The story
about Eisenhower's February 1954 trip to Palm
Springs for a winter holiday, and his
subsequent late Saturday night disappearance, has
fueled rumors that Eisenhower traveled to nearby
Edwards Air Force Base to meet with aliens.
One of the
best recounting of this rumor was done by William
Moore a prominent California researcher who
traveled to the Eisenhower Library to do research
and actually interviewed the wife of one of the
key witnesses to the story.
NEWS CLIPPING SERVICE DATE OF
ARTICLE: March 29, 1989
SOURCE OF ARTICLE: Gazette
LOCATION: Hollywood, California
UFOS...EXPLORING
THE 'E.T.' PHENOMENON
By William L. Moore
One of the first conclusions an
impartial observer must make about the subject of
UFOs is that rumors and circumstance play far too
great a role in what ought to be a more exacting
quest for knowledge. It is just such an
observation which once led Dr. Carl Sagan to
comment dryly that UFOs "are more a matter
for religion and superstition than they are for
science."
While this dismissal is perhaps
unscientific in its own right, the point is well
taken. Attend any gathering of "UFO
people" you want, and simply listen. Rumors
abound. Perhaps worse, however, is that some of
these rumors manage to circulate for years (even
decades) without anyone making a reasonable effort
to get to the bottom of them.
One of the most persistent of
these is a story that President Eisenhower visited
Edwards Air Force Base in early 1954, and either
viewed the bodies of dead aliens and the wreckage
of their craft, or met with live aliens on some
sort of diplomatic mission to earth.
The story takes many forms, with
the common thread being that Ike mysteriously
disappeared one evening while on a vacation to
Palm Springs, and that he was spirited to Edwards
to view (or meet) aliens. It is said that he
returned by dawn and shortly thereafter ordered
absolute secrecy about anything having to do with
UFOs.
No doubt one of the reasons that
this particular rumor has continued to circulate
for such a long time is that there are a number of
verifiable facts associated with it--some of them
rather curious.
For example, President Eisenhower
did indeed make a trip to Palm Springs between
February 17th and 24th, 1954, and on the evening
of Saturday, February 20th, he did disappear! When
members of the press learned that the president
was not where he should be, rumors ran rampant
that he had either died or was seriously ill.
The story even managed to get onto
a press wire before being killed moments later. To
quell the fuss, White House Press Secretary James
Haggerty called an urgent late evening press
conference to announce "solemnly" that
the president had been enjoying fried chicken
earlier that evening, had knocked a cap off a
tooth, and had been taken to a local dentist for
treatment.
When Ike turned up as scheduled
the next morning for an early church service, the
matter seemed ended. Although the Palm Springs
trip was billed as a "vacation for the
president", the trip appears to have come up
rather suddenly.
In addition, it is a matter of
record that Ike had returned from a quail shooting
vacation in Georgia less than a week before
leaving for Palm Springs.
While the incidence of a local
dentist being called upon to treat a president of
the United States is unusual enough that it should
constitute a rather memorable event for those
involved, the dentist's widow, in a June, 1979
interview, was curiously unable to recall any
specifics relating to her husband's alleged
involvement in the affair--not even the time of
day it had occurred. Yet her memory appeared
flawless when asked to relate details of her and
her husband's attendance (by presidential
invitation) at a steak fry the following evening,
where her husband was introduced as "the
dentist who had treated the president".
This would appear to suggest a
cover story, the details of which would have
easily been repeated at the time, but quite
naturally forgotten 25 years later. Research at
the Eisenhower Library has uncovered two other
facts inconsistent with the dentist story.
The first is that while the
library maintains an extensive index of records
relating to the president's health, there is no
record of any dental work having been performed at
all during February, 1954. A file on
"Dentists" contains nothing concerning
any such incident either. Secondly, there is a
large file containing copies of all sorts of
acknowledgments which were sent by the White House
to people who had something to do with the Palm
Springs trip.
There are letters, for example, to
people who sent flowers, people who met the
airplane, people who had offered to play golf,
etc. There is even a thank you letter to the
minister who presided over the Sunday service Ike
attended. Yet there is no record of any
acknowledgment having been sent to "the
dentist who treated the president."
If the matter were as routine as
Haggerty attempts to make it appear, then the
absence of these records seems strangely
inconsistent. The rumor of the president's alleged
visit to Edwards is not a new one. UFO contactee
fringe writers began making unsupported claims
about it less than two months after Ike's trip.
So did a bizarre fellow from the
Hollywood hills named Gerald Light, who, in an
April 16, 1954 letter to the head of a Southern
California metaphysical organization, actually
claimed to have been at Edwards where he saw Ike,
the saucers and the aliens. Light's letter has
been controversial for years and copies of it have
turned up in all sorts of places, including the
National Enquirer.
Investigation into Mr. Light's
background, however, turned up the fact that he
was an elderly mystic who believed that psychic
"out-of-body-experiences" were a logical
extension of the reality of life and should be
treated as such. In the final analysis, Light's
alleged visit to Edwards was just such an
experience.
And so the story ends. Clearly
something unusual occurred involving the president
on the evening of February 20, 1954. Whether it
was a trip to the dentist, a trip to see flying
saucers, or something altogether different and
unrelated, no one can say. It's the stuff rumors
are made of.
