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Oct. 3, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:05:48

Edition 578 - Dr Irena McCammon Scott

Dr Irena McCammon Scott - veteran researcher - has interviewed new witnesses and has hundreds of pages of deeply researched new information in her Flying Disk Press book "Beyond Pascagoula". Irena's work shows, in 2021, 48 years after the event it's definitely not "case closed"...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Hey, I hope that life is okay for you.
	As we slide towards autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's been a mix of reasonably warm sunshine and quite a bit of heavy rain today, so the weather's playing games with us.
	I know in the southern hemisphere, you're happy that you've got spring, and that's just the way the world works, and thank goodness it still is.
	I'm going to do some shout-outs on this edition, and then we'll get to Irena McCammon Scott, who's done some amazing research for a new book published by Philip Mantlaw's Flying Disc Press about the Pascagoula case.
	We've had Calvin Parker on this show.
	A very credible man, I felt, with his story, very heartfelt.
	And if you want to go back and listen to that before you listen to this, then, you know, that might be useful.
	But I think you're going to pick up enough about the case anyway from this show by itself.
	Irina McCammon Scott is a scientist who's also massively and has been for a huge portion of her lifetime involved in investigating subjects like ufology and alien abductions.
	Her book is called Beyond Pascagoula, The Rest of the Amazing Story.
	Now, this is an interesting thing.
	The Pascagoula events happened in 1973.
	The account of it is that on October the 11th, 1973, 9 p.m., two men, Charles Hickson, 42, Calvin Parker, age 19, who were employees at a shipyard, were fishing off a pier on the west bank of the Pascagoula River in Mississippi.
	Suddenly, they sensed something behind them.
	They turned around to see an oval object with a light and then saw two flashing blue lights.
	And that is how one of the most amazing and now best known alien abduction stories began.
	But with other alien abduction stories that we've read about and heard, most of them, you hear the story and then it begins to fade over time as people's recollections fade or some of the principles, the witnesses, the people who know about it die off.
	This is a very different case and it's been highlighted by the research that Irena has done for her book because new witnesses in recent times, very recent times, have come to light.
	Much more detail and a whole narrative has emerged around the Pascagoula abduction.
	Not just the story itself, but around it, as you're about to hear.
	So this is something very different.
	And the research that Irina has done for this is incredibly impressive, as you will hear.
	And she's given a big chunk of her life to trying to get to the bottom of this.
	So before we get to Irina McCammon Scott on this edition of The Unexplained, just to say thank you to Adam, my webmaster, as ever.
	Thank you to Haley for booking this guest.
	And thank you to you for being part of my show.
	Thank you very much for all of your emails and the nice things you've said.
	If you've made a donation to the online show recently, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
	I'm continuing to do my work here and trying to do my best.
	I hope I'm able to deliver that.
	Okay, let's just do a few shout-outs.
	Mike in Kent, nice to hear from you in the last day or two.
	Joy got your email this morning.
	Some kind and perceptive words.
	Thank you, Joy.
	Roger, Martin, thank you.
	Tom wants to see me more on Twitter.
	I must admit, I've got a Twitter account.
	Don't use it nearly enough.
	Thanks, Tom.
	Simon, thank you for your thoughts.
	Phil in Michigan.
	Peter Boylan, thank you for your email.
	Stephen Stewart wants me to revisit the D.B. Cooper case.
	Okay.
	Polly in Kent, good to hear from you.
	And Maureen and Rachel in York, I think it was, who I've just heard literally minutes before recording these words.
	Thank you for it.
	I've had some really nice and supportive emails.
	And it's really heartening to hear from so many people that this podcast, you know, these audio programs have had an impact upon your life.
	And in some cases, have helped you through what has been an horrendous 18 months, nearly two years in this world.
	And, you know, I'm sitting here doing this in my shambolic little apartment, unaware of that so many times.
	But it's really gratifying to know, and thank you for the kind emails.
	Believe me, the words that you send me keep me going too.
	My website is theunexplained.tv.
	Please check it out.
	600 hours of podcast material there.
	And, you know, my life's work, as they say.
	Just one thing to say, just before we get to Irena, the guest on this edition, a lot of people seem to be doing video podcasts.
	You know, new podcasts seem to pop up every week.
	A lot of people doing video with split screen.
	Some of it looks quite impressive.
	Some of it looks really shaky and not good.
	Up to now, I've resisted doing video because my thoughts about video is that the pictures often detract from the sound.
	And I know from the emails that you send me that you use these podcasts when you're driving a truck or going to work or just going to sleep or whatever, you know, in your most private times.
	And I always think that the human voice and the narrative that goes with it is the most intimate and communicative thing of all.
	And maybe just because I'm a radio guy and I'm out of step, I don't know.
	But my personal view is that pictures get in the way of that some of the time.
	But your thoughts about that, gratefully received.
	You know, for now, I'm continuing in sound because that's what I know.
	Okay, let's get to the U.S. now.
	We're going to talk about Beyond Pascagoula, the rest of the amazing story.
	That's the title of the book.
	And the person who's done this intensive research is Dr. Irina McCammon Scott.
	Irina, thank you very much for coming on my show.
	Well, I'm very glad to be here, and thank you very much for inviting me.
	So, Irina, we've got a lot of ground to cover here, and I'm trying to do this as methodically as I possibly can.
	I went through the book today, and some of the questions will be based from different parts of the book.
	So I'm going to leap back and forth somewhat, but hopefully the narrative will all make sense.
	I'm hoping.
	I wonder if you can tell my listener first off a little bit about you.
	I was in scientific work.
	I have my PhD from the College Of veterinary medicine in physiology, and I did postdoctoral research at Cornell University.
	I had a professorship at St. Bonaventure, all in the scientific field.
	I also did research at the University of Nevada and Ohio State University.
	My bachelor's degree was in biology, but I started out in astronomy and I wanted to be an astronomer, but they didn't hire females back then.
	And I also worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
	I did a PhD level work, and part of it was in a section called Air Order Battle.
	And in this, I identified airplanes using satellite photography.
	Right.
	Okay, so, I mean, that is a very impressive background.
	I just wanted to jump in about that work that you did with the military.
	And I wonder if it had any impact on your later interest in UFOs, ufology, and what might lie beyond what we can see here on Earth.
	Yes, it did.
	I was not...
	It was just identifying airplanes over a communist country at that time.
	You just looked down from the satellite and identified airplanes.
	But it's the Defense Intelligence Agency, and that's very involved in the UFO reports from right now, such as the videos.
	And at that time when I worked there, I wasn't into UFOs, but I kind of suspected that there was more going on with UFOs than what anybody said, which wasn't anything back then.
	Okay, as far as you know, were reports coming in?
	Because if what I hear is to be believed, then, you know, reports of UFOs and strange things in the sky have been coming into certainly the British Ministry of Defense for decades upon decades upon decades.
	So I presume in America, it must have been exactly the same.
	I presume it was.
	An unusual thing happened when I was working there was I had just, in general, mentioned UFOs.
	I'd had a sighting, and I was upset about it.
	And I didn't go around saying I see UFOs because I had this really high security clearance.
	And I'd lose my job.
	What year was this roughly the sighting?
	It was 1968.
	Okay, so we've got to go back to an era where people, as you've indicated, were a lot less accepting of a lot of things.
	So if you went around saying, I've seen something, then some of those people, there might still be people who would take that attitude, would kind of look askance at you, wouldn't they?
	Yes, I had that type of real high security clearance.
	And even if I were mopping floors of McDonald's, I think I'd be in trouble if I said that, but I definitely would in a job I had.
	So I didn't say anything about I saw something.
	What did you see?
	My sister and I had a real close encounter.
	It was while I was working for the DIA.
	I just had it.
	And we were on vacation in the New England States.
	We were both living on the seacoast.
	I was in Washington, D.C., and she was at Drew University in New Jersey.
	And we had traveled up to Boston, and we were going to see the New England states and stay in Boston.
	We couldn't find a place to stay.
	We were heading out of Boston, and we could see an airport south of us as we were leaving.
	We were going to look for motels along the Outer Belt.
	And we could see this airport, Norwood Memorial Airport.
	We could see airplanes coming in and turning on their landing lights.
	And they had the red and green wingtip lights and strobe lights and everything.
	And everything looked normal, except there was this really funny light underneath them.
	And it was just very, very white and blinking off and on.
	And my sister kept saying, this is weird.
	And she even said UFOs, and I kept saying, oh, it's a helicopter, you're crazy, and so on.
	And anyway, we got off the Outer Belt and we were heading down Route 95, which is the main freeway that goes up and down the coast.
	And off in a, as we were driving along, off in a woods, I saw this ball of light.
	It was like a glass ball, and it had a light in the middle.
	It was like a big basketball or something.
	And it was on the ground or floating right above the ground.
	And it was going through this spectrum of colors, like all shades of blue, and then all shades of red and then all shades of blue again.
	And I had no idea what it was.
	And then the inside of our car lit up in green.
	And I was totally confused.
	And I looked at the thing, the ball of light, and it wasn't green.
	Nothing else was green.
	There was green inside our car.
	And finally that went off and we kept traveling and my sister started yelling at me to pull over, pull over.
	This thing she'd been watching is going over the car.
	And I was just going to, I pointed out the window and I saw a meteor right then.
	And then I was going to say, you ding bat, it's a helicopter.
	And then the thing came over the road real slow and real low.
	And it very definitely wasn't a helicopter.
	It was soundless.
	It was close.
	It had seven things that looked like windows.
	And we discussed them at the time.
	And we'd most seen blimps with lighted sides and knew what they looked like.
	And this looked like we were looking in windows.
	And the whole inside was really bright and like there wasn't anything in it.
	And It had seven windows and they were blinking on and off in sequence.
	It had one small green light on one end and one small blinking red light on the other.
	It was totally soundless.
	And so I had a, I was working in photography for the DIA, and I also had a camera in the car that would take high-speed film.
	It was a Polaroid back in those days.
	And I had 3,000 ASA film, and I had to find the film on the camera and load it.
	And this took a while, but the thing was real close, and I could have just got a spectacular picture.
	Photographically, it would be fantastic because I could get the thing flying across the road, and if I had it in stereo, it would show it was there and that sort of thing.
	And so I was really interested.
	And we also thought we were looking inside the thing.
	And just as I was ready to take a picture, this truck driver came over and asked me what I was doing.
	And he had parked right in front of us.
	And did you say to him, well, I'm taking a picture of that, pointing up to it?
	Yeah, he said, what are you doing?
	And I couldn't believe he didn't know.
	And I pointed at it, but I didn't say UFO or anything.
	I just acted like it was an airplane.
	And he turned around in the exact opposite direction of where it was and said, I don't see anything.
	And he just rotated back and looked at me and said, I don't.
	And then he asked me the same question again, what are you doing?
	And I pointed again.
	And he did the same thing.
	He just rotated around, looked in the opposite direction, just as opposed to you could get, like he knew where it was.
	And then he rotated back and said, he said he didn't see anything.
	And then he kind of pointed at his head like I was crazy and went back to his truck.
	Well, this had just messed up the most beautiful picture you could ever imagine.
	And so what do you, I'm sorry to jump in.
	What do you think happened then?
	Was this somebody who genuinely couldn't see it, wasn't aware of it, wasn't interested?
	Or was this, I mean, it sounds kind of sinister.
	That's what I'm saying.
	Well, it seems a lot sinister recently because my sister found a letter she'd written to my mother just a couple months ago.
	And when that happened, I thought she saw the man and I thought we were both talking to him.
	And she said she didn't know he was there.
	Apparently she was trying to stare in the windows of this thing and it was going through this routine of different blinks.
	And she thought it was some kind of a message.
	And she was just concentrating on that.
	But she didn't seem to know he was there.
	And I thought all this time she knew he was there.
	So that was really creepy, a creepy thing to find out.
	And as I think more about it, at first I thought maybe it was just a truck driver that was nuts.
	He didn't seem nuts, though.
	No, by the sounds of it, he thought you were.
	He was trying to imply that you were.
	Yeah.
	And so anyway, now I think more that it had something to do with UFOs.
	But the interesting thing, isn't it, Irina, that in this day and age, it's more accepted in ufology, in people who research this subject, this field, that different people can have different experiences of the same phenomenon.
	Some people can see and hear nothing, and others can be very close to them and experience all kinds of things.
	we're much more used to that now, I think.
	Yeah, I'm more accepting of it now, but when it happened, I mean, up until a couple of months ago, I always thought my, she, she, But, well.
	He tried to kill you.
	Yeah.
	After that, I got my camera ready and he prevented me from taking this real good picture, but I still wanted to take a picture.
	And my sister said at that time that the object we were watching had just suddenly traveled and just suddenly got in a different place.
	And I didn't notice that.
	But I climbed up a hill because I didn't want to get lens flares from the freeway in my high-speed film.
	And I did get a picture of it, which I actually analyzed eventually and published in a scientific journal.
	But then I came back down, and the thing went to the airport and began to circle and blink in a pattern again.
	Well, I thought it was probably going to go the opposite direction from where our car was pointing.
	And so I got on the freeway and I was going to go to the next intersection, turn around, come back.
	Well, the man got right behind us, right on my bumper, and began to follow us, or in my opinion, chase us.
	And I couldn't get rid of him.
	I would switch lanes, I'd slow down, speed up, and he just stayed right there.
	He had his bright lights in my mirror, and I was blinded.
	And I finally just floored it and started going as fast as the car would go, and he was on my bumper.
	And I thought we were going to get killed.
	And I decided what I'd do is to try to get off the freeway from the left-hand lane.
	And just instantly, whenever another intersection came up to go, and I told Sue to look out the window and see if you could see anything behind us coming, and she couldn't see anything.
	And so I did it, and we got rid of him.
	I thought we were going to die then.
	So presumably up to this day, I don't want to put words into your mouth, you are unsure as to whether this guy was in some way connected with what you'd experienced or whether he was just a random lunatic.
	Well, I wondered that for years, and I think except that he was there having a close encounter with a UFO.
	And even at that time, I thought he obviously knew where the thing was because when I pointed at it, he would turn and look in the opposite direction.
	And that was another thing that made me think something's pretty weird because, you know, if somebody points at some direction and you look to see what they're looking at, you don't look in the opposite direction.
	You look at, you know, where you're pointing.
	True.
	And that made me think for a long time, even when it first happened, I thought, you know, he may be connected with the UFO.
	But then, when my sister told me recently that she didn't know he was there when I was talking to him, she knew he chased us later with the car, but she was completely unaware of him being there.
	And so that made it seem a lot creepier and made me think more that he wasn't just some random nut.
	He didn't act like a nut.
	Now, the fact that Sue didn't experience it in quite the same way, and this is more than 50 years ago, I don't know what must have been going through your mind.
	Did you ask yourself questions about yourself?
	Am I going mad?
	Is there something happening to me?
	Is something being directed at me?
	All kinds of questions.
	Well, I had a poltergeist experience after I got back to Washington that night.
	I mean, the next night.
	And I was very severely worried on account of my job because if I'd gone crazy or something, I would lose my clearance.
	And so I was pretty worried about that.
	And as I think about it now, I think that probably that man was connected with the UFO.
	And I wonder, and we can only wonder, whether, I mean, you can tell me more about the poltergeist, but, you know, if things were flinging themselves around in the place that you were living, then you can only make the assumption that perhaps maybe, since it was so close to the incident, that there was some kind of energy involved that was revolving around you.
	Well, it could have been revolving around my sister, too, because when we were tiny kids, we had an experience that we didn't understand.
	But I think now that it had to do with UFOs.
	And so I think it involved both of us.
	All right.
	So UFOs and ufology.
	You didn't find it.
	It found you.
	Yeah.
	When my sister and I were just kids, we had something in our room.
	And we'd never heard of UFOs at the time.
	But I think it found us because we were poor.
	We just had a radio.
	My father had been farming with horses.
	And things are pretty primitive, like Stone Age.
	And it was several years before we ever heard of UFOs or anything like that.
	So it wasn't that we were out looking for UFOs.
	Whatever happened, it started before we even heard of them.
	Okay, so these incidents that happened to you that you couldn't really talk about because of the era that you were in and the job that you were doing especially, would make that a no-no back then and probably now too.
	Were these the trigger for you getting involved in this subject, in this field?
	Yeah, many years later, I came out of the UFO closet and became involved.
	And nearly getting killed was one thing that was more urgent than a lot of people.
	That's the kind of thing that focuses your mind.
	What a terrible experience.
	I mean, I guess it was very difficult then to keep your own counsel about that, to keep quiet about it.
	No, it wasn't difficult at all because I didn't want to go through the harassment or lose my job or anything.
	You know, I mean, this is a different era, but I totally completely get that.
	Okay, so fast forward to today, and you get involved in the Pascagoula case.
	Philip Mantle asks you to reinvestigate because I'm aware of this.
	I interviewed Calvin Parker quite recently when he started talking about it again.
	And I know that Philip was becoming more and more aware that further information was coming out.
	Is that the point that he started to contact you?
	Yeah, he wanted, he's English and has an English accent, and he wanted somebody on this side of the pond to interview people.
	And I had a computer set up where I could tape record the interviews and things.
	And so he asked me to interview people.
	And I was very interested, so I was happy to do it.
	What did you know about Pascagoula up to that point?
	Up to that point, actually something that was associated with Pascagoula was the very first thing I ever investigated when I came out of the closet in the UFOs.
	It was actually before that.
	I had been getting my PhD in Missouri, and my mother from Ohio called, and that's about 600 miles away, and said, did you hear this noise?
	And I joked with her and told her she was crazy and everything.
	She had said if she ever showed signs of insanity, we should let her know before she gets demented.
	And so I teased her quite a bit.
	But later, I moved back to Ohio and I was curious about the noise.
	And I looked it up, and it was a very strange noise.
	It was really quite amazing.
	It was before I was in UFOs, and I'd worked with a seismologist from Ohio who was quite interested.
	And I'd worked with him and published in a scientific journal about it, just that it was a mysterious noise that wasn't explained.
	And that drew me into UFOs because people asked me to give talks about it.
	And that then eventually got UFOs from that.
	And is this the noise?
	Sorry to jump in here, just to clarify.
	You talk in a large portion of your book, and we will get into it.
	Of course we will, because it's a major plank of it.
	We talk about a boom, a kind of boom, kind of explosion, kind of bang that was heard across the United States.
	It was heard far and wide.
	It was not heard by some people, which was strange because other people adjacent to them did hear it.
	But there was a phenomenon that was simultaneous, pretty much, with what happened at Pascagoula.
	Yeah, so I already had quite a big interest in Pascagoula before Philip ever contacted me.
	And had you made the connection that these things Happened at the same time because they did, didn't they?
	Yeah.
	So I had been interested in that sound for quite a while.
	I mean, it's a weird thing to be interested in, but I was.
	And then he asked me about interviewing people.
	And I realized that the sound was the same, you know, as close as I could get to the same time as that happened.
	So I had a good personal interest in the whole thing.
	I mean, I hadn't read much about the abduction or anything until then.
	And the first people I interviewed, I hadn't read too much about it even then because I didn't want to get influence before I started talking to people.
	Now, the Pascagoula case has become prominent again because after decades of not speaking about it, not wanting to, Calvin Parker decided he had to write it down and start to speak about it quite rightly.
	You know, it had been such a part of his life.
	So that's why we know about it now.
	I think what we need to do before we go into the other witnesses who've come out and who you've spoken with and also the connection with this boom or bang or explosive noise that was heard far and wide.
	Can you give me just a quick summary of, you know, for those who don't know, of what happened to these two people, that's Charlie Hickson and Calvin Parker, aged 42 and 19 respectively, on that night in October 73?
	Yes, it was October the 11th, 1973, and Calvin Parker was either 18 or 19, and it was his first day on a new job, and he'd worked, and then he was with Charles Hickson and the older man, and they were family friends.
	Hickson was a friend of Calvin's father, and Calvin was a friend of Hickson's son.
	And so they decided to go fishing, which you do if you're around the Pascagoula River and in the south part of the United States and everything.
	And they had no interest in UFOs or anything else.
	They were just going fishing.
	Calvin was engaged to be married, and he wanted to just settle down in his life and be married and have kids and everything.
	And so they went out fishing, and they tried several places.
	Hickson decided to go to this one place where he thought he could get good fish.
	And Calvin, I guess there was a sign up that said no fishing or something.
	And Calvin was pretty nervous about it.
	And he told Hickson that he can go to jail instead of him, you know, if something happens.
	And so they went out and started fishing.
	And they saw, after a while, they saw these blue lights.
	And they thought it was the police after them.
	And it turned out to be a whole lot worse than police because then they saw this object that was above the ground, sort of, well, maybe two feet above the ground.
	It was kind of big.
	And there was this blinding light on the inside of it.
	And I guess the outside was kind of blue or something.
	And these things came out and grabbed them.
	And two of them grabbed Charles and one grabbed Calvin.
	And they both said something about that they thought they'd been injected or given a drug or something because, you know, they were healthy men, strong and everything, and they didn't fight back.
	They just were like they were paralyzed, but they were conscious.
	And so these things, and he, lots of people in abductions describe them as beings, but it sounded more like they thought they were robots or mechanical.
	They took them in to the object and sort of examined them like doctors do.
	It was sort of interesting instruments.
	It's more like they use today than they used back then.
	And then returned them.
	Well, they were both absolutely terrified.
	I guess when Parker was returned, he was just standing there with his hands up in the air and didn't move, and then he collapsed.
	And they didn't know what to do because they just weren't UFO people.
	And so Hickson, he had been in the military and things, and he had experienced extreme terror, and he kind of adjusted to it in a way.
	And Parker was just terrified.
	And then they both decided at first not to say anything, but Hickson said, well, we'll have to report it.
	And he didn't know who to report it to.
	So he went to the newspaper and they said they're closed.
	It's night.
	And then he called the Air Force base, which is Kessler, which was a big, important Air Force base.
	And it was night.
	And the person said, well, the Air Force no longer has anything to do with UFOs.
	Report it to the local authorities.
	So finally they got to the police.
	And the police had him come in.
	And, you know, Hickson just called up and said, you're not going to believe this.
	I mean, can you imagine giving a report like that to the police that somebody, the UFO, abducted you?
	You expect them to laugh at you and call you drunk and not believe you.
	And that's what he did.
	He called and said, you're not going to believe this.
	But they had them both come in and then they split them, I think, and interviewed them both separately.
	And then they put them in a room and left them by themselves.
	And they didn't tell him, but they had a tape recorder there.
	And they figured that if they were hoaxing or just, you know, putting it on, that then they would be laughing about fooling the police.
	Well, they were both just absolutely terrified.
	And Calvin said, I felt like I died.
	And he was praying and everything else.
	And so when they examined the tape recording, they took them a lot more seriously.
	And that's basically what happened.
	After that, if it hadn't been for the tape recording, they'd have probably just said, well, these are two drunks.
	Get out of the, you know, Isn't one fascinating aspect of this, and just for my listener's benefit, Calvin Parker tells the whole story on a previous edition of The Unexplained at theunexplained.tv.
	The interesting thing is that the police were very diligent about the procedure.
	You know, they interviewed them properly.
	They didn't just dismiss them as a couple of fools who perhaps had one too many beers.
	Yeah, and I talked to one of the police that was not involved, and he said that just immediately a police report had gone out and said, well, they picked up two drunks that said they'd been abducted.
	And at first they didn't take them seriously.
	And I think that's what caused the whole thing to spread so that a lot of people knew about it.
	Yeah, they did a professional job on that.
	More professional than a lot of people do now.
	And there is much more to this story that, you know, now we know how there was on board this craft, there was a form of communication.
	There was a struggle as well, wasn't there?
	I think Calvin struggled with one of these beings, but all of this is described in that podcast.
	There was a lot to this experience.
	Just to keep it short, for this conversation, what became of Charles Hickson, who died in 1980, sadly?
	He was the older man, of course, and Calvin Parker after that?
	I read a report on NBC News today that said on their website, until his death, Charles Hickson would tell the story to anybody who'd listened.
	Calvin Parker was quite different.
	Well, yeah, and I just was writing something about that.
	I interviewed his wife, who experienced everything with him.
	And, you know, they were engaged then.
	And I guess her father didn't believe him and told her not to marry him or suggested that she get out of the marriage and stuff.
	But they went ahead and got married at their regular time.
	And I don't think Parker ever talked about it until just before he wrote the book, his wife and Philip both began to suggest to him to write it.
	And he had never spoken about it much until then, even to his wife.
	And it's only in recent years, since people like me and others have done interviews with Calvin Parker, that we realize the full extent of this.
	And I was, and I said it at the time, for somebody to recall that much detail and to do it repeatedly after so many years says an awful lot about the credibility of the person that you're talking with, I think.
	You know, I found him completely credible and I said so at the time.
	I understand his health hasn't been too good lately, has it?
	Yeah, just now when he's retired and can really enjoy life and has got all that out of his chest, he's ill, and that's pretty awful.
	I hope modern medicine can get him over it.
	Absolutely.
	We wish him and the family all the best.
	Okay, so the story comes out again in more recent years when Calvin tells his story more widely and the book is published by Philip.
	And that begins to trigger something that doesn't often happen in this field.
	All of these decades later, new witnesses emerge, don't they?
	Yeah, what makes it more impressive is that way back then, the son of the sheriff said that he'd taken like 50 calls of reports of UFOs that very night.
	And so it's not like people are just making it up because there were a lot of reports back then.
	And indeed, the people of Pascagoula were very much on board with this story.
	You say in the book, I owe many thanks to the many additional Pascagoula residents who bravely came forward and allowed me to interview them.
	So the story meant an awful lot to the people of Pascagoula.
	It never went away for them.
	No, and a lot of them had had experiences and they wondered what was going on.
	And then when the story of the abduction came out in the news, well then they remembered, you know, for years and years and years because they had something to date it with that, you know, was impressive and sort of confirmed what happened to them.
	So you wouldn't normally just remember anything that happened, you know, way back in 1973.
	But at that time, some of them had sightings, and that came out the next day or so in the news, and so they did remember.
	You spoke to a woman called Maria Blair, didn't you?
	Uh-huh.
	What did she experience?
	Well, when I first talked to her, she didn't make too much sense, and I kept calling her back and talking to her more.
	But she said that she and her husband were close to a pair.
	They were on the other side of the Pascagoula from Calvin and Charles.
	And that she kept seeing this thing flying around.
	They were waiting for his supervisor, I guess, and he and the other man were going out on a boat.
	But they were in their car right then.
	And she kept seeing this thing flying around.
	I think she said it multicolored, and that she thought it was an airplane, but that it just was flying around, around, around, and over.
	And she said she made the comment several times that she thinks the pilot is lost.
	They're confused.
	And then they were just married at that time.
	Her husband decided to get his clothes and take him out to the ship.
	And so he was walking ahead of her.
	And when she was walking along the pier, something looked like a man came out of the water.
	She just seemed very, very, very emotional about this.
	And it was like they walked down to the pier like about 9 o'clock, you know, sometime around when the abduction was taking place.
	And then she said she came back about 12.
	And that didn't make sense to me either.
	And she said she was just terrified and ran back to the car.
	And so I wondered about the man, and she was really emotional about him.
	So just to clarify that, she told you that she experienced a man or something that appeared to come out of the water.
	Uh-huh.
	and then had missing time.
	Well, she didn't say she had missing time, but it sounded to me like she had missing time.
	She didn't say that.
	So I kept probing her again about the man, and she just seems terrified.
	She seemed really emotional.
	And she said her husband, I talked to him first, and he said he heard a big splice, and he thought it was a blimp.
	And she said her husband cautioned her not to say anything.
	Her husband told her that there was nothing to it.
	There was no abduction, no UFO or anything like that.
	And then I kept probing her because she seemed so emotional about it.
	And, you know, I thought there's something more going on there.
	And you've got an awful lot out of her because the transcript is in the book.
	One quote is here.
	She says, they had me in a state of not knowing what was happening to me unless in my subconscious mind because I was scared out of my mind when I saw this ugly thing float in front of me at the pier.
	So you really got her to open up.
	Why she opened up was because unfortunately her husband then became very, very sick.
	And right before he was put on a ventilator, you can't talk in a ventilator, he told her that they had been abducted and that he hadn't ever said anything about it because of the harassment.
	And so that's, then there was a reason why she was so nervous.
	And then I don't think she's ever remembered being inside the thing or anything.
	She just remembered seeing it from the outside.
	But her husband said, you know.
	Just to let my listener know, I suspect that hooter noise we're hearing, is that your SMS texts coming into you?
	I apologize.
	I should have put my phone outside.
	It's a great, great sound, actually.
	I might try getting that one myself.
	All the others seem boring compared with that.
	Okay, so I mean, this is really impactful.
	So Maria Blair's husband had actually known much more about this for all the years, had decided that they really shouldn't be talking about this and getting involved in this, and had impressed that upon her.
	Yeah, and then he died.
	And, you know, that's pretty sad.
	And he told her just before they put him on a ventilator, and he didn't tell her too much.
	He said there'd been doctors that examined him.
	And, I mean, not beings that examined him.
	He called one a doctor and told her things like that.
	But she didn't get too much out of him because then he was put on a ventilator and he couldn't talk.
	It almost seemed to me, looking at the account of your conversations with Maria, that it was like peeling back an onion, peeling back the skin.
	You were able to get her to talk more and more.
	Do you think that there are things that she might still recall?
	Yeah, she's kind of interested in hypnosis, but with her husband's death and things, she's pretty upset.
	And so nothing's taken place yet.
	And, you know, she's pretty emotional.
	I mean, absolutely understandable, maybe in time.
	But, you know, that is a remarkable brick in this wall.
	And when Calvin Parker heard about that story, how did that make him feel?
	Do you know?
	I think he said he cried or something at first and felt like he'd always known her.
	I can imagine that.
	Because they went through the same thing.
	But the other remarkable thing is we said that witnesses in the plural had come out all of these years later, which tends not to happen in ufology and UFO cases.
	And there's another one, a crane driver, Louis Lee, and you quote him as saying, I was working full-time at the shipyard, moonlighting at Walker's shipyard for five or six hours.
	I was working nights.
	The UFO came over the Pascagoula River, and I don't know how long I looked at it, but I had to stop looking at it because they were giving me instructions about what lever to pull and everything I took my eyes off it.
	But it was kind of like round, egg-shaped with a blue, here's that color, blue, super silver ray.
	So, you know, he experienced something on that night, even though he was at work.
	Yeah, and that was one of the criticisms that people had leveled against the whole thing is, is that this was kind of like a public place.
	They were on a pier, and it was late at night, but Route 90 went across the Pascagoula River north of them.
	And they were kind of in an isolated place, but there might have been other people.
	And they always wondered, well, why didn't a crane operator or somebody like that see something?
	Well, it turned out a crane operator probably did, and he was known by some of the people at Pascagoula.
	And I think one of the people I interviewed said that maybe she thought she had heard him talk about it way, way back.
	So, yeah, that was pretty interesting.
	Anybody else?
	I know about those, you know, I know about Maria and her husband and the crane operative.
	Anybody else?
	Yeah, there were several people on the bridge that might have seen it.
	There was a man that drove close to that place around that time, and he said he heard a, he, there was a funny wind, and I don't remember something else happened.
	And I was wondering about that because Calvin's car was new.
	And when they came back to the car, he said a window was shattered.
	And then when they opened the door, the window fell out, and that the car, he couldn't start the car, and the car had been fine up until then.
	And later, he changed the spark plugs and started working it.
	And I think he commented the spark plugs look kind of old or something.
	And that seemed really weird.
	And so I was wondering about the person that seemed to have driven by there and experienced the wind.
	And then I think there were some people on the bridge.
	I can't think of right now.
	You've done such a lot of.
	I'm sorry, you were saying about those people.
	Sorry to jump in.
	No, nothing quite.
	You say that at that time or around that time, and this is because of your investigations, there were a sudden upsurge of bewildering happenings I'm quoting here that occurred simultaneously with or at nearly the time of the Pascagoula event.
	You say I wanted to get accounts that were as close to real time as possible.
	I began to collect material that told of the October 11 occurrences.
	And there were all sorts of things, including, I think, a couple of reported abductions.
	Somebody reported a craft the size of a two-bedroom house spotted over Jackson, Mississippi.
	This is all around the same time.
	And all sorts of other things that appeared to happen simultaneously or pretty simultaneously with the events involving Charlie and Calvin at Pascagoula.
	There were several that happened about the same time, and one of them was on an island right off, not too far from where they were.
	And I think it was the same night that an object came, they were out with a dune buggy and some sand, and they got it stuck, and they were trying to get it out.
	And they said this object came real close to them and shone a real bright light on them.
	It was so bright that they said they could see all kinds of colors and grains of sand.
	Well, they were terrified and got their dunes buggy out real fast by maybe superhuman effort or something and went home.
	And that was kind of like the preamble to the abduction of Hickson and Parker because they said, first of all, there was bright light shone on them.
	And there were several other things kind of like that.
	And there was, you have discovered, you have talked about in the book, a pretty full-on investigation, wasn't there, by a whole variety of people, I believe including the famous investigator tied to the military, J. Alan Hyneck, was involved in this.
	And it seemed that the military were particularly interested in the idea that there might have been not a UFO, but a USO, something that came from beneath the water in this instance.
	So we didn't know about this, but there was a pretty full-on investigation, wasn't there?
	Yes, there was.
	The Pascagoula area made national news twice.
	Once was the abduction, and the second time was from what you'd call the unidentified submarine object, or USO, which happened maybe a week or two later on November the 6th.
	And the abduction was ridiculed, but the USO was taken very seriously with a pretty good investigation by the Coast Guard.
	And what were the characteristics of this USO?
	Only one of the people that saw it is alive now.
	And I interviewed him.
	He was a 16-year-old boy then with his father.
	But he said that they saw it and they couldn't figure out what it was.
	It was a light under the water.
	And their boat and another boat and some other people saw it.
	And he said his father probed it with an oar and when he hit it, it was like metal.
	It sounded like metal, but it was something floating around underwater.
	And they had no idea what it was.
	And then so they went back and got the Coast Guard, and the Coast Guard came, and the Coast Guard saw it too.
	And it would light up sometimes very, very bright, but then if they hit it or irritated it, it would go dim.
	And sometimes it would go completely out, and then somebody else farther away would see it.
	And so the Coast Guard had no idea what it was too.
	And the Coast Guard man said it was quite unusual because he said when there was an oar over, that the light from it sort of went through the oar, like an x-ray or something.
	And he thought it was very, very strange.
	And so they had a number of high-level people investigate and interview the people that saw that.
	And one of the reasons they were interested was because there was a nuclear facilities associated with the shipyard that most people didn't know about.
	I think the military was keeping quiet about it.
	And this was a real high-tech shipyard.
	And Kessler Air Force Base was a really important training site and Air Force base for people.
	And so that took place in a really important area.
	And the abduction did too.
	But people didn't seem to tie the two together.
	But the abduction would have been just as serious as the underwater.
	That's an aspect of it that hasn't been discussed much, if at all.
	And is it true?
	I did the fastest speed read of your book.
	And, you know, being a journalist, I can read books pretty fast.
	I did that today when I got the book from Philip.
	Was there a situation where the United States went to its highest state of nuclear defense alert, DEF CON 3, for a while around this point?
	Yeah, I think it was October the 24th or something.
	And it was the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East.
	And this was an alert for a possible nuclear war starting.
	It was Israel, Egypt, I think, was attacking Israel or something.
	And with their alliances, two countries were allying.
	It was one of Those times in history that was very much unstable, I think is the way to put it.
	But in terms of the UFO flap as you describe it, and all of the things described at that time, you know, reading the book, and it hasn't really been clear until I read this book, that around that time there was a kind of UFO-style flap of the kind that history reports in the 1950s in the United States.
	You know, the UFOs over Washington, D.C. and all that kind of stuff.
	It was a really active period, wasn't it?
	Yes.
	There used to be flaps, and I think this is because everybody reported at the same place, like Project Blue Book or those two Project Signs or Project Grudge.
	And then that ended, the official reporting site ended about 1969.
	And there was no way to tell if there were flaps afterwards because everybody reported different places.
	Nobody knew where to report.
	But even so, 1973 was considered a flap by everybody.
	And a flap or wave is when there's just a, for some unknown reason, there's a sudden increase in sightings.
	And in the 1973, when people said this was probably the biggest one ever, there were just all kinds of things happening suddenly then.
	So this happened at a time when everything seemed to be peaking.
	But there was another aspect to this, and we sort of intimated this at the beginning of it.
	But let's talk about it now, because this is where you came in, in a sense.
	There was, I'll call it a sonic boom, but that doesn't really describe it, a kind of explosive, percussive noise that people were reporting precisely around the time of the Pascagoula incident.
	But it was reported right across the United States.
	I've been able to investigate that a lot better now because NASA has come out with information about sonic booms.
	And I can look through newspapers and get more information.
	But this apparently began, the sound was apparently, according to the newspapers, first heard in Iowa.
	It was heard right across the United States, clear to the coast, and it passed over areas of big population like Indianapolis and Columbus and Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. And it was just a very strong, unusual noise, and it made newspaper headlines across that area.
	I mean, I could find it often on the first front page of the newspapers on the next day after, I mean, on October the 12th.
	And people ran out of their houses.
	They had actual fire department runs.
	People thought their houses were exploding.
	And it was just really totally impressive.
	And in the book, you say that this was, as you said, this was recorded in Washington, D.C., also recorded around several key military sites.
	But you also note that there were places where this noise was conspicuously absent, where people did not hear it.
	Yeah, and I wasn't too sure about that because all I had to do, all I had was newspaper articles, and some of them said, oh, they didn't hear it, and other things would say, oh, those same people heard it.
	And so I don't think I could get a pretty good idea of where it was and when.
	But it was sort of plus or minus because it was what I collected was newspaper reports.
	So, you know, some people didn't seem to hear it and some did, and I didn't understand that.
	But I don't know exactly, you know, I don't know what caused the noise.
	Nobody ever saw anything.
	And I don't know its trajectory, whether it could have gone around some of the cities or things like that.
	And I don't know where the actual thing was that caused the sound.
	Was there a suggestion that some kind of military aircraft, I think the SR-71, might have been involved somehow?
	They always say that scientists are debunkers.
	When I started, I worked with some scientists, and they didn't debunk it.
	They were interested.
	But then I published about it in the MUFON Journal, and I got debunked by a UFO person who said it was SR-71.
	And I kind of weakly defended myself and debunked him by saying that the sound wasn't where the airplane was.
	Well, since then, NASA's come out with a lot of information about sonic booms and that sort of thing.
	And the sonic boom is under the airplane, and they give, it depends on the altitude of the airplane, the speed of the airplane, things like that.
	So that I could get a much more definite debunking of my debunker by saying, by using NASA data, that this sound was not where the airplane was.
	And of course, a sonic boom would be a very localized thing.
	I know this, and we know this in Europe because we had Concorde here.
	Concorde used to fly over my apartment after taking off from Heathrow Airport, a very impressive aircraft, but that once it got up to supersonic speed, there would be a boom.
	And people in places like Cornwall in the southwest of England, the Scilly Isles down there, they would hear that boom.
	And it was, as you know, very controversial.
	The Americans did not want sonic booms near their territory from Concord, which was, I think, the thing that kept Concord out of New York for a while.
	So it's a localized phenomenon, but the booms that people were hearing at that time around the abduction of Calvin Parger, Charlie Hickson, they were hearing something that wasn't localized.
	It was widespread.
	This was real widespread.
	The debunker told me it was this one airplane that was 80,000 feet.
	What 80,000 feet the sonic boom should be on 40 miles on each side of the airplane.
	And this was for the airplane he mentioned, it was in Rome, New York.
	And this was heard many miles away, even in not only in the lower part of New York, but clear down in the Cumberland Valley of Tennessee.
	And I said maybe 700 miles away.
	And so this was nothing like a sonic boom.
	I mean, if you heard that like 500 miles away, it would, the airplane have to be like that.
	Oh, moving.
	There's the phone.
	We've had the text.
	There's the phone.
	Sorry.
	No, that's fine.
	We could stop if you want to, or we'll just roll on.
	My listener's fine with this.
	Goes away.
	Okay.
	So here we had a widespread, audible, and tactile phenomenon.
	People felt this happening simultaneously.
	And you're tying all of these threads together.
	Not only that, there were things happening in other countries.
	You talk about there was a teleportation and abduction case in Brazil and various things happening in different countries around the same time.
	So tying it all together, as we come towards the end of this, Irina, what do you believe was going on in 1973?
	Or what would you like to research next that might give us more of a clue?
	In Ohio, my mother had, after she called about that noise, she had called me later and said there was this big flap.
	Well, at the same time as it was happening at Pasagoula, there was a big flap in Ohio, even around Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which was where the UFOs had been studied.
	But there were sightings all over.
	And so it was a pretty unusual flap because a lot of things were happening at the same time.
	Interesting that it should be reported at Wright-Patterson, which we've discussed on this show so many times because people say that's where the Roswell debris went, maybe where the aliens went, but that's where a lot of the good stuff actually resides.
	Uh-huh.
	But we don't know the truth of that.
	No.
	And so it was interesting that there was a lot going on in other places.
	And another interesting thing was that there was a professor in Missouri that began studying it early, I think it was April 1973, and studied it during that time.
	And he said there was a definite flap at that time because he had the reports leading up to it and afterwards.
	And he said there was a huge amount of sightings.
	At that time, his name was Harley Rutlich.
	And he did a really good study of UFOs.
	He set up, he was at first a skeptic and was just going to go down and disprove it in a week or two and tell everybody what UFOs were.
	We went down and set up a study station and had scientists collect data and did a real field study.
	And I guess he saw quite a few UFOs himself and he had ways to identify whether they were UFOs or something else.
	And he just did an excellent study and published it many years later.
	But his data also showed that the flap, that particular flap around April, I mean around October, and quite a few other things that happened in people's data showing unusual events right around then.
	Do you believe, or maybe you know, that the U.S. military, other armatures of the U.S. government, have further information about what happened in 1973 that the public need to know?
	Like what?
	Well, perhaps more detailed information than you've been able to uncover because of who they are and where they are.
	Well, any information I'd be interested.
	No, well, what I'm saying is basically we've had the interim report on UFOs and UAPs delivered in Washington in June.
	There is supposed to be more coming.
	Do you think that behind closed doors somewhere, there is more information on exactly what did transpire in 1973?
	Well, I heard that it was sort of a show of force.
	Some people thought it was a show of force to the military.
	That's interesting.
	I mean, there are people who've said that about the Tic-Tac UFOs more recently.
	It's a great book, Irina.
	You got hold of some great illustrations and photographs and documents, and the story itself shows me that you put an awful lot of hard work into this.
	How long did this take to put together?
	Well, I've been working on it since, actually, I suppose when my mother called, 1973.
	Not, not, I mean, just off and on, but some nice stuff.
	So if I was doing a movie trailer, we could say that it's a story that's been nearly half a century in the making.
	Yeah.
	Except it was dormant for most of that time.
	Which is the thing that makes it even more fascinating, I think.
	Is there anything that we haven't talked about we should have?
	Well, I think one important thing is that it was the submarine object was taken seriously, and now with the nibbets and everything, there's observation of submarine objects flying away like there was in this way back.
	So it all ties in.
	Yeah.
	And also the DIA.
	Back then, I thought the DIA was hiding things.
	That's when you were working for them.
	Yeah.
	Gee.
	Well, you know, maybe one of these days we'll know more.
	Will you be doing any more research on this, or is this literally quotes the book closed for you?
	No, I'm interested in any data anybody gives me.
	Okay.
	Do you have a website, Irina?
	It's called irinascott.com.
	And people can contact you through there.
	Uh-huh.
	Okay.
	Well, no, they can contact me on Facebook or through my publisher, Flying Disk Press, Philip Mann.
	Okay, so they can do it through Philip at Flying Disk Press, or indeed they can do it through me if they want to email me through my website, theunexplained.tv.
	Irina McCammon Scott, thank you very much for being so patient with me and for giving me your time.
	And I apologize for my phone.
	Thank you very much.
	I was very honored to be interviewed, and thank you very much for having me.
	I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though I had to do it quickly reading the book.
	Thank you.
	Okay, you picked up a lot from the book.
	Irena McCammon Scott, she's clearly put such a lot of effort into that research, and I thoroughly, heartily, and completely recommend the book published by Philip Mantle's Flying Disc Press.
	More great guests in the pipeline here with the Unexplained.
	So until next, we meet.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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