QUIRKY WORLD ... A daily look at some of the world’s stranger stories
Now, the sole survivor of the case is still grappling with an encounter that turned his life upside down. Calvin Parker Jr said he harboured doubts about his encounter with what he said were grey, wrinkly-skinned and crab-clawed creatures.
He has spent decades moving around and changing jobs to avoid the unwanted attention. He was 18 when, on Oct 11, 1973, he went fishing with his friend, the late Charles Hickson, along the banks of the Pascagoula river in coastal Mississippi.
The two said a UFO with blue lights swooped down, making a zipping noise.
Mr Hickson, then 42, said three creatures took them by the forearms and levitated them aboard the craft. Then, something that looked like a large floating eye appeared to examine him.
“They gave a thorough, I mean a thorough, examination to me just like any doctor would,” he said, adding that he was conscious, but paralysed.
And then the two were back on the banks on the river and the UFO was gone.
The case sparked hundreds of reports of sightings, jokes and hoaxes — and even some books. Above all, it rekindled interest in a subject that had first begun in the 1940s with an incident in New Mexico in which UFO enthusiasts believe the government got its hands on a crashed spacecraft and alien bodies.
The goal was merely to promote clean energy — but television ads starring a pair of male puppets called “plug” and “socket” have instead unleashed a debate about gay pride.
Puppets, Sheka and Teka have appeared in ads for the state-owned Israel Electric Corporation for over a decade.
Israelis have long playfully questioned whether they might be gay. But the arrival of a baby puppet in the new campaign set off fresh speculation about their sexual orientation.
Gay activists demand the ad characters, who have a close but ambiguous relationship, officially come out of the closet. Some advocates accuse the company of being intentionally ambiguous about their sexuality in a cynical publicity ploy.
“This should weigh on the conscience of everyone who worked on this campaign, who will come home and ask themselves whether they would want to raise a child in a country where the electric company says: ‘Hide, don’t be proud,’” wrote Dvir Bar in nightlife magazine City Mouse.
What’s worse than an airline losing a customer’s dog? Sending an accidental email dismissing the mishap as being no big deal.
Air Canada is working to get the missing pooch crisis under control after its manager of corporate communications, Peter Fitzpatrick, fired off an email that was intended to be internal but actually reached the inbox of Maria Medina, a reporter from CBS-13 in Sacramento.
Upon hearing that the dog had escaped, Medina wrote to the PR firm representing Air Canada, according to the Toronto Star.
The company’s PR contact emailed Fitzpatrick for input on how to respond to Medina’s questions.
Fitzpatrick wrote, “I think I would just ignore, it is local news doing a story on a lost dog. Their entire government is shut down and about to default and this is how the US media spends its time.”
He intended the email to go to the PR contact. Instead it went to the reporter.
The dog, a two-year-old greyhound named Larry, went missing from the San Francisco airport after an Air Canada employee let it out of its cage.
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