1973 was a great year for fans of high-strangeness UFO reports. The most famous of these is the October 11th case from Pascagoula, Mississippi, where Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker said they were taken aboard a craft by elephant-skinned humanoids with crab-claw like hands. After their story hit the papers, an article appeared in the October 18, 1973, edition of The Pensacola News ( part 1, part 2 ) headlined “Pickup by UFO Reported.” According to the article, a “Pensacola businessman” (later identified as an electrician) reported an encounter of his own, and his story was even more dramatic than Hickson and Parker’s. UFO investigators at the time seem to have mostly ignored it, as it doesn’t appear in periodicals of the day such as The APRO Bulletin or Flying Saucer Review. This might have been due to the continued focus on the Pascagoula case and the extreme nature of the claim by the man in Pensacola. Read more →