William J. Birnes - UFOs and the White House: What Did Our Presidents Know and When Did They Know It?

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

OUTSIDE THE OVERTON WINDOW

W inston 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 its 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 didnt.

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 Reagans not one but two UFO sightings, his administrations 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-ters UFO sighting and also that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the victim of 2016s 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 didnt, and heres 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 cant, and what should be relegated to what the Huffington Post refers to as News of the Weird. How often will Foxs 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 didnt report on Reagans 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 eventstrue, documented, and substantiatedare 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? Thats the Overton Window being shattered by the chapters that follow. From the first UFO sightings by the New England colonists in the 1630s to todays White House, UFOs are making their way into American history. Theyre all here. And theyre 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

I n 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

Fishermen on a small flat-bottomed cargo-carrying bargecalled a lighterat 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 something 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 todays 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 hadnt been invented yet, counts as credible sighting as any sighting of a floating orb today.

Just five years later, towards the end of Governor Winthrops 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 Chaddocks 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.