Gulf Coast Mississippians are the proverbial color for envy about the way Roswell, N.M., has capitalized on its 1947 visit from "little green men." As Mississippi’s Sun Herald columnist Lisa Monti writes:

 

Can’t we just kick ourselves all over the banks of the Pascagoula for not taking a page from Roswell’s UFO business plan?

 

In her recent column, "There’s green in those little men," Monti laments not entirely tongue-in-cheek that 35 years ago, the Gulf Coast’s "mothership came in" in terms of alien tourism opportunity, but city leaders "blew it."

 

It was 35 years ago that a UFO — let me repeat — a UFO buzzed Pascagoula (Miss.) and, as the story goes, scooped up a pair of shipyard workers who, shucks, just wanted to do a little fishing. Instead, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were mysteriously floated into the hissing, hovering spacecraft, got examined by some weird device and were deposited back to the the dock. Their tale unleashed a media firestorm that should have lit a fire under our leaders to turn the alien encounter into a tourism bonanza. Can you say, Roswell, N.M?

 

Gulf Coast residents remember well the incident in 1973, when even the Jackson County sheriff who questioned the two men said he believed their story because they were so traumatized, one Gulfport resident told the New Mexico Independent in an e-mail. They also passed lie-detector tests. Hickson wrote about the encounter in a book, "UFO Contact at Pascagoula," which is available on Amazon.com and, interestingly, is listed under Christian titles oneBay. Monti quotes from Roswell’s Web page, saying it "teases" tourists into coming to see for themselves why Roswell is "the mother of extraterrestrial connections."

 

Clearly, our aliens were smarter than theirs because they pulled off the Pascagoula encounter without crashing. And yet Roswell, not South Mississippi, is the mother of extraterrestrial connections. Unfortunately, our spaceship sailed away a long time ago."

 

It was Democratic Sen. Tim Z. Jennings’ brother Tom Jennings who, while mayor of Roswell, started playing up the 1947 crash and promoted the first UFO festival in July 1997, its 50th anniversary. He decided UFOlogy would be an economic boost rather than the embarrassment previous mayors had feared.