UFOs and The White House Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Bill Birnes and Joel Martin.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover Design by Rain Saukas

  Jacket Image: iStock

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2430-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2431-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedicated to the late Jimmy Breslin from Queens Boulevard,

  a columnist and reporter who always shot straight.

  “Flying saucers are real, and we know what they are.”

  —President Harry Truman

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Governors John Winthrop and William Phips, UFOs in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the Salem Witch Trials

  Chapter 2

  George Washington and the UFO at Valley Forge

  Chapter 3

  President Thomas Jefferson’s UFO Report to the American Philosophical Society

  Chapter 4

  Lincoln’s UFOs

  Chapter 5

  President William McKinley and the Texas Airship Mystery

  Chapter 6

  Teddy Roosevelt and the UFO Sighting Over Sagamore Hill

  Chapter 7

  FDR’s Presidency, World War II, and the UFO Flap over Europe

  Chapter 8

  Harry Truman: Roswell, the Summer of the Saucers, and MK-ULTRA

  Chapter 9

  We Liked Ike

  Chapter 10

  JFK, the Marilyn Monroe Conspiracy, and All the President’s UFO Memos

  Chapter 11

  LBJ and UFOs

  Chapter 12

  Nixon, “The Great One,” and the ET in Florida

  Chapter 13

  President Gerald Ford’s Quest for UFOs

  Chapter 14

  The Turbulent Presidency of Jimmy Carter

  Chapter 15

  President Ronald Reagan and UFOs

  Chapter 16

  George H.W. Bush: “Americans Can’t Handle the Truth!”

  Chapter 17

  The Clintons Come to Town

  Chapter 18

  President George W. Bush, Vice President Cheney, and the UFOs

  Chapter 19

  The Obamas and UFOs

  Chapter 20

  Hillary Clinton’s Promise of ET Disclosure and the John Podesta Email Flap

  Chapter 21

  The Age of Trump: Aliens, New Disclosures, and Climatic Armageddon

  Notes

  Photos

  Introduction

  OUTSIDE THE OVERTON WINDOW

  Winston Churchill once noted that what we call history is actually written by the victors, describing the way the winning party line tends to prevail over the opinions of others. And so it is with American history, especially as it’s taught in schools. The orthodox opinion prevails even in the face of contrary evidence. The chapters in this book will challenge the normative historical interpretation of the American presidency by presenting facts you might never encounter in a schoolroom or a college class.

  Did you know, for example, that President Harry Truman, the plain-speaking “Show Me State” politician who made the decision to unleash nuclear weapons on the world, was also one of the first presidents to step forward and declare unequivocally that flying saucers were real and that the American government knew what they were? Of course you didn’t.

  Did you know that just days before his assassination in Dallas, President John F. Kennedy instructed the branches of the military and the CIA to release all their UFO files to the Soviets before releasing them to the American space program? Or that the president was whispering pillow talk to his mistress Marilyn Monroe about “little men from outer space” kept at a secret military location? Probably not.

  How about President Reagan’s not one but two UFO sightings, his administration’s having been run by an astrologer, or his using an astrologer to pick his vice presidential candidate in 1980 by analyzing the star charts of his political short list? You probably knew about President Car-ter’s UFO sighting and also that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the victim of 2016’s Salem Witch Trials, was a fierce advocate for UFO disclosure inside the Bill Clinton White House. When you studied the history of the presidents, did you know about their statements on UFOs or the memos they wrote about them? No you didn’t, and here’s why.

  All of these events lie outside of what journalists call the “Overton Window,” the frame of acceptability for political, journalistic, and public discourse. In other words, the Overton Window is a form of censorship indicating what can be reported, what can’t, and what should be relegated to what the Huffington Post refers to as “News of the Weird.” How often will Fox’s news commentators like Tucker Carlson talk about the crash of a UFO at Roswell? Rachel Maddow just about doubled over with laughter at the thought that Ronald Reagan brought up invaders from outer space at a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, but didn’t report on Reagan’s official UFO briefing at the White House, nor about his revelations regarding UFOs to Steven Spielberg, the director of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  All of these events—true, documented, and substantiated—are part of American history, but excluded from our public discourse because they lie outside the Overton Window and are unacceptable to the likes of our favorite network and cable news broadcasters. But not anymore.

  Can you hear the sound of broken glass? That’s the Overton Window being shattered by the chapters that follow. From the first UFO sightings by the New England colonists in the 1630s to today’s White House, UFOs are making their way into American history. They’re all here. And they’re all true. So fasten your seat belts.

  Chapter 1

  GOVERNORS JOHN WINTHROP AND WILLIAM PHIPS, UFOS IN THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY, AND THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

  “In this year,” wrote Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop in his journal in 1639, “One James Everell, a sober, discreet man, and two others saw a great light in the night at Muddy River. When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton [Charlestown], and so up and down [for] about two or three hours. They were come down in their lighter about a mile, and, when it was over, they found themselves carried quite back against the tide to the place they came from. Diverse and other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place.”1

  Fishermen on a small flat-bottomed cargo-carrying barge—called a “lighter”—at night on the Charles River on the edge of Boston saw a hovering elliptical-shaped object in the distance, larger than the moon, but moving up and down in the sky. The object changes shape right before their eyes, morphing into s
omething like a flying pig. They watch this object in fascination for a couple of hours before they decide to row towards it for a closer look-see when, after traveling about a mile and suddenly and without their awareness, they find themselves back where they started. But, in order for them to have rowed back to their original starting place, they would have to have pulled against the current, which they did not do. Worse, they seem to have had no sensation of the passage of time. In today’s parlance, what the fishermen experienced is called “missing time.”

  Perhaps modern skeptics can quibble with the reports of the description of this incident, citing the possibilities that the fishermen only saw a bright star or the planet Venus or that they might have had a few too many tots of rum before they set out on their cargo run. But Governor Winthrop attests to their sobriety in his write-up of the event and thought enough of it to include it in his official history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Thus, according to one of the most important political leaders of the New England colonies, about a hundred and fifty years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this event actually took place, belonged in the official history, and the governor vouched for the veracity of it and the boaters who recounted the event. But the story becomes more complicated, according to Governor Winthrop, because not only was the floating object in the sky witnessed by the fishermen, it was witnessed by other “credible persons,” as Governor Winthrop describes them. In other words, it was a multiply witnessed aerial phenomenon of unknown origin seen and attested to by more than just the witnesses in the cargo barge. This, eliminating such things as airplanes or helicopters, because they hadn’t been invented yet, counts as credible sighting as any sighting of a floating orb today.

  Just five years later, towards the end of Governor Winthrop’s term in office, another strange confluence of events took place, this time involving an undersea object that seemed to cause the fatal explosion of a merchant vessel belonging to Captain John Chaddock. The explosion occurred seemingly out of nowhere, and took the lives of all persons aboard Captain Chaddock’s ship, stirring up rumors of a curse, of the work of the Devil, or something more mundane: a crew member who set the explosive charges because he was carrying a grudge against the vessel or its master.

  If the only event had been the explosion of a wooden ship at sea, it might have passed as a simple tragedy of unknown causality. However, because the ship’s explosion took place amidst the eyewitness reports of strange lights in the sky and because Chaddock’s ship was reported to have hit an undersea object while at sea—well before the invention of the submarine—it is not out of the realm of possibility that Chaddock’s vessel struck an unidentified submerged object, a USO. Again, witnessed by many townsfolk, strange lights began to appear in the sky that no one could explain. Were these lights demonic in origin? Was the New England colony cursed because of the townspeople’s misdeeds? A sense of dread crept through the local population.

  Governor Winthrop again reported in his journal that, “Exactly sixteen days after the blowing up of Capt. Chaddock’s ill-fated ship and crew, and just at ‘the witching hour of midnight,’ as Shakespeare calls it, ‘when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes forth contagion in the air,’ three men in a boat, coming toward Boston—a strange hour for reputable puritans to be out—saw two bright lights rise out of the water, at the place where the vessel had been blown up, just off the North Ferry slip. They made the still more inexplicable that the two lights assumed the form of a man, and sailed leisurely off over the water to the south, keeping but a short distance from the shore, till it reached Rowe’s Wharf, where it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared just 15 minutes before.”2

  This time, instead of an unidentified flying object, the witnesses saw an unidentified submerged object, a USO that, upon breaking the surface of the water, became a flying object. If this were the only event after the shipwreck and loss of a crew, it would have been frightening enough to the local residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But the sightings didn’t stop. Less than a fortnight after the initial shipwreck/sighting, the twin lights appeared again in the sky and flew to the exact spot where Chaddock’s ship exploded, which was where they entered the water.

  The sightings over the Boston bay area still continued in the weeks following the second sighting. The next sighting witnessed by those who lived along the shore involved a single light, which some witnesses said was as large as the moon, which rose out of the water at the spot of the shipwreck and traveled over land to the present location of East Boston, where it encountered another illuminated flying object and merged with it. Witnesses watched in stunned silence as the lights joined with one another then separated, repeating this several times and all the while generating sparks and flames, until they finally morphed into a large single object, an actual disk as big as the moon, before it disappeared behind a hill overlooking Boston proper. And all of this during the tenure of Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop, a prudent, honest Puritan not given to flights of fancy or whimsical illusions.

  While these UFO sightings—and we call them UFOs because they were truly unidentified flying objects, whatever their origin might have been—while strange were not the first UFO or USO sightings in the New World. Indeed, even before the British came to North America, even before the Puritans settled in New England, Italian explorer, sailing under commission from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Christopher Columbus witnessed a self-illuminated unidentified object moving through the water alongside his flagship the Santa Maria as it approached the island of Hispaniola. The object seemed to be tracking the Santa Maria until it broke the surface of the water, rose into the sky, and flew off into the heavens. Columbus was so transfixed by the object, all he could do was stare until it was out of sight. Then he ordered his scribe to write an entry in the ship’s log, thus cataloguing the first UFO / USO sighting by a European in the New World. The year was 1492.3

  Fire and Brimstone, Cotton Mather, and the Salem Witch Trials

  Our New England colonies in the seventeenth century were roiled by superstition and a belief in the immediate presence of evil spirits as well as the Devil itself. It is no mystery, therefore, that the residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw the lights in the sky and the light rising out of the water, taking on a circular shape, and then flying off not as a visitation from extraterrestrials, but a sign of evil spirits. None other than New England’s fire-and-brimstone preacher, Cotton Mather, reported that he had seen strange lights orbiting around the moon, a report that has lasted through five hundred years of history and eventually made it into NASA’s lunar study NASA Technical Report R-277—Lunar Events.4

  Mather’s report of lights floating over the moon, coming over the surface from the dark side of the lunar surface, was a startling revelation from a person who was also partially responsible for shutting down the Salem Witch Trials in the town of Salem in 1692. The brutal sentences handed down to women and men accused of practicing witchcraft after sham trials—most of the victims were hanged, not burned—were based not only upon fear and upon the sanction in the Bible, which stated society should not suffer a witch or a sorceress to live, but also allowed the seizure of property from those accused. Salem Village today is now the municipality of Danvers, Massachusetts.

  Chapter 2

  GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE UFO AT VALLEY FORGE

  The echoes of the surprise victory Washington won over the Hessian forces celebrating Christmas 1776 outside of Trenton were only made louder by Washington’s subsequent victories at the Battle of Princeton in January 1777 and the British retreat north to occupy the Atlantic coast of New Jersey. But Washington’s New Jersey victories were to be soon extinguished later in 1777 by his losses at the Battle of Brandywine and then at Germantown outside of Philadelphia, which city was occupied by the British. Washington’s failure to drive the British out of Philadelphia forced him to retreat to winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, with an army of under 15,000 troops who w
ere demoralized after two defeats, were severely lacking supplies, had little, if any, winter gear, and were ill-shod and starving. In fact, military historians have said that Washington’s army at Valley Forge was not a disciplined army at all but a ragtag cohort of volunteer farmers and tradesmen who had yet to be paid by the newly formed Continental Congress. They were at the point of mutiny.

  As the terrible winter dragged on, many of Washington’s soldiers, who had already missed the harvest, now wanted to go home. They feared that in their current demoralized and ill-equipped state, they were no match for the British, and would be summarily defeated, captured, and hanged for treason against the Crown. For many, their only hope was to return to their farms and claim innocence in the face of British charges should the rebellion be put down. And Washington himself was disconsolate as he watched the condition of his army decay. And in addition to the fearsome condition of his army, Washington was also at odds with the Continental Congress for their lack of support for his troops. His men had not been paid, had not been resupplied, and had not received the support an army in the field needs from the civilian government in charge of the war effort.

  The Continental Army was a mixed bag of volunteers, with teenagers serving in the ranks alongside those who, today, would be considered senior citizens in their sixties. But in the mix as well were a number of foreign officers who had been trained in European military practices and sought to train Washington’s troops. They were joined by a Prussian officer who called himself Baron von Steuben, who, although not a baron and not a senior officer, was, nevertheless, a skilled military tactician and a former captain in the Prussian military, who impressed Washington with his military background. Washington put him in charge of the men to train them in field maneuvers. Joining von Steuben at Valley Forge was the Marquis de Lafayette, another skilled military commander whom Washington put in charge of a regiment and then the army in Virginia, and a military engineer, Louis Duportail, who supervised the building of fortifications for the defense of Valley Forge should the British decide to attack.