Presidents and UFOs - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 2/20/23

an English miner. The grandson of a Cape Girardo attorney of fifty plus years and also a US grandson actually also a US Commissioner, city attorney, and community leader. Paul is the son of a local paralegal and an educator who worked in the suspected crash area within neighboring Scott County.

A fan of American history and popular culture, he now lives and works in a city in the western part of the showm State, writing original screenplays and other books on largely historical non fiction subjects, including a follow up to his original fact based publication M forty one, The Bombshell Before Roswell. Paul Blake Smith Back on Coast to Coast, Hey Paul, welcome back, thanks for having me on, and Happy President's Day. Absolutely, my son still raves about Simo

led that school. It is a good school, and I'm glad I went there. It was for me. It was a lot like high school in Cape Girardo, only with the classes further apart, and you had to walk up and down these steep hills in the summertime, you'd work up a sweat just getting to your classroom. But otherwise it was a great university. I used to drive out there a lot to pick him up and stuff like that. And then one of my granddaughters graduated from there with

a degree in hotel management. She just loved it, had a great time there. How did you get involved in these UFO stories? When I was researching the Cape Girardo UFO crash of nineteen forty one, I kept happening across a story that I had read some years earlier and intrigued me this idea that Resident Eisenhower actually met with friendly extraterrestrials at an Air Force base, at a hangar

near a runway. And I always found that very exciting, and I thought, has anyone ever researched this early and done a book, so I thought, no one has, and I wrote that and it came out a few years ago and it's done quite well, a lot of good reviews. And along the way I found the date February nineteenth kept popping up. For example, that's when Eisenhower stuck away from his Palm Springs, California vacation to go out to Edwards Air Force Base in a pre arranged meeting. And

ten years later, exactly Lyndon Johnson was president. He was on the phone with Eisenhower on that ten year anniversary date. LBJ got on a plane and flew right out to Eisenhower and met with him a number of times, some in private. There's some apps in his schedule, and you kind of wonder what the two of them were up to that was so very important. They had to meet in Palm Springs. There were two Air Force ones on the ground at the local airport, even though LBJ did

not have a vice president. In the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy and then fourteen years after the nineteen fifty four event, on February nineteenth, LBJ went back to Palm Springs and met again with Dwight Eisenhower in his retirement, and they played golf together and huddled in private, and soon we had a new president, Richard Nixon, and so on February nineteenth, nineteen seventy three, it's been alleged by Jackie Gleason's wife that Jackie came home one night

and spilled the beans on just where they were an Air Force base with the President of the United States. This theme sound familiar, and there were extraterrestrial was involved. So I thought, where's a book on this? There isn't any, So I thought I would spend the next few years researching and writing it and it should be out in late April early May of this year. I thought President's Days an excellent time to talk about it, don't you perfect timing, And that book's going to be called The

Nixon Gleason Alien Encounter. That's correct from foundations, and hopefully we'll get that out before people want to buy a book for reading this summer at the beach. But it's just an amazing story about what basically boils down to Jackie Gleason blurted out to his wife at the time, and she told a tabloid in a quick interview one year later, when she was separated from Jackie, just what her husband came home and said, and Jackie got on

the phone. He was just livid when he read this in a tabloid and said, you know, this was supposed to be something you were to tell anyone. And he was peppered with questions by some press and people in the entertainment industry did this really happen? And he refused to give an answer. He just would not comment. He wouldn't deny it, though, wouldn't right. He didn't say it didn't happen. All he had to do is say, oh, this is a bunch of bunk and junk. Get out

of here. I don't want to hear about this. But he did not. And one thing I read in Jackie's biographies is that he was known as a real straight shooter, a very honest man. He didn't make up a lot of nonsense. He did do his share of drinking, but he didn't start making up tall tales. That he'd liked facts and he went really overboard for the facts on

UFOs from the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. He would buy up every book and periodically he could get his hands on on the subject, and then he would call up the authors and quiz them at length about UFOs, and even the sub Jack Sue saw UFOs in the books, he would meet with them in person and pepper them

with questions. So he took the subject amazingly seriously. He used to listen to the Long John Nebble Show That's right, a long, long time ago, which was what I think the first of the paranormal genre are radio shows rock in the fifties. He was the Art Bell of his time, or the George Nori and he would host this New York City based show, and Jackie was an insomniac, and he would wake up and listen, and then he would

call in. At times, just as I was finishing some research for the book, I found Jackie talking to Frank Edwards on the Long John Nables Show, and Jackie said, quote, and you can hear this tape online. The sound quality is not very good. He said, I just told Edward R. Murrow that I think UFOs are the most important subject going on in the world today. Seriously. Jackie took it, and he actually said this on the air. So in his day it was considered still by some a little kookie.

It was not as mainstream as it is today. He went out on a limb to get so heavily involved in this subject. Did Nixon go to Gleason or did Gleeson go to Nixon when they went down to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. From what I understand, it may have been a case of Nixon finally contacting Jackie. The two had played golf since their early sixties. For over ten years, they were golf buddies in South Florida. So you know that Jackie was obsessed with the UFOs.

He had to have asked Nixon over and over, and Nixon would not tell him big state secret. He knew he wanted to be president again and would run again. He hadn't been president, but he had been vice president under Eisenhower, so Nixon had to keep the secrets to himself. But by early nineteen seventy three, Nixon was in a bind. His henchman had been caught burglarizing the Watergate Hotel and

Democratic National Headquarters, their offices, Larry O'Brien's office he was toast. Yeah, and so they all got caught, and Nixon needed to raise hush money and you can hear transcripts or read them to this day of Nixon being very upset by January of seventy three, saying where are we going to get this hush money? Just tearing his hair out over this. A few weeks after the Jackie Gleason encounter, Nixon was quite calm and said, oh, yes, I know where we

can get that money. It's not a problem. Now. Jackie had been offering on the hair over the years, first fifty thousand dollars to anyone that would produce proof, absolute proof of extra terrestrial, and he jacked it up to a half a million, and that didn't at him anything, so he went up to one million dollars by the late sixties. I'll give a million dollars to anyone who give me absolute hard proof. So do we have to put two and two together or can we add up?

For so Nixon was the guy. Yeah, Nixon needed the money. He knew Jackie had this obsession, and all he had to do was show him something real quick. At Homestead Air Force Base, where Nixon had been in and out fifty five times, Nixon flew down to keybis Cane to his beach house during his presidency and he would always use Homestead Air Force Base. He was there a lot, so something was brought in or was there, and that's

how he picked up Jackie, I believe by helicopter. They went to the base directly, and Nixon finally gave Jackie what he wanted, satisfied his curiosity. And since they shared the same lawyer, a man named Herbert Comback, I think the financial arrangement was very likely put together off the books, as Nixon was quite fond of doing so that he could have the money to pay the Watergate defendants who broke in and did the burglary and their legal fees

and pay for their families and their kids. So there was a real motive for both of them to go ahead and do this. You think Jackie actually had the money that he really thought that somebody was going to come forward and give him the information. Believe it or not. Yes, he made a ton of money and he spent it very freely. He would make up to like fourteen million per year from his movies, TV's, record albums, personal appearances. He was immensely wealthy and a lot of money back then,

a fortune. Yeah, and so he spent it quite freely, and a million dollars was nothing to him. He had to have this proof. He was the king of TV and king of movies, and he always got whatever he wanted, and he was very frustrated that he couldn't see a UFO and that he wanted that proof, even though he read all of these books and heard about other people seeing UFOs or maybe even an extraterrestrial allegedly, I could see Nixon telling Jackie right now, I'm going to show

you a U. Yeah. Another factor was Jackie's birthday was coming up in just about nine days from the nineteenth I think it was, or now that's my birthday. Actually it was nine days after the nineteenth. Jackie's I think was the twenty sixth of February. But anyway, what do you get Jackie, the man who has everything but yearns for this one thing that's always been out of his reach.

What did Nixon reportedly show him? Paul? According to Beverley Gleason, Jackie's wife at the time, he came home and said, I just saw the bodies of four dead aliens. President Nixon showed me at Homestead Air Force Base, and he said that he apparently didn't give a color of their skin.

But he said they were about two feet in height, maybe a little more a little less, stretched out on four tables, examining tables in this kind of laboratory, so that you had to have imagine Jackie's reaction to this. He must have been absolutely staggered. But here was finally the proof. He said. They looked like they had been embalmed. And when you go back to the old nineteen fifty five Hopkinsville, Kentucky case, you know, the family out in the country that felt they were under sea by aliens,

the descriptions match perfectly. He said. They had big ears and pretty big eyes and were about two feet tall, so maybe it was the same race. He seemed quite serious about it, his wife said, and this was not a joke. She said, he was really shook up. Were these from Roswell Cape Girardo? Where do you think? Yeah? She didn't say if, he said. I wonder how much

he withheld from his wife. That night, he was hosting a golf tournament and he just seemed to disappear one evening, and when he came back close to midnight, she said he was pale and trembling, and he looked Haggard, and he had really been through quite a shocking experience, so he didn't really say too many details, or he didn't want to. He was either too traumatized. He did say he was sworn to secrecy, so he immediately broke some of that hope as soon as he got home. But

it's only natural if you're in a legal case. They called out an excited utterance when you're in the traumatic experience of something that happened in a legal sense. Well, in this sense, Jackie was all shook up when he got home and he blurted out. But I think is the truth. On the nineteenth, the anniversary of contact from Eisenhower, Nixon's old boss, we're talking with Paul Blake Smith. His book that's coming out is called The Nixon Gleason Alien Encounter.

Will also talk about President Eisenhower's close encounters after the break and then the situation in Cape Girardo that is a bombshell before Roswell happened in nineteen forty one. Roswell was nineteen forty seven. Of course, I would have loved to have interviewed Jackie Gleason there. I don't know what he would have said, but it would have been worth it. He was amazingly talented. If you ever ran down a list of his skills, he could do pantomime, sketches, stand

up comedy. He could dance, he could sing, he could play the trumpet. He created his own music. He was like an orchestral score director. He was the choreographer of his show. He would just throw himself into every performance, and on the sidelines he was actually sucking on oxygen. He was so out of breath. He was such a big, heavy man. But he was a most well read, intelligent and fun. He did smoke and drink a lot, but that was not uncommon back then. He used to say,

how sweet it is, and it certainly was. He lived the highlife in every sense. He really had a great time in life. What do you think idem interested in U falls? You know, that's a really good question, and I'm not sure. However, the Eisenhower encounter happened in February

of nineteen fifty four, on the nineteenth. It was around that time that suddenly Jackie got this obsession with building a UFO house in New York State, just about thirty five forty miles outside of New York, where he lived in an apartment in Manhattan, and so he had custom built this spaceship, this circular house that overlooked the overlooked

the side of this valley. It was on the edge of a cliff sort of and with big bay windows, and he filled it with telescopes and a Tesla coil that he felt that Nicola Tesla, the inventor used to try to contact aliens. And it's a little known fact. Jackie was also an avid Ham radio operator. And he kept turning the dials listening in, you know, almost as if he expected to catch an alien broadcast or something. That's how obsessed he was. So, at least as far

back as fifty four. And you know what, in my research I found there was a man named Everett Gleeson who was Dwight Eisenhower's national security advisor, and he met with Eisenhower just before he took off for Palm Springs and record show. Everett Gleason met with Eisenhower as soon as he got back to the lighthouse. So Everett Everett Gleason was born in Brooklyn, just ten years before Jackie.

And you've got to wonder, is this some sort of relative who could have tipped Jackie off to this amazing encounter in person in southern California in fifty four, and Jackie just went ballistic and had to have his own spaceship house and pretend like he's living in one, and he held parties there over the years. He had a custom built in an airplane hangar, of all places, you know, Eisenhower met with aliens in an airplane hangar. So it's just really strange and how the two stories kind of

fit together. If Gleason was told by Nixon and seventy three, then he should have been married to Beverly McKittrick at that time. That is correct. She was his wife for the past few years. When she gave that statement to a tabloid reporter in seventy four, they had been separated and Jackie was so furious they split up. That was the end of their relationship. So she went one step further in nineteen eighty three. She's still alive. I believe

she is. I can't find her. I enlisted another investigator. He can't find her either. She would be about eighty nine years old right now, but a great interview that would be. Oh yeah. She has avoided the press strenuously. She doesn't seem to want to talk about it or write a tell all book either. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more