Around 8 PM, about an hour before Hickson and Parker made their report, a service station operator named Larry Booth called the Jackson County sheriff to say he had seen a strange craft with a blinking colored light pass overhead. Then Hickson and Parker arrived at the sheriff's office with their own account: they claimed to have been taken aboard a UFO and examined by beings before being released. The two men were shaken enough that deputies took them seriously. They were sent to Keesler Air Force Base, where they were cleared of radiation exposure and released. Ufologist James Harder and J. Allen Hynek -- one of the era's most prominent UFO researchers -- traveled to Mississippi to interview the men separately under hypnosis, and both told the press that the accounts were likely based on fact.

The story detonated. By October 17, newspapers were cataloging a wave of UFO sightings across the region. By October 24, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was comparing the case to the famous Betty and Barney Hill encounter. Local reporters noticed the two men had stopped showing up to work, fueling speculation that someone was paying them. On October 31, a polygraph examiner concluded that Hickson had told the truth as to what he believed, though he carefully added: "We do not say a space ship landed or that creatures emerged from it." Parker, through an attorney, declined to take a polygraph; his attorney said he had recently been hospitalized. Hickson appeared on The Dick Cavett Show on November 2, followed by the Mike Douglas Show and the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. By the end of the year, he had become one of the most recognized names in UFO culture.

Fame was not kind. In January 1974, Hickson was arrested for public drunkenness after being found wandering along a highway. He traveled to Detroit to address a UFO group in April. That same month, he told reporters he had experienced three additional encounters with the beings and that they would soon deliver a message he could relay to Washington. He met with Erich von Daniken, the controversial "ancient astronauts" proponent. He appeared on the game show To Tell The Truth. By October 1974, the press labeled him a "UFO celebrity." Jackson County Sheriff's Captain Glen Ryder told The Washington Post in 1975: "We did everything we knew to try to break their stories. If they were lying to me, they should be in Hollywood." Hickson died of a heart attack in September 2011 at the age of 80. Parker kept a much lower profile for decades before publishing his memoir, Pascagoula: The Closest Encounter, My Story, in 2018. Parker died in 2023.

Aviation journalist and UFO skeptic Philip J. Klass found discrepancies in Hickson's account, noted that Hickson had refused to take a polygraph administered by an experienced outside examiner, and concluded the case was a hoax. Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell pointed out that Hickson's story changed and grew more elaborate over time. Nickell speculated that Hickson may have experienced a hypnagogic episode -- a vivid waking dream -- and suggested that Parker's corroboration was unreliable because Parker himself told police he had passed out at the start of the incident and did not regain consciousness until it was over. The debate has never been resolved to anyone's satisfaction, which may be exactly why the story endures.

In 2019, a historical marker was unveiled at the site along the Pascagoula River. Netflix's Files of the Unexplained covered the incident in 2024. Every October, the City of Pascagoula hosts the Goula Palooza festival to mark the anniversary. Whether one sees Hickson and Parker as genuine witnesses to something unexplained or as participants in an elaborate episode of collective suggestion, the incident has become inseparable from Pascagoula's identity. The quiet fishing pier on the river where two men cast their lines on an autumn evening in 1973 has become one of the most famous UFO locations in the world -- proof that sometimes the strangest stories attach themselves to the most ordinary places.