Eisenhower and the UFOs

While on a winter vacation in Palm Springs, California, President Dwight D. Eisenhower disappeared.  Rumors started going around.  Was President Eisenhower sick?  Had he died?  Press Secretary James Haggerty explained that the President’s absence was due to a dental emergency.  He had broken a tooth while eating chicken.

Eisenhower showed up early the next morning and the matter seemed settled.  However, a new rumor began, a rumor that persists to this day.  The story goes that the President had been called away from his schedule to go to Muroc (now Edwards) Air Force Base.  There he saw an alien space craft and met with aliens.  Shortly after his return, he ordered that all reports about flying saucers be cloaked in secrecy. 

Except for UFO fringe writers, interest in the incident died down.  In 1962, now former President Eisenhower did meet with Kenneth Arnold.  Arnold had made the first major flying saucer sighting in 1947 and had coined the term “flying saucer”.  However, interest in the February, 1954, incident would return in 1979.

That year,  it was learned that the wife of the dentist knew nothing of President Eisenhower’s visit.  Furthermore, the Eisenhower Library has no record of any dental work being done during February, 1954.  In 2009, a man called in to the radio show “Coast to Coast”.  He claimed to possess a 16mm black and white film which showed Eisenhower and billionaire Howard Hughes inspecting a crashed flying saucer.  The caller said that what he had seen on the film scared him to death.

UFO enthusiast Michael E. Salla says that Eisenhower’s meeting with the aliens is supported by testimonial and circumstantial evidence.  For example, the Palm Springs vacation for the President was announced suddenly and came less that a week after his quail shooting trip to Georgia.  Salla believes that the Muroc meeting not only happened but was the first of a series of gatherings that led to a treaty being signed with an alien race now called the “Greys”.

As wild as this story sounds, I have to put it into the Probable category, partially because I could not find much skeptical works to refute it.  It is very possible that the Palm Springs vacation was set up at the last minute so Eisenhower could slip away to Muroc.  And I think it is possible that the treaty may have given aliens the right to abduct humans in exchange for technological knowledge.