Social Media

Twitter Polls about Presidents and UFOs

What our Twitter sampling says about modern UFOlogy when it comes to the occupants who have worked in the Oval Office may surprise you.

My Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel podcast co-host Ross Coulthart and I are deep into prepping our sixth episode, “Take Me to Your Leader,” one that focuses on the much speculated about and not entirely clear relationship between U.S. presidents and what they knew and what they didn’t know about UFO/UAP reality.

Because we each have fairly significant Twitter followings of people (@RossCoulthart @HollywoodUFOs) who, presumably, are interested in the topic themselves, we did a collection of instant polls to see what might be the thinking on some classic stories that seem to hang around the subject. Consider it a snapshot of a moving target. It is hardly definitive, but it still feels useful.

We’ll start with the current occupant of the White House, President Joe Biden. We begin this with a simple question:

Has President Joe Biden received a comprehensive briefing on the UAP issue?

This result is significant because it means that a plurality of people who read up on this subject generally think the current president is not fully informed on this issue by the very government he was elected to represent. We’re going to take this a more or less legitimate picture of the feelings people have given that the poll received our largest number of votes (617 in a single day).

Next we skip back in time to the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan held office (1981–1989). Reagan’s connection to the UFO issue is stronger than most. He’s rumored to have seen a UFO in the 1950s on the Pacific Coast Highway but, for sure, he saw one in 1974 when running for re-election as California governor and had his pilot actually chase after it.

As president, Reagan spoke openly on at least two occasions about how, if the world faced an alien threat, we might pull together and forget our petty divisions. He said that in a speech before the United Nations, and he said it to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbechev who confirmed it. He also told filmmaker Steven Spielberg at a White House screening of ET that the two of them might be the only two people in the room who knew how true the film was.

Since a lot of that is public record, we asked a tougher question about whether Reagan’s support for a controversial space based anti-missile system was aimed at the Soviet Union or a greater threat.

Did President Ronald Reagan have certain knowledge of alien reality that caused him to support the “Star Wars” missile system?

This one wasn’t close at all. In political terms it was a landslide for the belief that Reagan most definitely pursued the “Star Wars” system because of his beliefs about aliens.

Which takes us to the man Reagan defeated for the presidency, President Jimmy Carter. Again, Carter’s bonafides on the UFO subject are clear. He saw a UFO in 1969 while campaigning to be governor of Georgia. He filled out a NICAP report on it that is public record. And in 1975, while campaigning for the presidency, he promised that he would release UFO data to the American public if he was elected.

He never did, though, and that’s the mystery. Many people believe he was warned off the whole thing which seems reasonable. Yet there’s another story, one where he is briefed partially, and even that level of truth is so shattering to Carter, that an aide spied him crying at his desk in the Oval Office. So, we had to ask:

Did President Jimmy Carter receive a UFO briefing that caused him to cry at his desk?

There isn’t much journalism to support this specific story but, apparently, people think it feels right. Half of our 236 voters in this poll said they thought that UFO reality brought Carter to tears.

Now we come to the story that people who study ufology love to tell. In this one, President Richard Nixon, a friend of comedian and actor Jackie Gleason, shows up at his house without a Secret Service escort. He takes Gleason to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida and takes him to a distant hangar and shows him an alien craft. Wait! There’s more. Then he takes him into a room inside the hangar and shows Gleason a collection of dead alien bodies that are suspended in some kind of liquid solution.

Jackie Gleason was definitely into UFOs. He had over 1700 books in his collection, and built himself a house that looked like a flying saucer. His ex-wife supports this story and wrote that he came home that night and told it to her and never deviated from it.

Did President Richard Nixon show a retrieved saucer and alien bodies to comedian Jackie Gleason?

This one divides people who are interested in the history of UFO/UAP reality. With 591 votes cast in 24 hours, they gave support to the story’s truth with a plurality of nearly 43%. But “Not sure” and “No” had strong support, too.

While it may sound like a Hollywood movie logline, this time it’s personal. The NBC TV series Dark Skies that I co-created with Brent V. Friedman was set in the 1960s during an alien invasion. The pilot episode had the main character, John Loengard, recruited into Majestic-12. He stole an artifact from the Roswell crash, got it to JFK who said he was going to go public with the UFO story in his second term after the 1964 election. Our poll puts that one to the test, too.

Was the assassination of President John Kennedy connected in any way to UFO secrecy?

The plurality in this poll may just think that my Dark Skies premise was good fiction but not necessarily true. 39% said it didn’t happen that way while 33% said it did. The truth is there is more to the JFK story these days anyway. The prevailing rumor is that he told Marilyn Monroe about UFOs shortly before her death. Also, it looks like he did ask NASA to get involved in the subject shortly before his own.

Yet when it comes to the Big Daddy of presidential UFO stories, many ufologists echo President Dwight Eisenhower’s election slogan, “I like Ike.” For years, the hot story has been that during his term (1953–1961), Eisenhower not only met with aliens on an Air Force base, but he cut a deal with them. An unsavory deal (for us, anyway) that we are living with to this day. It’s such a hot rumor that just last year it inspired a movie (The 11th Green) and a TV season (American Horror Story).

Did President Dwight Eisenhower actually meet with non-humans and strike a deal with them?

Here’s the one where folks were close to evenly divided on Yes, No or Not Sure. The undecideds took the day with 37% which seems reasonable. Even though there are sources who say some version of this happened, they’re not significant enough or on-the-record publicly, for hard evaluation. This does require a high standard. Thinking about Ike staring down an ET visitor still comes across to most as science fiction and is very hard to wrap your head around.

Finally, we go back to the beginning (or at least what many believe was the beginning) of the UFO cover-up. The thinking here is that Roswell happened for real, and bodies and crash wreckage were recovered. This happened on the watch of President Harry Truman who realized the military of the time — even though they’d beat Hitler just two years earlier — was now running around with their hair on fire over aliens. So he did what they asked him to do, form a high level group, secret as hell, to figure out what to do next.

Many people think that group was called Majestic-12 and, depending on who you ask, there are real documents or real fake documents that were leaked in the 1980s, to prove it. So we are asking our Twitter followers what they think.

Did President Harry Truman create an organization known as Majestic-12 in the aftermath of the Roswell crash?

And while the last one was our closest, this one is our most definitive. Readers do believe that Harry Truman did, post-Roswell crash, put together a group of military, intelligence and scientific insiders to look into the matter. Given a reality to Roswell, this seems more than likely, whether or not the group ended up being called Majestic-12 or not.

What Does It All Mean?

Probably not all that much. While the samples are healthy as far as Twitter polls go, there’s just nothing scientific about it. What can be interesting, though, is to consider that almost everyone who voted in it already thinks they know something about the UFO/UAP issue because they follow a UFO Twitter feed and they are interested in the topic.

Among that group, on Twitter, in the first month of 2022, those people, by varying margins felt this way:

• They believe President Truman created Majestic-12 to deal with the ET situation, President Reagan created a space-based missile system to deal with a non-human threat, President Nixon showed bodies and crash wreckage to a non-classified personal friend in Jackie Gleason, and President Carter got a partial briefing that was enough to bring him to tears.
• They don’t believe President Biden has had a full briefing or that President Kennedy’s assassination had anything to do with ET issues.
• They’re not sure if President Eisenhower met with aliens.

If you want to hear more about what Ross Coulthart and I have to say about the whole history of presidents and UFOs, check out the next episode of Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel.

Please follow Ross Coulthart and Bryce Zabel on Twitter at @RossCoulthart and @HollywoodUFOs. Here are a few other article from Trail of the Saucers that are about some of the issues raised in the above article: