Did ET like Ike?

There’s an old UFO tale that always sends the needle on my skeptical meter into the red danger zone: The claim that President Dwight Eisenhower met at least once, maybe several times, with extraterrestrial aliens during the mid 1950s.
Despite my own misgivings, the stories seem to continue to thrive in UFO lore.
As I was researching my book, UFO Cold Cases: Kansas, I ran across some material I didn’t include in my book — writings and videos about what happened during Ike’s mysterious disappearance during a “vacation” trip to Palm Springs, California, in February 1954.
Eisenhower, a native of Abilene, Kansas, was a military genius who became the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II. He was elected president during the 1952 election and served two terms through 1961.
His presidency covered the time period when the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book investigators were regularly keeping track of thousands UFO sightings around the world.
The Blue Book documents don’t have anything about the alleged visit. But I did find a documented UFO sighting the following night in the nearby Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys — something I’d never heard before.
Here’s a condensed version of the Washington Post’s feature story in 2004 on the 50th anniversary of the tale.
WaPo reports that on Feb. 20, 1954, Eisenhower “interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., to make a secret nocturnal trip to a nearby Air Force base to meet two extraterrestrial aliens.
“Or maybe not. Maybe Ike just went to the dentist.”
The WaPo story talks about the now 62-year-old dispute between Ike’s official biographers and those who claim his emergency visit to the dentist for a chipped tooth was just a cover story.
Michael Salla, a UFO researcher whose theories are on Exopolitics.org, expounds the theory that Eisenhower went unannounced to Edwards Air Force Base, where he met with two “Nordic” aliens, so-called because their white hair, pale blue eyes and colorless lips make them resemble Scandinavian humans.
Salla claims the Nordics, who communicated telepathically, wanted to make a deal: If Ike would eliminate the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, they would share their superior technology and spiritual wisdom. Ike turned them down.
Salla also claims another race of ETs, known as the “Greys” — also met with Ike later that same year and made a deal “allowing them to capture earthling cattle and humans for medical experiments, provided that they returned the humans safely home. Since then, Salla says, the ‘Greys’ have kidnapped ‘millions’ of humans,” according to the WaPo story.
However, the WaPo story goes on to say that the archivists in the Eisenhower Library in Abilene laugh off the story and others like it.
And that would seem to be the end of it. Or is it?
As I said earlier, I searched through the Project Blue Book documents available online to see what might have been reported around that time.
I found a two-page document that seemed to be out of place in the files.
It was dated Feb. 24, 1954, and was titled “Memorandum for Chief, General Investigations Division.”
The name of the informant was blotted out, but the details were a little bit strange, given the Ike UFO story.
Could this sighting be a smoking gun for the Ike story?
The memo says the informant reported he had seen two flying saucers about 11 p.m. Feb. 21 as he was returning to his home in Van Nuys. The man said he was unlocking his garage door when he saw an object in the sky that he recognized from written accounts as a flying saucer. He called to his wife and mother, who were still in his car, to look at it.
His next-door neighbor, (name blotted out), a former Marine Corps pilot, and the neighbor’s wife also came outside to see what was going on.
The report said “the first object he saw was moving erratically at considerable speed and making changes in direction impossible to any aircraft with which he was familiar. It disappeared to the west, traveling at a very high rate of speed. (The neighbor) and his wife came into the yard in time to see this object traveling toward the west.”
Then the group saw a second object approaching from the north.
“This object appeared to be coming directly toward the group and then made three complete circles over the area and disappeared to the east.”
The two men in the group, who were both pilots during World War II and had flown about 2,000 hours, reported they had seen many natural aerial phenomena, such as St. Elmo’s fire — but the objects they saw were nothing like that.
They described the objects as luminous, reddish in the center, with an electric-blue luminosity at the edges which seemed to flash in a bluish halo as they turned. They also said the UFOs were elliptical and seemed to be transparent.
Meanwhile, below is a 2013 video of a dying man who claims he worked for the CIA and was involved in UFO investigations. In the video, he claims he was sent by Eisenhower to Area 51 where he ended up seeing the Roswell crash remains and where he saw a live “Grey” alien.