four feet in clay that took her own bootprint at
Speaker 1: a quarter of an inch and took these at better
Speaker 1: than an inch. She photographed them with a field notebook
Speaker 1: for scale, and she went back that afternoon with a
Speaker 1: colleague and the rain had taken them.
Speaker 2: That's Mississippi. I've got river mud on my boots.
Speaker 1: And a photograph of a historical marker on my phone.
Speaker 1: And if I'm honest with you, the thing I keep
Speaker 1: going back to isn't the craft or the pincers or
Speaker 1: any of it. It's a man standing on an abandoned
Speaker 1: pier with a spinning reel in his hand, deciding that
Speaker 1: the worst thing that could happen to him was not
Speaker 1: being believed.
Speaker 2: He was right about that part.
Speaker 1: It cost him everything ordinary he had left, and he
Speaker 1: still went and beat on the door of a newspaper
Speaker 1: office at ten o'clock at night. The tape's still there,
Speaker 1: the marker's still there, The river's still there, doing whatever
Speaker 1: the river does on a still summer evening when somebody
Speaker 1: swears they hear it humming.
Speaker 2: So let's head back to the truck. The light's going.
Speaker 1: The mosquitoes down here have gotten personal, and we've got
Speaker 1: a long haul ahead of us before the next stop.
Speaker 1: There's more country out there, and there's something in every
Speaker 1: bit of it
Speaker 2: Didn't di