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It is an article of faith among UFO conspiracy theorists that every United States president since Franklin Roosevelt has been privy to top secret evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life. According to the 2015 book The Presidents And UFOs: A Secret History From FDR To Obama, virtually all of them wanted to go public with the knowledge of who (or what) is responsible for sightings of unidentified flying objects, but were blocked by intelligence officials. Richard Nixon — who, according to the book's author, Larry Holcombe, was convinced that a limited level of UFO disclosure would ensure his place in history — went to extraordinary lengths to preserve that information for posterity, if more recent reports are to be believed. A 20 March 2018 article on the conspiracy-oriented blog YourNewsWire.com featured quotes from a phone interview with Robert Merritt, a sometime police informant and — according to him — covert domestic intelligence operative for the Nixon administration, in which he says he was shown proof of extraterrestrial life during a face-to-face meeting with the president: It's more than a little preposterous. We listened to the entire 75-minute interview with Merritt, conducted by self-styled Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt, in hopes that we could make better sense of it. We couldn't. The absurdities and contradictions are too glaring and too many. Merritt says the last of his three one-on-one meetings with Richard Nixon occurred in July 1972, just after news of the Watergate burglary broke. He found Nixon in tears, fearing for the survival of his presidency. But that wasn't the reason Nixon had asked him there. He wanted to talk about aliens. This is from a partial transcript of the interview provided by EarthFiles.com: Merritt would have us believe that almost a half-century ago, Nixon had earth-shattering evidence that the U.S. government possessed advanced scientific knowledge gleaned from aliens (knowledge that made the television show Star Trek look antiquated, the president supposedly said), and what he chose to do with it was hide it in a time capsule of which Nixon never spoke again. Moreover, Nixon allegedly shared this revelation with only two other people: Merritt, a shadowy dirty tricks operative the president barely knew, and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who himself has never spoken of the matter. Nixon said whatever nation possessed this advanced knowledge could rule the world. What became of it? What became of the alien(s)? What became of their alleged home planet, Planet X (which, in astronomers' parlance, refers to a hypothetical, yet-to-be-discovered planet beyond the orbit of Pluto)? What became of the manila envelope taped to Merritt's stomach? Actually, we do know what became of the latter. According to Merritt, he popped it in a mailbox. (So much for Nixon's adhesive tape spycraft.) The rest is a mystery wrapped in an enigma inside a bad science fiction novel. Merritt is, without a doubt, a colorful figure, and no stranger to conspiracy theories. His previous claim to fame was a book co-written in 2010 with Douglas Caddy, an attorney who briefly represented the Watergate burglars in 1972, which was billed as an exposé of the Watergate scandal. Merritt maintains that Nixon was innocent of complicity in the break-in and cover-up. Instead, he was supposedly set up by conspirators inside the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who concocted the scandal to bring the president down. The historical record says otherwise. As to Richard Nixon's supposed interest in and knowledge of extraterrestrial life, apart from unsourced quotes cited by UFO enthusiasts and a dubious supermarket tabloid story published in 1983, there's little evidence that he gave it much thought at all. Said story, which ran in the infamously unreliable National Enquirer under the byline of Beverly Gleason (the ex-wife of television comedian Jackie Gleason), describes an incident that had allegedly occurred ten years before: Gleason's story was incredible indeed — though not too incredible to be published in the National Enquirer, the pages of which were often filled with outlandish reports of supernatural occurrences. There is little reason to believe that it's anything other than a tall tale. An entry in Richard Nixon's daily diary confirms he was with Jackie Gleason at a celebrity golf tournament in Lauderhill, Florida on 19 February 1973. The president's tight schedule left zero room for a side-trip to gawk at alien corpses, however. At 12:10 p.m. he was delivered by helicopter to the Inverrary Golf and Country Club, where he was greeted by Jackie Gleason. After motoring to the eighteenth green in a golf cart, Gleason introduced the president to the assembled guests, to whom he spoke for around 10 minutes. By 12:30, Nixon was back at the helipad, and on his way to his Key Biscayne compound. We found no other records of Nixon and Gleason meeting in 1973. The fact is, according to Nixon confidant Frank Gannon, who spent many hours interviewing him and editing his memoirs during the late 1970s and early '80s, the ex-president evinced no interest in UFOs or extraterrestrial life at all: In a coda to the E.T. time capsule story, Robert Merritt's co-writer Douglas Caddy penned a February 2018 missive to the National Archives and Records Administration offering to disclose the location of Nixon's secret letter on the condition that its contents — if the document is discovered — be made public. He has yet to be taken up on the offer.
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