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The Gleason/UFO connection: February 19, 1973 — President Richard Nixon meets on the 18th green of the Inverness (Fla.) Golf and Country Club with entertainer Jackie Gleason. Gleason has long been a fan of UFOs. He later becomes a subscriber to the newsletter Just Cause (Citizens Against UFO Secrecy). Gleason has a collection of 1,700 books on parapsychology, UFOs, and the unknown. Gleason’s second wife, Beverly McKittrick, says that Nixon took Gleason to a heavily secured area at Homestead AFB [now Homestead Air Reserve Base] where he views the remains of small aliens in a top secret repository. McKittrick relates this story in an unpublished manuscript of Gleason called “The Great One.” Larry Bryant, editor of Just Cause, the newsletter Gleason had a subscription to, files a Freedom of Information Act request with Homestead AFB. Bryant requests documentation on the repository and Gleason’s visit there to see the alien bodies. Homestead replies that “no such records existed.” Bryant also sends an advertisement to the Homestead AFB newspaper soliciting information. The public affairs officer at Homestead denounces the Bryant advertisement and “forbade its publication.” At the same time Bryant writes Gleason providing him with a draft affidavit. He asks Gleason to execute the affidavit so it can be used as part of a growing accumulation of evidence Bryant is collecting in preparation for taking the government to court to release all information on alien crash retrievals. Gleason does not reply. Shortly before his death in 1987, one story says Gleason confirms the story about seeing the bodies at Homestead. The person who Jackie Gleason tells the story to is Larry Warren, who is a member of the Air Force Security Police at RAF Bentwaters, one of two bases in England where in late December 1980, three days of bizarre UFO incidents take place. Warren says that Gleason and Nixon enter a room with 6–8 glass-topped freezers. Inside “were the mangled remains of what I took to be children.” On closer inspection, he sees that some of the figures look old and injured. Gleason cannot sleep or eat for three weeks after the visit. The director of the Secret Service under President Clinton, Lewis C. Merletti, claims that the idea of a president escaping his secret service agents only happens in the movies. In response to a question by reporter Joan London about the possibility of the president escaping his protection to go out and secretly do something, Merletti claims, “all Hollywood. There’s no sneaking out. It has never happened.” Marty Venker, a Secret Service agent who worked with Merletti under Presidents Ford and Carter, however, tells a different story. In his book Confessions of an Ex-Secret Service Agent he explains that not only can the president disappear, but it has happened. Venker states that in the exact year of the Homestead incident with Gleason, 1973, Nixon tries to cut his secret service protection. Venker also states that it was not uncommon for Nixon to try to elude his Secret Service detail. The agents working on the Nixon presidential detail were warned about it. Nixon is familiar with Homestead AFB, which is only minutes from his Biscayne Bay compound. There is no proof that Nixon escorted Jackie Gleason to view alien bodies at Homestead, but everything checked out indicates it could very well have happened. It would have been very easy in terms of distance for the Gleason/Nixon alien event to have occurred. (https://web.archive.org/web/20201006005302/http://www.presidentialufo.com/old_site/richardm.htm ; Fortean Times 366 (May 2018): 30–36)

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