http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53203-2004Feb18.html

Ike and the Alien Ambassadors
The Whole Tooth About the President's Extraterrestrial Encounter
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page C01
Fifty years ago tomorrow -- on Feb. 20, 1954 -- President Dwight
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. There's some
dispute about this.
The Ike-met-with-ETs theory is advanced by Michael Salla, a former
American University professor who now runs the Peace Ambassador
Program at AU's Center for Global Peace.
The Ike-went-to-the-dentist theory is advanced by the folks at the
Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan. And by James M.
Mixson, a dentist, professor of dentistry and historian of
presidential dental work.
Just to make things more intriguing: On the night in question, the
Associated Press reported this: "Pres. Eisenhower died tonight of a
heart attack in Palm Springs."
Two minutes later, the AP retracted that bulletin and reported that
Ike was still alive.
Indeed, Ike was alive. And he continued living until 1969. But in
the decades since his death, his activities on the night of Feb. 20,
1954, have become fodder for strange theories about alien beings.
Some facts are beyond dispute: Eisenhower was on a golf vacation in
Palm Springs on Feb. 20, 1954. After dinner that night, he made an
unscheduled departure from the Smoking Tree Ranch, where he was
staying. The next morning, he attended a church service in Los
Angeles. Also that morning, his spokesman announced to the press
that Ike had visited a dentist the previous night because he'd
chipped a tooth while eating a chicken wing at dinner.
Salla, who has a PhD in government from the University of Queensland
in his native Australia, doesn't believe it. He figures the dentist
trip is just a cover story. He believes Ike went to Edwards Air
Force Base, where he met with two ETs with white hair, pale blue
eyes and colorless lips.
These aliens -- nicknamed "Nordics" in UFO circles because they
resemble Scandinavian humans -- traveled to Edwards from another
solar system in a flying saucer and, Salla says, they spoke to
Eisenhower.
"There was telepathic communication," says Salla, 45, as he sits in
his suburban Falls Church living room. "It's as though you're
hearing a person but they're not speaking."
The "Nordics" offered to share their superior technology and their
spiritual wisdom with Ike if he would agree to eliminate America's
nuclear weapons.
"They were afraid we might blow up some of our nuclear technology,"
Salla says, "and apparently that does something to time and space
and it impacts on extraterrestrial races on other planets."
Ike declined the ETs' offer, Salla says, because he did not want to
give up the nukes.
Sometime later in 1954, Ike reached a deal with another race of
extraterrestrials, known as the "Greys" -- 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.
Salla, author of "The Hero's Journey Toward a Second American
Century," published his ET theories in his new book, "Exopolitics:
Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence" and in an
article on his "Exopolitics" Web site (http://www.exopolitics.org/).
For much of the '90s, Salla studied conflict resolution and tried
unsuccessfully to apply that knowledge to prevent war in East Timor
and the Balkans, he says. Frustrated, he began looking for an
extraterrestrial connection to human misery and, he says, he found
evidence of ET visitations -- including the Ike encounter -- on the
Internet.
"There's a lot of stuff on the Internet," he says, "and I just went
around and pieced it together."
Meanwhile, he taught at the School of International Service at
American University. In 2003 he founded the university's Peace
Ambassador Program, described on the AU Web site as a "summer
program that combines study, meditative practices, and prayer
ceremonies at selected Washington DC sites aimed at promoting
individual self-empowerment and Divine Governance in Washington DC."
Salla stresses that his ET research is not connected with his work
at AU's Center for Global Peace. The folks at the Center for Global
Peace are also quite eager to stress that fact.
"The research that Michael Salla is doing is not research that he is
conducting on behalf of the center or in collaboration with the
center," says Betty Sitka, associate director of the Center for
Global Peace. "This is his own personal research."
Meanwhile, the question remains: Did Ike really meet with ETs 50
years ago?
"Not to our knowledge," says Jim Leyerzapf, an archivist at the
Eisenhower Library. "There's nothing in the archives that indicates
that."
Then Leyerzapf bursts out laughing.
He has heard this theory before. "We've had so many requests on that
subject that we have a person who specializes in this."
That person is archivist Herb Pankratz.
"He specialized in transportation," Leyerzapf says, "and we decided
to add UFOs to that. He does trains, planes, automobiles -- and
flying saucers."
The library fielded dozens of questions about the alleged Ike-ET
meeting in the late '80s and early '90s, when several UFO books
advanced the theory, Pankratz says.
"It's interesting how these stories have changed," Pankratz noted in
an e-mail. "Initially, the accounts claimed the President made a
secret trip to Edwards Air Force Base to view the remains of aliens
who had crashed at Roswell, N.M., in 1947. Later stories then
claimed he had actually visited with live aliens."
Pankratz doesn't buy either theory. He believes the dentist story,
and he cites James Mixson, the dental historian and professor at the
University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Dentistry. Mixson's
article "A History of Dwight D. Eisenhower's Oral Health" --
published in the November 1995 issue of the Bulletin of the History
of Dentistry -- is the definitive work on Ike's teeth.
Citing the U.S. surgeon general's records on Ike's medical and
dental history, opened to researchers in 1991, Mixson reported that
on the fateful night of Feb. 20, 1954, Ike chipped the porcelain cap
of his "upper left central incisor" and it was repaired by Dr.
Francis A. Purcell.
Alas, Purcell is unavailable for comment. He died in 1974, according
to Pankratz.
"The lack of a dental record from Purcell's office," Mixson
wrote, "has helped fuel belief in this UFO encounter."
But, Mixson quickly added, "the President had well-documented
difficulties with this crown."
Indeed, the crown, which was installed in July 1952, was chipped and
repaired in December 1952, the February in question, and again in
July 1954, when the president's dentist, Col. James M. Fairchild,
replaced it with a "thin cast gold/platinum thimble crown."
That may be more than you wanted to know about Ike's dental work. If
not, Mixson goes on at some length, quoting a long, lyrical passage
written by Fairchild on this troublesome presidential incisor.
Meanwhile, there's another perplexing question: Why did the AP
report that Ike died that night?
"Somebody was fooling around and it went out," Pankratz says. "It
wasn't supposed to go out but it did."
Ike never made any public statement about meeting ETs, Pankratz
says. But did he perhaps spill the beans to his family? Ike's son,
John S.D. Eisenhower, is a retired Army brigadier general and author
of several books on history, including "General Ike: A Personal
Reminiscence."
Asked via e-mail if his father had ever mentioned meeting with
aliens, Eisenhower responded with a short but emphatic reply: "No."
He declined to comment further.
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