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.
