Speaker 1: On November seventh, nineteen seventy two, America went to the polls,
Speaker 1: and the nation nearly unanimously voted to re elect President
Speaker 1: Richard Nixon. Of the five hundred and thirty eight electoral votes,
Speaker 1: Nixon won five hundred and twenty that's ninety six point
Speaker 1: five percent of the electoral college vote. The only two
Speaker 1: electoral College votes he lost were Massachusetts and the District
Speaker 1: of Columbia.
Speaker 2: Nixon took the whole map.
Speaker 1: It's one of the single greatest electoral victories in US history.
Speaker 1: His reelection was more than a mandate. It was self
Speaker 1: evident that Richard Nixon was the unchallenged leader of.
Speaker 2: The free world. No one was more powerful than Richard Nixon.
Speaker 1: And then just a few months later, on February nineteenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, Nixon had the day off. It was
Speaker 1: Washington's birthday, a federal holiday, so the president had some
Speaker 1: time for himself. That Monday, he was in Florida, where
Speaker 1: he spent the day playing eighteen holes at a celebrity
Speaker 1: golf tournament. According to his official presidential calendar, Nixon hopped.
Speaker 2: Into a chopper and flew to the exclusive.
Speaker 1: Country club of Miamia there in the early afternoon, the
Speaker 1: President enjoyed the links with David Eisenhower, the son of
Speaker 1: former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who also happened to be
Speaker 1: Nixon's son in law married to his daughter Julie. The
Speaker 1: other person golfing with Nixon that fateful day was his
Speaker 1: good friend and financial donor of the famous funny man
Speaker 1: Jackie Gleeson. Perhaps drunk on his new power, perhaps just
Speaker 1: feeling himself because he'd ended the war in Vietnam, or
Speaker 1: perhaps it was just that sort of day. Whatever it was,
Speaker 1: something happened out there on the golf course because Nixon
Speaker 1: decided he would show Jackie Gleeson what the comedian wanted
Speaker 1: to see most of all in life. And later that
Speaker 1: same day, President Nixon took Jackie Gleeson to a secret
Speaker 1: base in Florida because the most powerful man on earth
Speaker 1: had promised his friend he would show him the bodies
Speaker 1: of dead aliens recovered from a crashed UFO. At least
Speaker 1: that's how the story goes. This is very special episodes
Speaker 1: and I'm your host, Zarn Burnett. This is the story
Speaker 1: of when Nixon showed Jackie Gleeson where the aliens are.
Speaker 3: Kept Welcome back to very special episodes. My name is
Speaker 3: Jason English. I'm solo this week for the banter portion
Speaker 3: of our program, the full Team. We'll be back next week.
Speaker 3: Dana and Zaren and I have a running joke about
Speaker 3: how Richard Nixon seems to appear in every episode we
Speaker 3: put out, just in the last couple months. He popped
Speaker 3: up in our discussion of Big Bird's diplomatic mission to China.
Speaker 3: Saren mentions him briefly in our episode with David Chase
Speaker 3: talking about the Lost Wonder Years script. Nixon's name comes
Speaker 3: up at the end of last week's episode when we
Speaker 3: were talking about my daughter's appearance on The Rachel Ray Show.
Speaker 3: We crunched the numbers. Nixon has appeared in forty percent
Speaker 3: of our episodes this year, and none of these episodes
Speaker 3: are about Richard Nixon. He's just in the background. So
Speaker 3: Saren decided to set off and find the strangest story
Speaker 3: that actually involves the former president. I will caveat from
Speaker 3: the start this story may not be true, but the
Speaker 3: people involved all believed that it was.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 3: Did President Nixon show his buddy Jackie Gleeson the secret
Speaker 3: facility in Florida, where we're hiding dead aliens, let's discuss.
Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, a home that once belonged to Jackie
Speaker 1: Gleeson came up for sale asking Chrisce twelve million dollars.
Speaker 1: The custom built dwelling was situated in a leafy glen
Speaker 1: in the Hudson Valley. The home was quite unique. In fact,
Speaker 1: it was a complex of structures. Two of them were
Speaker 1: built to look like UFOs. There's the main house aka
Speaker 1: the Mothership, and there's the guesthouse aka the scout Ship.
Speaker 1: The comic had the homes built to his exacting specifications.
Speaker 1: The construction took five years. In nineteen fifty nine, when
Speaker 1: the builders were done, Jackie Gleeson had a home that
Speaker 1: looked like a UFO had landed in the New York Woods.
Speaker 1: Inside the home you would find no right angles, no
Speaker 1: indication it was shaped by human hands. Instead, all the
Speaker 1: angles were rounded, curved, and organic by design. In the
Speaker 1: listing from the real estate agents from Remax, they noted
Speaker 1: that the concept of the home is a musical note,
Speaker 1: hence the roundness of the design.
Speaker 2: As with a note, it never ends.
Speaker 1: If you look at the ceilings, the woodwork looks like rowboats.
Speaker 2: There are the trusses that hold the house up.
Speaker 1: There are no cross support beams because they would have
Speaker 1: had right angles.
Speaker 2: The home boasted a hell of a spread.
Speaker 1: There were five bedrooms, six baths, a library, a billiard's room,
Speaker 1: a home office, and roughly seventy five hundred square feet
Speaker 1: of living space. And Jackie Gleeson often played host at
Speaker 1: the home, entertaining his famous friends and colleagues, including Richard Nixon,
Speaker 1: which tells us that Richard Nixon was quite familiar with
Speaker 1: the fact that his old friend Jackie Gleeson was a
Speaker 1: nut for the flying saucermen from Mars. In his custom
Speaker 1: spaceship home, Jackie Gleeson kept a library of seventeen hundred
Speaker 1: books on the subject, as well as books on parapsychology
Speaker 1: and the paranormal. But above it all, Jackie Gleeson was
Speaker 1: all about them aliens, UFOs and flying saucers. To read
Speaker 1: contemporary stories on the subject, such as the one about
Speaker 1: a woman who claimed to be married to a man
Speaker 1: from Saturn, he also examined the photographs of any and
Speaker 1: all reported UFO sightings. Jackie Gleeson mostly came away unconvinced.
Speaker 1: He was a skeptical believer. He wanted to know if
Speaker 1: there were aliens out there. He believed there were, but
Speaker 1: he really wanted to know for sure. There is a
Speaker 1: small and subtle irony that the man who played Ralph
Speaker 1: Cramden on the early TV show The Honeymooners, who first
Speaker 1: became famous for comically threatening his wife home, was into UFOs.
Speaker 1: But the man was a space case, and he also was.
Speaker 2: Friends with the most powerful man in the world.
Speaker 1: The keeper of the secrets. Former President Lyndon Johnson, had
Speaker 1: died in January, just days after Nixon's second inauguration.
Speaker 2: The man who knew.
Speaker 1: That Nixon cheated his way into power in the sixty
Speaker 1: eight election, who could have revealed what he called Nixon's
Speaker 1: quote treason, was gone. So was the once all powerful
Speaker 1: head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover. He died in
Speaker 1: May of seventy two. Also, former President Truman died in
Speaker 1: December of that same year, and so in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: at the start of his second term, the only one
Speaker 1: left still standing is Richard Nixon. He was the only
Speaker 1: living president. Nixon was the only keeper of the secrets left,
Speaker 1: and there were definitely.
Speaker 2: Secrets to keep.
Speaker 1: Paul blake Smith wrote the book President Eisenhower's Close Encounters
Speaker 1: when Nixon was the vice president.
Speaker 5: To Dwight D.
Speaker 2: Eisenhower, he'd learned about the aliens who'd come to Earth.
Speaker 1: According to Paul Blacksmith, the story goes quote, Eisenhower stepped
Speaker 1: away from his golf vacation in Palm Springs, California, on
Speaker 1: the night of February nineteenth, nineteen fifty four, and went
Speaker 1: to Edward's Air Force Base in a pre arranged meeting
Speaker 1: to meet some landed friendly extraterrestrials. They were human like,
Speaker 1: according to a US test pilot who was there. The
Speaker 1: aliens were reportedly fluent English speakers, and they chatted with
Speaker 1: President Eisenhower in a relaxed and conversational manner. It seems
Speaker 1: that the aliens also liked Ike, but they did ask
Speaker 1: Eisenhower to do them one favor, hook him up do
Speaker 1: a solid for the et. As Paul Blake Smith tells it,
Speaker 1: the aliens told Ike, quote, stop.
Speaker 3: Your atomic boom testing program.
Speaker 1: So basically it was like a riff on the plot
Speaker 1: of the classic sci fi flick The Day of the
Speaker 1: Earth Stood Still. But you may be thinking, what about Nixon,
Speaker 1: was he also there, We don't know. It's doubtful. When
Speaker 1: LBJ was president, exactly ten years later, he took a
Speaker 1: trip out to that same top secret base in Palm Springs.
Speaker 1: Back to Paul Blake Smith, he claims that he found
Speaker 1: evidence that President Johnson also had a secret rendezvous with
Speaker 1: the same aliens that Ike spoke to.
Speaker 2: Apparently on the tenth.
Speaker 1: Anniversary of Eisenhower's initial contact with the Flying Saucer Men,
Speaker 1: which would make it February nineteenth, nineteen sixty four, then
Speaker 1: President Johnson called former President Eisenhower from the White House
Speaker 1: and asked him about the aliens, what to do, what
Speaker 1: to say, how to chitchat with them? Then he flew
Speaker 1: to Pop Springs, where he met with Ike in person
Speaker 1: multiple times. Then he went back again four years later
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty eight, and again on the same date,
Speaker 1: February nineteenth. As Paul Blake Smith reasons quote, something was up.
Speaker 2: Now does that date sound familiar.
Speaker 1: It's the same day that Nixon went golfing with Jackie Gleeson,
Speaker 1: and it's the same day that he took Jackie Gleeson
Speaker 1: to see the preserved bodies from a wrecked alien spaceship.
Speaker 1: Only now it's five years later. February nineteenth, nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: That day, Nixon was in Miami to attend Jackie Gleeson's
Speaker 1: celebrity golf tournament, which was televised on CBS. At the
Speaker 1: golf course, the President's helicopter touchdown, Nixon hopped out a
Speaker 1: Marine one. He chatted with the press before the news cameras.
Speaker 1: He bantered a bit with Jackie Gleeson. Then he and
Speaker 1: his pal hopped in a golf cart and toured the
Speaker 1: manicured greens. Their golf outing that day is well documented,
Speaker 1: but what's not as well documented is what happened later
Speaker 1: that same day when Nixon showed up at Jackie Gleeson's
Speaker 1: house alone. I gene with my own jew I In
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty, Jackie Gleason was on the radio talking about
Speaker 1: his love of all things alien. But he was no
Speaker 1: gape mouthed, goable guy. Gleason wasn't there to speculate. He
Speaker 1: wasn't there to dream aloud about one day seeing a
Speaker 1: flying saucer and those little green men from Mars. No,
Speaker 1: he wanted evidence, incontrovertible evidence, and he wanted others in
Speaker 1: the community to also demand provable evidence for what he called,
Speaker 1: quote the most important story in the world. The radio
Speaker 1: show he was on was called The Long John Neville Show.
Speaker 1: Jackie Gleason was a guest along with fellow paranormal researcher.
Speaker 2: Gray Barker, and Whoo. Jackie went hard after his fellow believer.
Speaker 1: At one point, the two men get into this heated
Speaker 1: exchange about a woman named Marla Baxter who claimed to
Speaker 1: be married to a man from Saturn.
Speaker 2: Jackie found it laughable.
Speaker 1: He felt this kind of talk was exactly the problem
Speaker 1: that was why aliens in flying saucers were considered such
Speaker 1: a kooky subject and never taken seriously by serious people.
Speaker 1: That night, in nineteen fifty eight, Gleason wondered aloud on
Speaker 1: the radio show why aliens always picked such dubious people
Speaker 1: to abduct or to give their messages to humanity?
Speaker 2: As Jackie Gleeson put.
Speaker 6: It, why what a space person contact anyone? Well, let's
Speaker 6: not say how it's that's dla. Why what a space
Speaker 6: person con got any woman being on it? That's what
Speaker 6: you think would be, at least according to the people
Speaker 6: who claim to be contacted the space people have a.
Speaker 4: Message for us.
Speaker 1: At this point, Jackie Gleason asks what that message is,
Speaker 1: and more importantly, he asks, if the aliens really want
Speaker 1: us to believe their message, and if they do want
Speaker 1: us to believe it, then why don't.
Speaker 4: They everdence along with this so that we were believe them.
Speaker 2: This is what drives the funny man crazy.
Speaker 1: If the aliens want to make contact, why do they
Speaker 1: always pick the most suspect citizens to convey the information
Speaker 1: to Why trust them with their message and then obscure
Speaker 1: any evidence that they've been on earth?
Speaker 2: It makes no sense.
Speaker 1: In that same radio show, Jackie Gleeson tells a story
Speaker 1: of how two years earlier, back in nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 1: he tried to make a documentary about aliens. His partner
Speaker 1: in the project was the legendary mid century journalist Edward R.
Speaker 4: Murraw.
Speaker 2: As Gleeson tells the story as.
Speaker 4: Morrow and I I want to and I sauld I
Speaker 4: think the biggest story of the world is flying them.
Speaker 4: If they I let you and I do a documentary
Speaker 4: fhing what don't If they're off wearing sauce or who telling,
Speaker 4: But it's just the full goal, then we should forget
Speaker 4: about it. And he says, I got the guy in
Speaker 4: general so and so up, and we called the guy
Speaker 4: up that the guy said to don't get paying this thing.
Speaker 4: I don't want to get pare it. It's too hot
Speaker 4: down here. I don't want to handle it. And you
Speaker 4: might as well to get about the project. You'll get
Speaker 4: no co operation. And I all hung up the phone
Speaker 4: and he left that may and he repeated what the
Speaker 4: guy said to him on the phone, if I could
Speaker 4: pare up the Henry, and he left that they're off wine.
Speaker 1: It didn't matter which avenue he attempted. If he partnered
Speaker 1: with a respected journalist and tried to ask the important questions,
Speaker 1: or if he did late night radio shows the paranormal investigators,
Speaker 1: Jackie Gleeson could never get the answers he most desperately desired,
Speaker 1: as he mused to Great Darker, the paranormal author and investigator.
Speaker 4: With a client off, a little guy hopping out and say.
Speaker 6: Perios probably wanted to go. And I want to have
Speaker 6: that ran down a faceball field in Central Park and
Speaker 6: there'll be plenty of people in who were three years
Speaker 6: and five minutes, everybody alone, whatever its.
Speaker 1: Is, well, Jackie Gleeson didn't know then, But what he
Speaker 1: was about to discover was that his friend, the most
Speaker 1: powerful man in the world, wanted to share a secret
Speaker 1: with him, one that would forever change his life. Jackie
Speaker 1: Gleeson met Beverly McKittrick, his second wife, at a country club.
Speaker 1: Looking back, much of his life was shaped by country clubs.
Speaker 1: The pair married in nineteen seventy. Their marriage didn't last long.
Speaker 1: They divorced in nineteen seventy five, but it was an
Speaker 1: amicable split. Eight years later, in nineteen eighty three, Beverly
Speaker 1: McKittrick shared a very unexpected story from her time being
Speaker 1: married to Jackie Gleeson. It was about the time his friend,
Speaker 1: the President showed her husband the Flying Saucerman.
Speaker 7: I'll never forget the night in nineteen seventy three my
Speaker 7: famous husband came home, slumped white faced in an armchair
Speaker 7: and spilled out the incredible story to me. He was late.
Speaker 7: It was around eleven thirty pm, and I'd been worried.
Speaker 7: As soon as I heard his key turn and the
Speaker 7: lock of our golf course home in Invery, Florida, I
Speaker 7: jumped to my feet and asked, where have you been.
Speaker 7: His reply stunned me.
Speaker 5: I've been at Homestead Air Force Base, and I've seen
Speaker 5: the bodies some aliens from out of space. It's top secret.
Speaker 5: Only a few people know, but the President arranged for
Speaker 5: me to be escorted in there and see them.
Speaker 1: According to mckitchenen, that night, Nixon showed up at their
Speaker 1: home alone, driving himself. Now this may sound fetched, but Nixon,
Speaker 1: like John F. Kennedy, was known to sneak out of
Speaker 1: the White House, and Nixon was even known to give
Speaker 1: his Secret service men the slip from time to time.
Speaker 1: Guess Old Tricky Dick was also Slippery Dick. So there's
Speaker 1: Nixon saigns his secret service guys. When he shows up
Speaker 1: at Jackie Gleeson's home and the President tells Jackie he's
Speaker 1: got a surprise for him.
Speaker 5: Nixon is like, come on, good up, Jackie, put on
Speaker 5: your pants, let's go. There's something I want to show you.
Speaker 1: Nixon drives them thirty five miles over to Homestead Air
Speaker 1: Force Base. Of course, the President's recognized and saluted by
Speaker 1: the soldier at the gate, and they're waved onto the base.
Speaker 1: Nixon leads Jackie Gleeson to a top secret facility. It
Speaker 1: was heavily guarded yet it was a nondescript building. There,
Speaker 1: Nixon is waved into the top secret facility because he's
Speaker 1: the president, and I guess that includes plus one privileges,
Speaker 1: because he was able to get Jackie Gleeson into the
Speaker 1: top secret facility with him. Jackie Gleeson's wife McKittrick very
Speaker 1: memorably recalls what he told her when he returned home.
Speaker 7: There were a number of labs we passed through first
Speaker 7: before we entered a section where Nixon pointed out what
Speaker 7: he said was the wreckage from a flying saucer and
Speaker 7: closed in several large cases. Next, we went into an
Speaker 7: inner chamber, and there were six or eight of what
Speaker 7: looked like glass topped coke freezers. Inside them were the
Speaker 7: mangled remains of what I took to be children.
Speaker 1: It's finally happening. The aliens are so close Jackie Gleeson
Speaker 1: can almost touch them. One might imagine Gleeson is looking
Speaker 1: to Nixon, the President nodding in response, and then Gleeson
Speaker 1: looks once again at the fantastically terrific sight before him.
Speaker 1: It's easy to imagine Nixon standing there in the top
Speaker 1: secret base wearing some awkward, uneasy Nixon smile. As he
Speaker 1: tells his good friend Jackie Gleeson.
Speaker 5: Ugh, as you can see they're real.
Speaker 1: There's just a thick piece of glass separating the former
Speaker 1: TV star from what he's most always wanted to see,
Speaker 1: a real alien from outer space.
Speaker 7: And there were the aliens, lying on four separate tables.
Speaker 7: They were tiny, only about two feet tall, with small,
Speaker 7: bald heads and disproportionately large eyes. They must have been
Speaker 7: dead for some time because they'd been embalmed.
Speaker 1: According to Nixon, the alien's bodies had been pulled from
Speaker 1: the wreckage of a spaceship.
Speaker 2: No word on if it was the famous crash at Roswell.
Speaker 1: After all those years of searching, after reading all those
Speaker 1: thousands of books, attending all the conferences, and listening to
Speaker 1: all those late night call in shows, finally Jackie Gleeson
Speaker 1: had his evidence of flying saucers and the little Green
Speaker 1: men from Mars, and just as Nixon had hoped, it
Speaker 1: indeed blew his friend's mind. His wife remembers how after
Speaker 1: he returned home, Jackie Gleeson.
Speaker 2: Couldn't sleep for two weeks.
Speaker 1: He wanted to know so badly and for so long,
Speaker 1: But then when he finally did see an alien in
Speaker 1: a spaceship with his own two eyes. It nearly wrecked him.
Speaker 1: He didn't know how to process it. However, he did
Speaker 1: know he needed to swear his wife to secrecy, so
Speaker 1: he did that, and she didn't tell anyone right up
Speaker 1: until they got divorced, and then she wrote her tell
Speaker 1: All memoir.
Speaker 2: Then she told the story to the.
Speaker 1: National Inquirer because Homegirl needed to sell some books, which
Speaker 1: immediately undercut her credibility. So what did Jackie Gleason say
Speaker 1: about his encounter after his wife spilled the beans and
Speaker 1: told his secret to the world.
Speaker 5: Nothing.
Speaker 1: He didn't deny it, he didn't dispute it. He also
Speaker 1: didn't corroborate it. He didn't say anything. One year before
Speaker 1: he passed away, Jackie Gleeson gave an interview to a
Speaker 1: fellow ufologist named Larry Warren, and that guy claims that
Speaker 1: Jackie Gleeson repeated the same story to him seated there
Speaker 1: in his UFO shaped home in the Hudson Valley. Also,
Speaker 1: there are some who have claimed to see those very
Speaker 1: same aliens in the top secret base in Homestead, Florida,
Speaker 1: and one man, a former CIA operative named Chauncey Holt,
Speaker 1: claims he was there that very day, February nineteenth, nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three, when Nixon showed Jackie Gleeson the small, mangled
Speaker 1: bodies of shipwrecked aliens. Yet the question remains, did Richard
Speaker 1: Nixon really reveal the greatest secret ever kept? Did the
Speaker 1: President take his golf buddy Jackie Gleeson to a top
Speaker 1: secret facility and show him the proof he so clearly craved.
Speaker 2: We don't know.
Speaker 1: Ironically, we have no proof. We just have the stories.
Speaker 1: But I like to believe it happened. But I like
Speaker 1: to believe aliens are real. I also like to believe
Speaker 1: that Jackie Gleeson got what he wanted most out of
Speaker 1: this life, that he finally saw a real alien, and
Speaker 1: seeing it wiped out everything he'd ever known or believed
Speaker 1: to be true, which wrecked him too, the great cost
Speaker 1: of innocence lost. I also like to believe that the
Speaker 1: most powerful man in the world, Richard Nixon, the master
Speaker 1: of secrets, wanted to give his friend the greatest gift
Speaker 1: he could think of, but he forgot to tell him
Speaker 1: how to live with that truth. There's an irony there too.
Speaker 1: The most famous liar in American political history gives his
Speaker 1: friend a great hidden truth as a gift, and that
Speaker 1: truth damn near kills his friend Nixon.
Speaker 2: But at least Jackie Gleeson got to see the aliens.
Speaker 1: That is, if you believe it happened. We just don't know.
Speaker 1: But sometimes not knowing is better. We can believe whatever
Speaker 1: we want.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3: Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
Speaker 3: Today's episode is written by Zaren Burnett. Our show is
Speaker 3: hosted by Zaren Burnett, Danish Schwartz, and Jason English. Our
Speaker 3: producer is Josh Fisher. Editing and sam designed by Jonathan
Speaker 3: Washington and Josh Fisher. Mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher.
Speaker 3: Additional editing by Mary Doo. Original music by Alice McCoy.
Speaker 3: Show logo by Lucy Kintonia. Our executive producer is Jason English.
Speaker 3: Our next episode comes out next Friday, June twenty seventh.
Speaker 3: We are a Wednesday show, but we need to shift
Speaker 3: a couple of days next week because we have a
Speaker 3: very exciting interview that will be incorporated in that episode.
Speaker 3: So give us a couple of days. It'll be worth it.
Speaker 3: Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.