Charles Hickson didn’t need the recent reports of a UFO sighting in Stephenville, Texas, to stir up memories of what he says was his encounter with alien visitors more than 35 years ago.

“I was terribly frightened,” Hickson told WLOX-TV News of that late October night in 1973.

Hickson, now 76 and living in Gautier, decided to go fishing on the Pascagoula River with his buddy, 19-year-old Calvin Parker. Something happened that night that would change their lives forever.

“It looked to me like air, or steam, or something escaping from a pipe,” Hickson recalled.

A piercing sound made Hickson and Parker stop what they were doing, Hickson said, and that’s when he spotted a large object hovering behind them.

“It was some kind of craft, it was probably 30 or 40 feet,” he said. “There were three things, they weren’t human beings. I know now they were robots.”

The sight is burned into Hickson’s memory.

“They appeared to me that they had something like elephant skin, it was very wrinkled. These things came to us and took a hold of me, and one took a hold of Calvin. We went into that beam of light and they carried me aboard that craft.”

He said the aliens held them for about 30 minutes.

“Something came out of that wall, like a big eye. It came up in front of me, it went under me, and it came back up my back side. The next time I saw it, it came over my head in front of me. They turned me around and carried me right back out where they pick me up.”

Then, Hickson said, within the blink of an eye, it was all over. The UFO was gone, and the men were left wondering what happened.

“I thought it might be a threat to the country, some type of threat to the country. We talked it over again, and decided we would go the sheriff’s department,” Hickson said.

After reporting the abduction, Hickson and Parker both passed lie detector tests and were even questioned under hypnosis. Investigators are on record saying the pair’s story never wavered.

“I am not trying to force anybody to believe anything. I just simply tell them what happened to Calvin and me, and they make up their own minds if they want to believe it or not,” Hickson said.

Despite the years, Hickson said the ordeal remains fresh on his mind.

“They’re just simply unidentified flying objects that come from other worlds out there, and those worlds are … I have no idea.”

Hickson and Parker’s alleged abduction played a crucial role in the creation of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle. The center is a centralized place for people to call and report strange and mysterious things they see.

Parker is reportedly now living in Louisiana and has declined to discuss the incident.