Philip Mantle on the newly unearthed Pascagoula tape recordings that shed amazing light on what happened to Charlie Hickson and Calvin Parker in October 1973. The Unexplained was the first show in the world to air these tapes - thanks to Philip Mantle and Flying Disk Press. Also - Jan 19, 2024 - Canada UAP sightings from commercial aircraft - We speak with researcher Chris Rutkowski who has been listening to the remarkable Air Traffic Control recordings.
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.
Well, thank you very much for being part of everything that I do.
And if you've been with me for a long time, thank you very much for being part of that journey.
This is the month of March 2024, and this is the 18th anniversary month of the entire project.
18 years as a podcast.
And coincidentally, in the same month, March, this month, it'll be eight years on the radio and for part of that time on television as well.
But let's not open up the TV debate because I think that's probably been had.
Thank you very much for everybody who's been part of this show over the years.
And thank you very much for keeping me on the straight and narrow with your guidance and your thoughts.
Even if you don't think that they will mean a great deal when you send them, please believe me that they do.
Just to hear that I'm reaching people and that they find a place in their busy lives or sometimes their troubled lives for me and what I've got to do means a great deal to me.
And I think the communication now that we've got almost transcends the material that we do.
You know, this is a presentation now.
And that brings me to a point where I've got to just quickly talk about this, the big debate that we had recently, and not for the first time, about whether I should do what I'm doing now.
And that is to discourse with you about the weather, which at the moment is quite sunny and quite spring, like a little bit of cloud there, and maybe the potential for some rain, but it is looking like spring here, yippee.
So whether I discourse with you about the weather, stuff that's going on with me and things that are going on in this crazy mad world of ours, or whether I just hit record on the guest and let the guest talk, ask him a few questions and stick that out there.
And we had that debate because I got an email from somebody that made me think, that made me go back to basics and wonder whether in this day and age, the way that I've been doing it is not the way that it should be done.
So I've had so many emails and they are, and I'm not going to say 99%, they're 100% that we keep things as they are.
So that's what I'm going to do.
And I think until you tell me differently that it's time for a change or it's time to stop, that is where I'm going to be.
Because I can't constantly be analyzing everything that I do.
I think if you're doing something like this, you sit down or stand up if you want to, hit record, do your show and be yourself.
And if you can't give it that, don't do it.
That's what I would say.
And I think just recording conversations with people and sticking those out, that's just content.
I've been a broadcaster all of my life.
And if I can't put my own spin and my own feel to it, I think I would definitely just stop doing it at that point.
So I am not going to consider that matter anymore.
I think we've got to just consider that debate shut and closed.
And thank you very much for everything that you've said about that.
Thank you to Adam for all of his years of work on this show.
Most of the show, he's been there for me.
I had Graham for about a year, I think, at the beginning.
Then Adam took over all of the stuff that I don't understand.
That is getting the show out to you and also designing, creating and honing the website.
Let's get to the material on this edition of The Unexplained.
A couple of items from my radio show that I think are very, very important.
One of them is a worldwide exclusive.
Item number one is Chris Rutkowski in Canada talking about a huge UFO flap that happened on the 19th of January where a lot of commercial pilots, and you will hear a brief snippet of a recording of them from Air Traffic Control, reported seeing strange light formations in the sky that some of them were convinced were not satellites or whatever you might describe them as natural phenomena.
They thought these things were something else and they certainly sound like it.
They were also seen down in the United States.
So Chris Rukowski is here as the first guest and then a world exclusive, Philip Mantle, with some newly discovered, heard for the first time sound from the Pascagoula era.
These are recordings of the people involved in this, recordings of Charlie Hickson, one of the two Pascagoula abductees, speaking to Dick Cavett, a newly rediscovered audio recording of his show, just a tiny snippet of that, and also a radio news bulletin from that time.
This material, I didn't know what to make of it when I knew it was coming.
When I listened to it, even though some of it is not pristine, perfect digital audio quality, because look, this was 1973, it absolutely makes the characters and the story stand up and live.
So my thanks to Philip Mantle, who is busily working out what to do with all of this material, and you will hear more of it soon.
My thanks to Philip Mantle for making me the first to allow this material to be heard.
So that's the second item.
I'm not going to say any more now because I've said way too much and I do apologise for that.
And thank you for listening, being part of it all.
Let's get to item number one.
January the 19th this year, pilots, commercial pilots in the skies over Canada reporting strange lights.
Let's hear from Chris Rutkowski in Canada, famous author and investigator of these matters.
And we'll also hear some of the air traffic control recording as run on the internet.
So here's that item, Chris Rutkowski.
Let's get to this now quickly.
Singular14.com.
Multiple pilots reported seeing lots of active bright lights in formation.
Flying over the Canadian prairies in the early morning of January the 19th, according to a recent article published by Canada's CTV News, the original unedited conversation between pilots and air traffic controllers happened from approximately 4.20 a.m. to 6 a.m.
At least four aircraft reported the lights, including a flared airlines flight from Vancouver to Toronto.
The actual recording, a little tiny bit of which I've edited here for you to hear, is just astonishing.
Have a listen to the air traffic control recording.
Yeah, it looks like it.
I mean, it's hard to say, but yeah, it's being like three to four really bright lights, and they kind of were in like a triangle formation, and then it looks like they're a little dipper for a bit, and then they disappear, and then they come back.
Okay, thanks for that.
I'll just make a note, but yeah, I can't think of what that might be.
I see something flashing light.
It's running 730, starts to country.
Yeah, forming triangles, then flying away and coming back.
And at our 1130 position, we've been staring at these things for well over an hour, and they're high up in the sky, I'd say 100,000 feet plus.
And Morningstar 7062, I missed your comment there.
What were you saying about the lights?
Definitely not satellites.
Bye.
Okay, thanks very much.
I'm just talking to the controls that I've taken over and I guess it's called a service report.
Okay, yeah, it's like unlike anything I've ever seen in like the 15 years of night watching that I've done.
Okay, thanks very much.
And that is air traffic control speak for noted.
We'll pass this on because I don't know what to make about that.
Chris Rutkowski, Canadian science writer who's written extensively about UFOs and has been a friend to this show for many years, is online to us now.
Chris, thank you for doing this January the 19th.
What a night, as somebody famous once sang.
Absolutely.
You heard there four different aircraft, commercial aircraft pilots reporting these lights that were flying in formation that seemed to be triangular formation at one point, then they shifted.
And, you know, this is something that you don't expect to have the air traffic control audio as well.
There are a number of researchers who are pursuing this, including myself, and we were able to get the air traffic control audio.
And it attests to the fact that pilots are, in fact, seeing some unusual things out there.
Well, indeed, that last pilot, the Morningstar flight, I think it was, or certainly the code sign or call sign Morningstar, she was obviously very, very experienced.
And you can hear her chime in at various points.
I mean, that's an edited version of the recording, but you hear her say, that's not satellites, and I've never seen anything like this.
And you can hear them gradually start to realize that they're dealing over time on this recording with something very, very unusual.
You know, that was quite a night, as we said.
And not only that, pilots, I think, down across the border in the U.S. saw and experienced these things, didn't they?
Absolutely.
In fact, since that time, we received additional reports from Ontario, Kenora, something was flying over Kenora, Ontario, a few weeks later.
And since then, I've actually corresponded with some pilots who came out of the closet, so to speak, to tell me about objects that they've seen while on transatlantic flights between Canada and Great Britain, and also over Alaska, United States, and also some down in Ohio.
So pilots are starting to really come forward with this, and we're finally getting some opportunity to get some of the audio recordings so we can have a better understanding of what's going on.
We're still having difficulty getting the actual reports that have been filed with various government agencies.
We still have not received any of those or been able to acquire them.
We do have audio recordings, and we do know that people are seeing these things.
We do.
What do you think will happen?
You know, those air traffic controllers at various points in the long recording, I heard them say, yes, we're going to pass this on, we're going to report this, we'll pass it up the chain.
What do you believe will happen to those reports?
Well, we're not sure.
We do know that we've received partial reports in Canada.
These are filed with Transport Canada, the equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States, and where there's something called an incident report.
They call it a service report on the audio you just heard, but they're generally called incident reports.
And there actually is a category of incident reports from the government of Canada called UFOs.
And they are actually filed, and we do know what happened on the date and what planes were involved and a little bit of a transcript in that sense, but we don't have the details.
We don't have the pilots' names.
We don't have exactly where they were.
We know they're over Saskatchewan somewhere, but don't know exactly where.
So we're still waiting for some details, but there are these reports that we've been able to acquire, but there's much, much more that needs to be obtained.
And we're hoping that eventually we'll get more of these.
Is there a move?
I was lucky enough to visit Canada just a couple of months ago, and I noted, having previously in the same trip visited parts of America, I noted that, of course, Canada is different.
You have your own government.
You do things differently there from the way they do things in the South.
Is there a move there towards disclosure as there is in Washington?
I believe there is.
As a matter of fact, I was speaking to some individuals from the Canadian government just later, just last week, as a matter of fact.
And there's something called the Sky Canada Project, which is an attempt by the Office of the Chief Science Advisor for Canada, the Ministerial of Science, where they're trying to have a better understanding of what people are seeing.
They want to know what government departments are currently collecting information, what's best to be done with them, and to try and be a little more transparent, hopefully a little more transparent with regard to this so that the public has a better grasp of what is actually being reported.
Chris Rydkowski, thank you very much indeed for your time.
Chris Rydkowski in Canada is a science writer and a great researcher of the UFO topic.
Interesting.
January the 19th was the night it looks like we may hear more about this.
Many, many thanks to Chris Rykowski for helping me out again.
What do you make of that?
Did you see anything on that night of January the 19th, whether you were in Canada or across the border in the United States?
Let me know.
I think it is a fascinating case.
What could those things have been?
Maybe you've got a rational explanation for them, but it seems it is perplexing a lot of people.
And now the world exclusive on this edition of The Unexplained, exactly as it was broadcast.
Both of these items are precisely as they went on air.
Philip Mantle from Flying Disc Press, the man behind the Beyond Pascagoula book recently, and the man who's made all of the running in the new exposition of the Pascagoula alien abduction case in 1973.
Philip Mantle has been able to unearth some new recordings or newly discovered recordings from that era.
People like Sheriff Fred Diamond, people like the guy who was responsible for the hypnotic regressions of the two.
That's Charlie Hickson and Calvin Parker.
There is also a recording of Charlie Hickson performing brilliantly on a Dick Cavett talk show.
There's a little clip of that.
So that's what you're going to hear.
It was exclusively broadcast on my radio show last Sunday night.
My grateful thanks to Philip Mantle for making me the first person in the world to air this material.
So, back to Pascagoula, 1973, and some unheard before now for many years recordings.
And unusually, as Philip is here to tell you, this particular incident is a gift, as I've always said, that keeps on giving.
New material keeps coming out.
And so it is with these recordings that we present to you tonight as a world's first.
They've never been heard on any radio station anywhere before tonight.
Philip Mantle from Flying Disc Press, thank you very much for coming on.
Good evening, Howard.
A pleasure as always, I can assure you.
Can you, because we discussed it last week, I wonder if you can give me the potted version of how you managed to acquire this cache of recordings, some of which we're going to hear.
Yeah, I mean, once I began working with Calvin Parker in 2018, one of the first things I asked him was, do you have any documents, photographs, anything?
And he says, no, Philip, we lost it all in Hurricane Katrina.
I mean, my house was under 12 feet of water, gone, you know?
So one of my tasks was to set about politely pestering people for such material.
Do you have any photos, documents, you know, anything, newspaper claims?
And slowly, surely, we built up a library of things and we uncovered things.
And, you know, people, pretty much everybody who had something, Howard, obliged us with it, you know.
And then we published some of that in Calvin's books and on we went.
And then we get to know people.
And when they get an email from me, they're thinking, I don't have to want the email.
I know what the question is.
It was just a polite reminder that we're still looking for things.
Now, a gentleman by the name of David Marler in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is the executive director of the National UFO Historical Records Center.
And they're probably the biggest archive of UFO material in the United States.
They've got all the NICAP files, Blue Book, David's own collection, and more and more material were coming in.
Now, back in 1973, the main UFO group at that time was called APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization.
They were the ones that dispatched Dr. James Harder down to Pascagoula when it happened, October the 11th, 1973.
Harder was there within two days.
And he was also trained in hypnosis.
And of course, on the same day that he arrived, the close encounters man arrived, the one everybody knows, Dr. J. Alan Hyneck.
And the files of APRO closed in the 80s.
They were held by a couple of people.
It was a lot of UFO politics, Howard, but they were held by a couple of people in Arizona who were very pleasant, very nice.
You can never get anything from them.
A couple of years back, the lady who was part owner of them died.
And then out of the blue, at the end of last year, the chap that owned them, it was a chap called Brian Myers.
He contacted David Marla and said, would you be interested in owning the APRO files for your archive?
Yep.
He went up.
They met.
They drew up a legal document.
The files were donated completely free of charge.
I mean, nobody had seen these in decades, Howard.
Literally.
Nobody even knew what was in them in that respect.
And David took delivery of them.
And I'm thinking, right, you know, Dr. Hara was part of APRO.
Surely there's some files in there.
David said, I've had a quick look because I know David.
And he said, I can't see any paper files.
A couple of weeks later, an email comes through.
And it's David Marla.
Philip, have you got any of these recordings?
And he listed what they were, you know, and I said, no, not on your neighbor, mate.
Have I got any of them?
And within no time, you know, he digitized them and they were sat on my laptop at home and I set about transcribing them.
And that brings us to where we are today, really, Howard.
It is a remarkable collection.
We've talked a lot about these characters, the guy who did the hypnosis session, who you referenced there, James Hyder, the sheriff Fred Diamond, and also the general climate of the time, the way that all of this was reported.
It was reported in a very serious, I was surprised, in a very serious, very credible, and very down-to-earth way.
I don't think we would manage that degree of credibility today, but hearing these voices from more than 50 years ago really brought it home to me.
The first recording we're going to hear from this collection of recordings is one that is, although it's bad quality, it's very hard to hear.
As an historical document, it is vital and it's amazing to have it because you and I have talked many times about how Charlie Hickson, the older man, and Calvin Parker, the younger man, went fishing in this place in Mississippi and found themselves floated onto a spacecraft meeting these strange beings, being probed and pushed about up there and then being returned, somehow to live the rest of their lives with a remarkable tale.
They ended up at the sheriff's office.
They were put together and they were recorded, unbeknownst to them.
They were recorded talking themselves with nobody else in the room.
Now, as we said last week, that would have been a time when those, you know, a lot of people would have said, well, we really fooled them, didn't we?
Hey, and they'd have relaxed their guard and talked about their real agenda.
In other words, If they were trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, that's when they would have said it, but they didn't.
And they didn't know that they were being secretly recording.
Recorded.
So let's hear right now the first of these recordings.
We won't hear very much of it because it isn't very clear.
But as I say, as a document of record, as a piece of sound, it is amazing.
This is that recording.
Now, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to be able to hear the exact words that are being said.
Using forensic audio techniques that I don't have, you could probably lift those voices up and make them more audible.
But this is a remarkable find, Philip, isn't it?
Well, you know, we knew about the so-called secret tape, and when you listen to it with your headphones on in a quiet room, you can follow it.
And Calvin is literally crawling up the walls.
You know, I've got to get home.
I've got to get me a doctor.
I've got to get some pills, you know.
And Charlie's saying, all right, son, you know, he's trying to placate him and he's trying to look after him.
And that was the one thing that persuaded the deputies and the sheriff that these two gentlemen were legit.
You know, they weren't up to some kind of stunt.
Because up until then, you know, they'd made full, you know, they joked with them.
And then said, if you're up to something, you're going to spend a long time in jail, you guys.
But after hearing the secret tape, that was it.
You know, the sheriff and his deputies knew that, in fact, they went on the record both at the time and later in newspaper articles and said, if these two guys were play acting, you need to take them to Hollywood.
They're that good an actor, you know?
And of course they weren't.
And it is, you know, a unique look back into the history of it and what was that exactly what was happening at the time, Howard.
This was in hours of the event happening.
I was shocked and moved by it.
Moved in every sense of that word.
Let's hear the sheriff here speaking himself.
This is Fred Diamond.
He said they didn't feel any sensation about him whatsoever, said they never harmed them, said they never felt anything other than they were just plump weightless.
So they drifted right back into the spaceship of the craft.
And that's when the young boy, Calvin, that's when he passed completely out.
And of course, the older man, he said it seemed like everything was in a state.
He said it looked kind of like ghost lights.
He said the inside of the craft was about eight foot inside of it.
He said he couldn't tell whether there was any lights in it or not.
He said to him it looked like it was, well, it was pretty bright in there, but he couldn't see any lights off the instance.
This to the older gentleman, Mr. Charles Tixon.
Now, he was the one that didn't pass out completely.
Tixon also stated that they laid him down.
Well, first he said it wasn't any chairs or anything in there.
Said it was just a blank room.
Said it was light in there, but he couldn't see any lights in the ceiling or in the walls.
He couldn't see any kind of instruments.
He also said they had some kind of a light gray skin.
Sheriff Fred Diamond talking very close to the event itself.
And you can read about this until you are blue or green in the face.
But when you actually hear that man's voice, you can hear the impact, the sincerity, the fact that he's taking this thing seriously and something has happened to make him take this seriously.
And you know what, Philip?
The thing that strikes me more than anything else from that and all of the things we're about to hear, and I wasn't aware of this.
I thought this was mostly about Calvin Parker because Charlie Hickson left us a long time ago and I didn't know that much about him.
Charlie Hickson seems to be the most, because he was the older man here, seems to be the most powerful of the two characters.
Absolutely.
I mean, Charlie fought in Korea, Howard.
You know, he's in the U.S. military, was under fire, was in some rather, you know, big battles in Korea.
And he used his wartime experiences to help him through this.
And he gives an example.
He said, he thought they were going to kill him on this UFO.
He thought I was going to die.
And he remembered the same feeling being under fire in Korea.
And he said, my captain said to me, stay calm, stay cool, guys.
We'll find a way out of this.
So he used that.
Whereas Calvin was only 18, I don't think he'd hardly been out of Mississippi, let alone done anything else.
So he didn't have those life experiences to fall back on.
And, you know, and the sheriff became one of their biggest supporters in the end.
And not only that, it's not in these recordings, but the sheriff had his own UFO sighting two days later.
So, you know, the sheriff didn't need any more convincing than that, Howard.
You know, he knew these gentlemen were not play acting.
He'd no idea what happened to them, of course.
But yes, you know, Charlie was the main one at the time.
It's only in the latter years when Calvin stepped forward and Charlie had gone that the roles were kind of reversed.
And as Fred Diamond said, Calvin Parker passed out, which at 18 I'd have done.
But Charlie Hickson was the one who was conscious and experiencing the entire thing.
Well, the thing is, Calvin didn't pass out.
Calvin didn't want to talk about this to anyone, period.
And it was only in agreement with Charlie.
He said, the only way I'll talk about it is if you say, I'll tell him I passed out and I didn't go into the thing.
I saw it land and I saw the creatures come out.
Otherwise, I'm not going to talk to anybody.
And what Charlie did, he was using that to protect his young friend.
He could see how disturbed and traumatized he was, You know, and so they agreed to that.
And it wasn't until later years, of course, that Calvin did say, he told Dr. Hynek when he was there that, you know, he told him everything.
He didn't, you know, there's no passing out with him because he trusted Hynek because he said he talked to me just like your father would.
You know, and he'd sat there with his beard and his pipe.
So he trusted him instantly.
So he told him.
And of course, you know, James Harder, he was down there.
And I think the next clip we'll hear later on is Dr. Harder at a press conference.
Have you got a short clip of the hypnosis?
I have.
But what I've got here at this point, because I just want to contextualize it, that's a great word to use for these things.
But I want to contextualize it just to give my listener, our listener tonight, an idea of how the media was treating this.
So if you were to tune into the radio, the television, today, what kind of coverage would you get?
Well, I'm not sure that it would be as serious and punch in the solar plexus as this radio report.
Authorities say a Jackson County man who claimed he was taken aboard a spacecraft early this month was telling the truth as to what he believes happened.
Jackson County Sheriff Fred Diamond gives us this statement of the polygraph operator after the test.
Attorney-in-law in Pascoe, Louisville, and the Jackson County Sheriff's Department did on October 30, 1973 conduct a polygraph examination on Charles Hicks regarding the truthfulness of his statement that he saw a spaceship, three space creatures, and was taken to this spaceship on October 11, 1973.
It is my opinion that Charles Hicks told the truth when he stated, number one, that he believed he saw a spaceship, number two, that he believed he was taken to this spaceship, and number three, that he believed he saw three space creatures.
Witnessed by Secretary of State, this is the 30th day of October 1973, signed by Scott Glass Crow, witnessed by Marvin L. Leonard, assistant manager of Pelton Detective Agency.
That was Jackson County Sheriff Brad Diamond.
I'm Lamb Scarson for the Kevin Boyle report in Miloxy, Mississippi.
51 years ago, Philip, just imagine hearing that on the radio now.
Well, it's amazing.
I mean, I mean, you know, they both said Charlie and Calvin will take a lie detector test now, you know, a polygraph.
And so it took a couple of weeks to organize it because the two local polygraph operators, one wouldn't have anything to do with it because of the UFO connection.
The other one refused it because they said we only conduct polygraph exams on people who've been charged with an offence.
Well, Charlie and Calvey hadn't.
And it just turned out that through a friend of a friend, they knew a company in New Orleans, a gentleman by the name of Scott Glasgow was sent.
He did it free of charge.
And, you know, and there's the result of it.
You know, Calvin didn't take the polygraph test at the time because he was in hospital because they left it a few weeks.
Calvin had gone back home and he was hospitalised.
But Charlie took it and no problem at all.
What is amazing, right at the end there, they tell you the company, the Pendleton Detective Agency.
I mean, what a great name.
So perfect name.
Well, when I started looking into this, Howard, that company was still in business.
And I contacted them.
And the man that ran it was the guy that ran it back in 1973.
He was still there.
And we corresponded right up until the pandemic.
And I have all his correspondence.
And that's all coming up in a new book I'm writing for next year.
And he said, he told us everything, you know, and even we've told him off a few times because he was such a nasty guy, but even arch debunker, Philip Klass, who's an aerospace journalist back in the 1973, he actually interviewed the polygraph examiner, Scott Glasgow.
And I've just got that interview.
So, and it's all transcribed.
So it saves me a lot of work.
But he passed, you know, and it's one of those things in it, Howard.
If you pass the polygraph test, people say, well, it's not real.
You can't use it in court.
However, if you fail it in the court of public opinion, everybody calls you a damn liar.
But Charles Hicton passed it with flying colours.
And that tells us a lot.
But what tells us more than anything else, and we have to take some commercials now, but I'm just going to say this.
What tells us more than anything else is the tone of these recordings, the tenor of the reporting, the tenor of the people involved, the way that they comport themselves.
You can see that this is being treated as something that is serious, as something that really happened to these two people.
We don't understand what it is, but we're giving it the time of day, and we're trying to get our heads around it.
Fascinating recordings.
You're hearing them for the first time exclusively tonight.
Philip Mantle is with us from Flying Disc Press.
He's the man behind all of this research.
And as Philip told us, there is more coming out.
Let's get to this now.
We talked about the hypnotic regression session with Dr. James Harder.
Let's hear a short recording of this.
I just float.
It's floating.
It's floating in the ocean.
Oh, okay.
Out of the ocean.
Yes, sir.
You feel yourself floating out of the ocean?
No, I'm going to ask you.
What's your question then?
so So, Philip, the only words that I can make out of that particular segment, and there's quite a bit of it, was the discussion about floating.
And that is absolutely crucial and key to this because that is how it all started.
They were floated onto a ship.
Yeah, and he talks about seeing the creatures, and two of them got hold of Charlie, one got hold of him, and he talks about being scared, you know.
And James Harder asks Calvin at one point, what did these creatures look like?
And Calvin says, they look like a ghost.
And when you hear it, you know, when you've got the headphones up high and I'm listening to it, it sends a shiver down your spine, Howard, you know, because of this, there's this young, hard-working man, you know, under hypnosis.
What is also fascinating that's not on the tape, of course, is I have a letter from Dr. Harder to a magazine he was writing for, and he states in this letter that Parker and Hickson, whilst under hypnosis, did not tell them anything that they didn't already know.
So they'd related the account to them, you know, fully conscious, that they'd both been put under hypnosis and told the same story.
So the hypnosis, you know, didn't cause them to fantasize or add things or delete things.
You know what I mean?
So they were just telling the same story as they would sat in a chair talking to you.
How many of these consistency is absolutely crucial and vital and very, very important to this?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's one of the, again, that's one of the reasons why Harder was sent there because of his he could conduct the hypnosis.
Do you get the impression, do you know whether the authorities in Washington, and I'm talking about the same sorts of people now who we're trying to prize disclosure out of and having varying degrees of success, mostly a stalled process at the moment, but were those sorts of people involved in this at the time?
Not that we can find out, Howard.
I mean, the sheriff phoned here, there and everywhere to get, you know, federal assistance.
I mean, the town wasn't besieged, but he had something like 2,000 telephone calls, not all reporting UFOs.
You know, they just couldn't handle it.
So they wanted, you know, federal assistance, which they never got.
What we did find in some papers that were donated to us that used to belong to the late Charles Hickson, they were found in his house when he passed away.
There's a letter in there from a NASA physicist.
And he's saying, Charlie, I asked NASA to investigate this when it happened.
And they declined.
They were just not interested.
And he went to his boss.
He was a NASA physicist.
And he said, why don't we do this?
No, not interested.
So I've put, well, I hope they're a bit more interested this time around because they're supposed to be doing their own research now.
So it will be interesting to see.
As we'll hear a little bit later when we hear that clip from the Dick Cavot talk show, for a while, these two guys became almost celebrities.
But I want to just go back to the hypnotic regression with Dr. James Harder because he held a news conference for the eagerly anticipating press.
Here's a little bit of that.
I believe everyone who talked to those two men are convinced that they had a real experience, that it was not a hallucination, nor were they drunk.
And that as bizarre and as impossible as the story seemed to be, that it has to be believed.
That particularly I had both of the men under hypnosis.
And of course, hypnosis is no royal road to the truth because a person can indeed continue telling a lie under hypnosis if he's determined to.
But it's almost impossible for them to have faked the intense emotional and terror-like involvement they had under hypnosis as they are regressed back through the experience.
Well, they seem to have been, well, I don't say seem, they definitely were abducted by three things they described as objects that floated out of a larger object.
Now, the three things they termed objects, other people call them spacemen.
I think there's some question about whether they actually were sentient beings.
They may have been robots, but they had appendages that had pincers at the end of them in which they used to grasp the two men by the shoulder and floated them, as the two men described it, back on board this spacecraft.
Dr. Heinik has described it as a UFO report, as an incredible tale told by a credible witness.
Did they have any idea how long they were aboard the craft and when, in terms of time when they were reading the space?
They didn't have a very good idea, but it wasn't hours.
It was not a very long period of time, but they couldn't say if it was 5, 10, or 20, 30 minutes, something on that order.
Now, here in the UK at the moment, our news is made up largely of Sakia Starmer, Rishi Sunak, 30 P. Lee.
1973, that happened.
And this recording you are hearing for the first time in many, many years tonight on this show.
And Philip, I just think that that is spectacular.
Absolutely.
I mean, it paints a picture, does it not, Howard?
I mean, you can imagine being sat in that press conference yourself, taking your notes as a journalist and thinking, oh, my God, you know, what a story.
And the one thing that everybody emphasized who came into contact with Charlie and Calvin is how traumatized they were.
And you have Dr. Harder there saying, yeah, you can tell a lie under hypnosis, but there is no way they can fake, you know, this trauma that they've gone through, how scared they are.
You know, it's, and, and that was everybody.
That was all the skeptical police officers, the deputies, you name it.
Once they met Charlie and Calvin and saw how shook up they were, they said, something's happened to these two gentlemen, period.
They didn't necessarily believe it was a, you know, a spaceship, but something had definitely happened to them without a shadow of a doubt.
And I think Dr. Harler really summed it up pretty well there, really, really did.
Did they get any psychological aftercare?
No, not a thing.
Calvin didn't live in that area.
He'd gone there to work and planned to go home on a weekend.
So he lived about 150 plus miles away at a place near Laurel in Mississippi.
So after a few days, he was gone.
He went back home because he didn't want to speak to the media and he wanted to keep his head down.
He was about to get married, Howard, you know, in a few weeks.
And his bride, he was 18, his bride was 16.
So they needed parental consent.
And he thought, if my future father-in-law gets to know this story, there's no way on earth he's going to let me marry his daughter, and you can kind of understand his reasoning there, you know.
And he went back home and he told me the story several times.
He said he was with his younger brother, Ricky, one night, and he just started shaking and he could not stop.
And in the end, his brother drove him to the hospital and they were waiting in the emergency room for quite some time.
And Calvin was getting a bit worked up.
So he said to his brother, Ricky, I've got a Coke in the car outside.
Will you go and get me, please?
Well, that was a ruse.
So Ricky goes out.
Calvin then picked up a chair and smashed it against the wall to get attention and get some medical attention.
And of course, this coincided, this was around about the end of the month.
This coincided with the polygraph test.
So he wasn't available for that.
And then on the 2nd of November, so we're talking, you know, just maybe three weeks later, Howard, they were both invited to go on what was, I think, the biggest talk show in the US at the time, the Dick Cavot Show.
And when you look on the website for the Dick Cavot Show, it did announce that both men would be on it.
Don't mention them by name, but it says the two men.
And of course, it ended up with just Charlie Hickson going on.
But it showed you what an impact it made.
You know, it really did.
And, you know, Calvin used to get fed up with Charlie speaking about it.
If you saw him on the TV, curse, you know, wish he'd stop talking about it.
But he was very, very good.
This is another thing that hit me squarely in the solar plexus.
How good Charlie Hickson was at handling the media.
He didn't really have to try.
So let's set the scene here.
We're going to hear a couple of minutes of the Dick Cavett show.
Now, this was some audio that was missing, now found, and that's part of this collection, this cache of recordings.
Dick Cavett, if you're not aware of him, was very much in the realm of people like Johnny Carson, David Letterman in later years, and those people who do talk shows right now, Jimmy Kimmel and all of those people.
I'm talking about the size of the profile, not the style of the show.
I liked Dick Cavett.
I thought Dick Cavett had a great style, very understated, witty, not belly laughs, but wit this man had, and great questioning, fantastic.
So if you ever get to see, maybe on YouTube, any of the Dick Cavot shows, check out his interviews with the famous people of the time, like John and Yoko.
He had them on.
Many, many movie stars, the whole pantheon of Hollywood legends he had on the show.
All kinds of people went on the Dick Cavot show because they liked him.
He was sympathetic as an interviewer, but got material out of people that I don't think other talk shows got.
So we said that Calvin Parker wasn't there.
Just very quickly, Philip, why wasn't Calvin Parker there?
He was still being hospitalized.
He was in hospital for a couple of days and just couldn't make it.
So, you know, Charlie being Charlie said, no problem.
You know, Charlie was very easygoing in that respect, Howard.
No problem.
I just go on and tell them the truth.
That's all he needs to do.
That's exactly and precisely what he did.
Have a listen to this.
They just seemed to float, you know.
They didn't ever touch the ground.
They seemed to just float over who we were.
Did they resemble human forms?
It resemble human forms in one sensible way, other than, you know, the hands or the feet and the head.
But the body resembled a human being.
Did they touch you?
Yes.
In fact, two of them took hold of me, one over each arm, one here.
And I seemed to just slip up to about the height that they were off the ground.
And we seemed to pull to the ship, to the opening in the ship.
You all, as a group, seemed to float up into the field.
What did it feel like when they touched him?
When they touched me, I didn't have any feelings.
There wasn't any feelings at all.
Not pot or cold or no feelings at all.
And you were then taken inside.
Did you say anything to each other at this time?
Did you and your friend, what were you talking about?
And at the time they took hold of me, I saw the third one take hold of him, and he seemed to go help.
He fainted, but I mean, believe me, afterward, I did find out he painted.
It's now some kind of change on my life.
You know, I'd never get it off my mind.
It'd be there with me always.
A voice that will echo down the decades to us, Philip.
That is Charlie Hickson himself.
I'd never heard him.
Well, I heard a little bit of that disc, that 45 RPM disc.
But to hear him sitting where Richard Burton had sat and John Lennon, Yoko Ono had sat, all of the Hollywood stars, sounding so credible, so powerful is the word that they would use today in media circles, is just a remarkable thing.
What a find that recording is.
Does the video exist or is it only sound?
We've not found the video yet.
All of the Dick Cava archive is now with the Library of Congress.
They've obtained it.
And as we know in those days, Howard, they used to re-tape over things.
You know, that was just one of the things they did.
And so some of them are online, but we haven't been able to find that one yet.
I have a very poor still photograph of Charlie and Dick Cavett sat there in full glorious colour.
I've had it digitized to black and white to make it look better.
But what the Dick Cavett show did, they had an artist work with Charlie to do some drawings of what they saw, and they were used on the show.
And I've got some very, I would say, poor, poorish copies of those.
Looks like somebody's taking a photograph of the TV screen, you know, and you get the bands across it.
But you can make out clearly what's on them.
And of course, on that show with Charlie was Dr. Alan Hynek and Carl Sagan.
So that's not a bad couple of companions to have sat next to you, is it not, you know?
And it didn't taste Charlie at all.
Exactly.
That's what I was going to say.
He did not waver by a quaver.
There he was under the bright lights, being seen by all of America, with people who were luminaries in their field sitting adjacent to him, with the best-known or one of the best-known talk show hosts in the world asking him great questions.
And he was absolutely fine.
I think that is a real find for me as a media person, you know, and a fan of Dick Cavett.
I think that's absolutely spellbinding.
And you have the whole recording.
So just at the end of this, Philip, what is going to happen to all of this material?
What are you going to do?
Well, at some point, I'm going to try and get it digitized so it's clear enough that we can hear it.
If there's anybody out there who specializes in this, love to hear from you.
I don't have any money, so don't think I have, you know.
I think I probably got even less than you got.
So look, what we'll say then tonight, and I was going to do this anyway, but thank you for preempting it because it needs to be done.
If you are connected with the recording industry, right, and I'm talking about people who use high-level digital sound processing, not just stuff that you have at home, because I've, you know, I've got some cheap software here and, you know, Philip has got that kind of, I'm talking about the real stuff, the kind of stuff they use to salvage old wax discs and stuff like that.
You know, the kind of thing that universities, big recording studios like Abbey Road, the BBC might have, whatever.
If you are custodian of that kind of equipment and you might be willing to give a little bit of your time to help to clarify some of these recordings that were not as clear as the ones you've heard tonight, then you can always email Philip Mantle at Flying Disc Press or you can contact me through my website, theunexplained.tv.
How's that, Philip?
It's great.
And I mean, I'm transcribing them.
I will publish them all in transcript format, Howard, you know, and I make all that available.
One little thing as well, David Marla came back to me shortly afterwards, a couple of weeks later, and he said, Philip, we've had another donation of a tape.
It's got all kinds of stuff on it.
It's an old reel-to-reel thing.
But on it is a recording with Charlie and Calvin in 1976.
Now, this is as clear as a bell, is this tape recording, Howard?
But they are being recorded for another type of test, and it was called a psychological stress evaluation test.
So in other words, you could take somebody's voice and allegedly tell whether they were telling the truth or not.
And, you know, so that is something I've been looking in and I've found all kinds of things, you know.
So that was, again, it's like the polygraph.
It's not admissible in court, but if you fail it, you're a liar, you know.
But it's fascinating.
I did not know it existed.
You know, this again came out of the blue.
And it's, you know, you just, it's another avenue to go down and see where it leads.
And all this will be made available, Howard.
I'll write it all up.
You know, I won't hide anything.
And people can make out of it what they will.
They really can.
Philip, thank you so much for allowing me to be the first in the world to put this material together and broadcast it.
There is much more and there is still work to be done on it.
But I'm very grateful to you.
I think it's something important.
And what it does is it makes the stories that we've heard and read, you know, the definitive book about Pascagoula, well, you put that out at the end of last year.
It is very much still available.
And it is, for me, the definitive book on the entire thing.
It's at Flying Disc Press.
I'll do the publicity for you before you do it.
But to hear the people of the time, to hear the tenor of the coverage, the tone of the voices, tells us something that no words on paper, I don't think, but I'm an electronic media guy and I would say that, no words on paper could ever do.
It's a little time capsule, Howard, and I'm very, very pleased to have shared it with you this evening.
And thank you very much.
Amazing material.
And as Philip and I both said, if you're involved in the recording industry or you have the very specialist software that can forensically go into recordings that are sub-par and dig out the best of them, please make contact with me through my website and I will make contact with Philip at Flying Disc Press.
Thank you very much for being part of this show.
Please keep your emails coming.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the Unexplained Online.
So until we meet again, 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.
