Good evening. I'm a researcher calling from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I've spent the last fifteen years documenting UFO encounters across the Gulf Coast region. But there's one case that stands above all the others. One case that I keep coming back to, year after year. And I'm telling you, the evidence in this case is overwhelming. It happened on October 11, 1973, on the banks of the Pascagoula River. Two men, Carl Henderson and Clayton Paulson, experienced something that would change their lives forever. Both of them are gone now. Carl passed away in 2011, and Clayton just died last year after a long battle with cancer. But their story lives on, and I believe every word of it. Let me set the scene for you. It was a Thursday evening, still warm the way October can be down here on the Mississippi coast. Carl was forty-five years old, a foreman at a local shipyard. Clayton was just eighteen, barely a man. It was actually his first day working at that shipyard, a job Carl had helped him get. After their shift ended, they decided to go fishing off a pier on the west bank of the Pascagoula River, near where the shipyard sat. Just a quiet evening, two coworkers unwinding with their fishing lines in the water. Clayton later said he wanted nothing more than a simple life. He wanted to get married, have children, have grandchildren, buy a house, retire, and fish. That's all he ever wanted. Instead, that night gave him a lifetime of nightmares. The fish weren't biting. The sun had gone down, and they were just sitting there in the dark, talking, waiting for something to tug on their lines. Around nine o'clock, they heard it. A whirring sound. Some described it later as a zipping noise. They looked up from their lines and saw two flashing blue lights coming toward them across the water. And then they saw the craft.
The object was oval-shaped, maybe thirty to forty feet across and about eight to ten feet high. It was hovering. Not flying, not falling. Just hovering there, making that strange whirring sound, with those blue lights pulsing. Carl and Clayton were frozen in place, staring at this thing that shouldn't exist. And then it got worse. Much worse. A door or opening appeared on the craft, and three creatures came out. Carl described them as having leathery gray skin, wrinkled like elephant hide. But the most disturbing feature was their hands. They didn't have hands at all. They had pincers, like crabs. No eyes that Carl could see, at least not eyes like ours. He thought they might be robots at first, some kind of machines. Clayton was terrified. Some accounts say he fainted right there on the pier. Others say he was conscious but completely paralyzed, unable to move a single muscle. The creatures floated toward them. Not walked. Floated. They grabbed Carl and Clayton by their forearms with those pincer-like appendages and lifted them right off the ground. Both men said they felt weightless, like they were being levitated. And then they were inside the craft. Carl remained conscious through the whole thing. He described being taken into a brightly lit room where something that looked like a giant floating eye examined him. It moved around his body, scanning him, studying him. He couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't do anything but let it happen.
Clayton's experience was slightly different, though he didn't talk about it publicly for over forty years. He described being taken down a hallway and into a room where one of the creatures placed him on what he called an examination table made entirely of glass. Then the gray, wrinkled creature left the room. Something came out of the ceiling, he said. It was about the size of a deck of cards, square-shaped, and it circled around him making a series of clicking noises. Years later, when Clayton had to get an MRI, he said the clicking sound from that machine reminded him of that night. Same rhythm, same pattern. Then the object shot back up into the ceiling and was gone. After that, a smaller being entered the room. Clayton said this one made him feel more at ease somehow, though he couldn't explain why. Maybe it was its size, maybe something in its movements. But the terror never fully left him. He said he felt like a lab specimen, like they were studying him the way a scientist might study an insect. About thirty minutes passed, though it felt like hours. Then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over. Carl and Clayton found themselves back on the riverbank. The craft was gone. The creatures were gone. They were alone in the dark, trying to process what had just happened to them. Carl needed three shots of whiskey from a bottle in his car just to calm his nerves enough to think straight. They had to decide what to do. Who do you tell? Who would believe them?
[ Story continues in the full game... ]