A new witness to a bizarre ‘alien abduction’ in 1973 that is at the center of a new Netflix show has spoken out for the first time.
During a video interview, She recalled seeing five-foot tall aliens emerge from an oval-shaped UFO with flashing blue lights over over the Pascagoula River, scoop up the fisherman and carry them off into the night sky.
When the craft returned, she claimed the beings each man by the arm who were slumped over and unconscious.
Maria Blair has kept what she saw that October a secret for decades due to fears she would be ridiculed – but gave a video testimony in 2023 that has been shared with DailyMail.com.
While the case is decades old, it has been brought back to life in Netflix‘s top-ranking new docu-series ‘Files Of The Unexplained,’ sparking new interest into what may have happened on that night in the Mississippi marsh.
Mississippi resident Maria Blair claimed she saw a UFO on the night of October 11 and witnessed the beings load and unload to the two men onto the craft, she said in an October 2023 interview shared with DailyMail.com
Two Mississippi fishermen, Charles Hickson (left, above) and Calvin Parker (right), told local sheriffs, reporters, and even the US Air Force, that they witnessed an oval-shaped craft hovering over the Pascagoula River on the night of October 11th, 1973
As UFO’s blue lights flashed and it descended closer to the marshland below, three, five-foot grey ‘wrinkled-skin creatures’ with ‘pincer-like’ claws (illustrated above) seized the two men — subjecting to them to examination, according to Parker, ‘just like any doctor would’
The first episode of the Netflix series focuses on the experiences of Calvin Parker when he was aged 19, after he maintained that he fought off an ‘alien’ by ‘[getting] her round her skinny-a** neck’.
Blair is just now coming forward to tell her part of the story.
‘They left twice, when they brought Calvin and Charlie [Hickson] back,’ she said, ‘when they brought them back from the spaceship.’
‘That’s when they got back in the craft,’ Blair said, ‘and it took off — straight up.’
Parker and Charles Hickson made international news following their claims.
As Hickson described the the scene to police in a 1973 video, the UFO flashed its blue lights as it descended into the marsh, revealing three, five-foot gray, ‘wrinkled-skin’ creatures with ‘pincer’-like claws who seized the two men.
Parker then chimed in, saying a large floating eye scanned their frozen bodies for about 30 minutes: ‘They gave a thorough, I mean a thorough, examination to me just like any doctor would.’
Blair, who has only spoken about her experience on October 11, explained in her interview that she and her now deceased husband, Jerry, saw the entire thing unfold over the marsh.
Maria Blair and her husband Jerry Blair (above) were newlyweds in 1973. They had only been married for about a year when they say they witnessed the Pascagoula ‘alien’ abduction from a distance across the river
Blair, who witnessed the events from about 350 to 400 feet away on the opposing side of the Pascagoula River, said that the younger man, Calvin Parker, appeared to be more afraid in the moment. Decades later, Parker and Blair got to meet in person (above)
‘I’m watching from my car, and I’m seeing the lights, the blue lights flashing,’ said Blair, who was then waiting with her husband for a boat set to take him to an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico.
‘That’s when Calvin [Parker] said he’d seen the blue lights.’
Blair estimated she saw the UFO’s flashing blue lights for about 35 to 40 minutes in total that night – the same testimony given to police by Parker and Hickson.
‘You’re surprised when you look in the sky and you see a blue light. It really calls your attention to it,’ Hickson told Jackson County Sheriff’s in a taped interview the night of the incident.
‘It come right down above the bayou,’ He said, ‘two-three feet above the ground.’
Philip Mantle, along with St. Bonaventure University assistant professor and biologist Irena Scott, spent roughly five years delving back into the ‘Pascagoula Alien Abduction’ case for their book, ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt’ (pictured) in 2023
Blair too witnessed that key moment, she said: ‘The door opened […] bright white light come through, very bright […] and I’m seeing the three ‘UFO guys’ come out, ‘aliens’ or whatever they are.’
UFO researchers Philip Mantle and Dr Irene Scott interviewed Blair on two separate occasions, first in 2019 and again four years later – saying she has stuck to her story.
But the Mississippi woman has not shared details with the sheriff department or US military that spoke with the two men decades ago.
Parker and Hickson’s story also made international news and both men were featured on TV several times, so it is not clear if Blair may have taken some of the fishermen’s details during her recent interviews.
‘We were sitting at the dock waiting to go out,’ Blair told Mantle. ‘She [Maria] said, ‘Did you see that?’ I said, ‘I did hear a big splash.” I thought it was a blimp or something,’ he continued, ‘but she said it was something else.’
Dr. Scott, a professor at St. Bonaventure University in Ohio, learned that Blair observed the UFO ‘going back and forth across the sky’ in a way not possible of an airplane.’
‘I told my husband, there’s something wrong with that plane,’ she continued, ‘it’s like he doesn’t know where he wants to go.’
Blair claimed she had an up-close encounter with one of the beings: ‘Something come up out of the water and it was like a person, and I told [Jerry], ‘There’s somebody out there.”
She was very sure it was not a fish.
Mantle, who published a new book with Dr. Scott on the case last September, ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt,’ said that he first located the couple via an anonymous comment made by their youngest daughter on a YouTube video.
The Blairs had not sought out fame, money or journalistic attention, said UFO researchers Philip Mantle, who supplied the new on-camera interview to DailyMail.com,
‘They didn’t step forward, as some people suggest,’ Mantle told DailyMail.com.
In 2018, a local Fox affiliate had interviewed Calvin Parker about his alleged abduction by the three bizarre creatures with their ‘robotic slit-mouths’ and ‘crab-like pincers,’ and the clip reminded Tracee Blair of her parents’ story. Above, Hickson on another local news segment
Files Of The Unexplained explores, in the words of the docu-series’ creators, ‘eight haunting encounters that may make you start second-guessing everything you have ever known’
‘It was just this stray comment on YouTube from their youngest daughter, Tracee.’
The Blair’s eldest daughter, Angela Maria, also shared her own memories of the shocking story to Mantle, emphasizing that the tale remained a tightly held bit of family lore for decades.
‘My mother has always wondered what happened to those two guys and if they were still in the area,’ she wrote to Mantle.
‘She’s only told my grandparents (who have passed), myself, my sister, and my ex-father-in-law this story, because she was always scared they’d [i.e. the pincer-clawed ‘alien’ beings] come back for her.’
The Jackson County Sheriff’s department and former US Air Force UFO investigator, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, also investigated the abduction case in the mid-1970s.
After interviewing Hickson and Park separately, the sheriffs then strategically left the two together alone in an interrogation room where they were secretly taped – hoping that the two fishermen would privately try to ‘get their story straight.’
Instead, the two men could be heard on the secret police tape too busy coping and processing their sheer terror.
‘I got to get home and get to bed or get some nerve pills or see the doctor or something,’ Parker can be heard saying on the tape. ‘I can’t stand it. I’m about to go half crazy.’
‘I know,’ Hickson replied as they tried to settle down. ‘You can’t believe it. You can’t make people believe it.’
Both men later passed polygraph exams.
‘We did everything we knew to try to break their stories,’ as Jackson County Sheriff’s Capt. Glenn Ryder told the Washington Post in 1975.
‘If they were lying to me, they should be in Hollywood.’
Calvin Parker had only been 18 or 19 at the time of the alleged abduction at the hands of the three wrinkled, grey beings.
Hickson was then 42; he passed away on September 9th, 2011 at age 80.
Parker passed away last year, August 24, 2023, but not before re-telling his story one last time to the filmmakers behind Netflix’s ‘Files Of The Unexplained.’
‘He was ill at that point,’ Mantle told DailyMail.com via phone. ‘They were very compassionate and knew of his illness by the time they went to interview him.’
‘It wasn’t a ‘mickey take’ or anything like that,’ he said, ‘although there are a few funny parts, because that’s the way it is with stories like this.’
