Quite naturally, the October 11, 1973, alien abduction case featuring Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson in Pascagoula, Mississippi, took the headlines in the media at home and abroad. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that UFO sightings continued, not just in Mississippi, but across the USA. However, UFO sightings were still coming in from Mississippi, and another peculiar sighting came just ten days after the Hickson/Parker encounter.
There was a discussion on social media about the Pascagoula case when a gentleman by the name of Kevin Garrett joined the discussion with the following account.
The following is my retyped copy of a letter from my grandfather to my aunt, describing events in Monticello, MS (about two hours north of the Mississippi Gulf Coast), just a few days following the incident in Pascagoula. I remember it happening, but honestly do not remember any details, except the globs themselves.
Sunday, 6:10 P.M., October 21st, 1973:
Dear Yvonne & Family:
We received your letter this morning and read it before going to Church. A.D. will write you telling that we are glad that you have bought a new vehicle. Also, to tell you of other happenings around here that may interest you.
The purpose of this letter from me is to tell you of our experience last Thursday afternoon. I was in the yard painting a record cabinet I have made for A.D. and A.D. was in the house resting. Martha came over to tell us what she had just heard over the radio. She heard the announcer state that spider-web-like material was falling from the sky in North Mississippi and that globs had fallen in a woman’s yard, and that her dog was lapping it. Martha was anxious for us to hear the next newscast, so at 4:00 P.M., she brought her small radio over, and we sat in the yard to listen to the news.
Sure enough, the first thing mentioned was that the spidery-webbed substance was then falling over Jackson. After listening for the 15-minute newscast to the end, I said, well, if spider webs had gotten to Jackson from North Miss., in that short period of time, we should be able to see some down this far. It was then about 4:25 P.M. and I was anxious to finish my painting, which I did. When Martha went home, she was looking up into the sky and, inasmuch as her TV antenna was almost in front of her, she noticed a silky like thread or web-like stringy something hanging from it. She called us, and we all went over to look.
There was another long strand hanging over a tree nearby, and while we were looking at this, someone said, “Look!, what’s that coming over.” From the North or slightly NE, we saw globs of whitish-silvery looking, odd, shaped UFOs coming over. At first sighting one, you would think it was a white bird, then it would reflect its true shape as it passed over. Not knowing the height from the ground, we cannot guess how large any of them were. They were not all the same size or shape. One appeared to be about the size of two 500-gallon butane tanks welded together lengthwise. Both ends were dome-shaped, and our guess was that it would have to be at least six to eight feet in diameter. It had no wings and it made no noise. It did not tumble over and over but kept a straight line, lengthwise. Ahead of it was a smaller blob like the others we saw. The smaller ball or glob was leading the bigger, cigar-like shaped thing, and we could see stringy-like silvery ribbon strands connecting the smaller to the large thing trailing. All were traveling at a tremendous speed, and we couldn’t figure out how they traveled so fast, especially since the wind was from the NW and they were coming from the NE. It could be that they were in a jet stream, but how did it get that height and what was propelling them unless they were in the jet stream? All were traveling very fast, and unless you spotted one in time, it was almost impossible for one who saw it to point it out to you. I would say that from the time one was spotted until you could see it no more toward the SW, would be about 30 seconds.
The birds and butterflies were disturbed. Some butterflies looked to be as big as a bat, and they were reddish-rust in color. They were not as high as those objects we saw but were traveling in the same direction. I have never seen butterflies, if they were; fly as high as these were flying. Blackbirds were flying over from the NW, going toward the river, and they acted funny. Two out of three out of a flock of ten to twenty would turn around, fly in the opposite direction, then turn and try to catch up. I believe that perhaps they had run into some of that spider-web-like stuff.
Well, I see that I had my carbon backward, so I can’t write on the reverse of the first page. Martha would not let Rusty touch the web-like material as she wanted Tom to see it when he came home. He did. Also, after getting his glasses, he finally begins to see those white objects coming over. He said he had never seen anything like it. About that time, we spotted two globs coming over. They were bigger than all the others except that cigar-shaped thing and they were going at a faster rate of speed than the others and seemed to be lower. One glob would get ahead of the other, then they would change and the other overtake the first one. They seemed to have a cord or something connecting them together and they were oddly shaped and would change shape as they traveled. These were also going toward the SW, and it appeared that the wind was tossing them about. Again, the wind was from the NW as a thin layer of cloud cover came over from that direction. So, the way I figure it, the wind we ordinarily know as wind, was coming from the NW and these things were traveling toward the SW. This, then, would not indicate that they were traveling against or opposite to the wind, but more or less across or more like an X, not exactly + to the other.
They have said very little about this except to state that they were taking samples to Hattiesburg for analysis. I heard one follow-up say that it turned out to be spider webs. We have not heard the report from Hattiesburg.
The only other report of sightings of this matter around here was by a class of children at Silver Creek who happened to be outside.
I have been a little reluctant to relate what I and we saw to others as I imagine it would be hard to believe. I have related this to you exactly as WE saw it, and you can draw your own conclusion as to what it was. Sometimes, when we are together, AD & I will tell you about the other object we saw about two weeks ago. This was prior to the incident at Pascagoula and AD and I got home in time for Martha and the children to see it. By the way, these blobs we saw, about 18 to 20 of them, lasted for about an hour. I had hoped they would keep over until sundown, but we did not see any more. Hope you appreciate this explanation and please excuse the errors. No, I am not excited, just rusty with my typing.
Love,
George Bowskey Russell was Kevin Garrett’s grandfather, the author of the letter, and A.D. (Alonzo Dulaney) was his grandmother A.D, Russell.
I, of course, am Kevin; Rusty is my brother; Tom was my father; Martha was my mother; Yvonne was my mother’s sister who lived near Fort Worth, TX, and to whom the letter was addressed. George Bowskey and Alonzo Dulaney were my maternal grandparents and we lived next door to them. The copy is from page two of a Xerox (when was last time you heard that term?) of the letter written by my grandfather to my aunt.
Kevin added on June 12th, 2023, via email: “The only thing I remember was seeing the globs getting caught in the limbs of the large pecan tree in the area between our houses. To me, they seemed a bit stringy. One would certainly assume some made it to the ground, but I don’t remember that. While I definitely remember the incident, I don’t remember many details. For example, I don’t remember the large silver things in the sky.”
Kevin Garrett informed us that he had recently moved house so it was difficult to locate the actual type-written letter in question. He did, however, have one page that he had previously digitized. The above account and the copy of the letter are reproduced with the permission of Kevin Garrett. Mr Garrett also supplied us with a photo of his grandparents.
This is yet another peculiar UFO sighting coming from Mississippi in what was a flap of sightings in 1973. The Parker/Hickson abduction account was the most outstanding of cases reported during this flap. It makes you wonder how many more sightings were made but never reported.
About the author: Philip Mantle is a long-standing UFO researcher and author from the UK. He was formerly the Director of Investigations for the British UFO Research Association and the MUFON Representative for England. He is the founder of FLYING DISK PRESS and can be contacted by email at: [email protected].
Our new book ‘BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT – The Pascagoula Alien Abduction’. Out September 1, 2023, on Amazon.
