Hangar 1: The UFO Files

There's a new(ish) show on the H2 channel called Hangar 1: The UFO Files, and I decided to start with an episode called "Presidential Encounters."  On February 20, 1954, Dwight Eisenhower went to Palm Springs, California, and for twelve hours, no one knew where he was.  The next morning, he showed up at a church in Los Angeles (one hundred miles from Palm Springs), saying that he had emergency dental surgery, but it is believed that he was actually at Muroc Airfield (which is now Edwards Air Force Base), and there were rumors that Eisenhower met with extraterrestrials.  Two months later, Eisenhower declared that all matters of an extraterrestrial nature should be classified.    Harry Truman was in office when the Roswell UFO crash happened, and he decided to keep what really happened a secret.  During his presidency, there were several UFO sightings near the White House, and Truman gave the Air Force the go-ahead to shoot them down. He started something called the Robertson Panel, a "CIA group that was tasked to look into the UFO situation and to find out how to handle the situation."  On November 5, 1961, John F. Kennedy discovered that radar systems couldn't identify some objects in their airspace and was worried that the Soviets might mistake a UFO for a U.S. missile and attack the U.S.  On November 11, 1963, the Soviets launched a spacecraft that never made it out of Earth's orbit, so Kennedy asked NASA to work with the Soviet space program and ordered the CIA to share UFO-related information with the Soviets.  Some people believe that this is the reason Kennedy was assassinated ten days later.  

In Miami, Florida in 1974, Richard Nixon went to see Jackie Gleason and took him to Homestead Air Force Base.  Gleason said that Nixon took him to a room with several freezers and that there were alien bodies inside.  Gleason went home and told his wife, who says he was so freaked out by this event that he could barely eat for three weeks afterward and that he couldn't understand why the truth was being hidden from the public.  In 1993, Bill Clinton reopened the investigation of the Roswell crash and went to the Air Force, asking about the bodies that were recovered; the Air Force claimed that the only bodies found in the wreckage were crash test dummies.  When he was running for governor, Jimmy Carter saw a UFO in Leary, Georgia in 1969 while preparing to give a speech; a few years later, he filled out an official UFO report about the incident.  When he became president, he wanted to release official UFO records to the public, but when he met with the director of the CIA (George Bush) to ask for the files, Bush said they were "need to know" and refused to release them.  Carter also contacted the FBI and NASA, but the FBI claimed they didn't have what Carter was looking for, and the CIA sent NASA a letter telling them to refuse Carter's request.  At some point during his presidency, Carter was given an official UFO briefing, and afterward was seen at his desk, sobbing with his head in his hands.  Ronald Reagan had a UFO encounter in 1974 while he was the governor of California.  He was on a plane during a campaign tour and saw a "white object zigzagging" in the director of the plane.  When George Bush was running for president, he was asked if he would release "the UFO secret" if elected; he answered, "Yeah, I'll do it.  Send me what you've got."  The reporter replied, "You were CIA director.  You know what's going on."  Bush answered, "Yes, I know some.  I know a lot."

This was a really interesting show, and I'd love to know what these presidents really know about UFOs and extraterrestrials.  I understand that no one wants to cause a panic, but it's 2014...the Roswell crash happened almost seventy years ago, and I think we can handle the truth about that and any other UFO-related events that have happened since.  I honestly don't think that aliens could be that much scarier than some of the people we've had on Earth (Hitler, for example), so why not tell us the truth?

http://www.history.com/shows/hangar-1-the-ufo-files