NIXON AND GLEASON

Opening

On 19 February 1973, President Richard Nixon was in Florida. That afternoon he dropped in at a golf tournament hosted by his friend Jackie Gleason, the star of The Honeymooners and one of the most famous entertainers in America. According to Gleason's wife at the time, Beverly, Nixon turned up at their house again that night, alone, without his Secret Service detail. He and Gleason drove off together into the dark. When Gleason came home hours later, she said, he was pale, shaken, and quiet. He told her Nixon had taken him to Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami and shown him wreckage of a flying saucer, and the bodies of its crew: tiny, about two feet tall, in glass-topped cases.

No one else has ever claimed to see Nixon and Gleason together that night, and no record of the visit exists. But the parts of the story that can be checked mostly check out, and the man at its centre was one of the most dedicated UFO enthusiasts in American public life.

Timeline

1950s. Gleason is a regular guest on Long John Nebel's late-night New York radio show, which discusses UFOs and the paranormal. He begins building what becomes a library of more than a thousand books on UFOs, psychic phenomena, and the occult.

1959. Gleason builds a round, domed house in Peekskill, New York, nicknamed "the Mothership."

1960s to early 1970s. Gleason moves his TV show to Miami Beach and later settles in Florida. He and Nixon become friends and golf partners.

19 February 1973. Nixon is at his Key Biscayne retreat. The Nixon Library's records show his day included an AFL-CIO meeting and about 40 minutes at Gleason's golf tournament at the Inverrary club.

That night (as told). Nixon arrives unannounced at the Gleason home, without his security detail, and drives Gleason to Homestead Air Force Base, about 35 miles south-west of Miami. Inside a guarded building, Gleason sees what he's told is wreckage from a crashed craft, and six or eight glass-topped cases holding small bodies with bald heads, some of them badly damaged.

After. Gleason tells Beverly the story that night. She says he was deeply troubled, not excited, and didn't want to talk about it afterwards.

Mid-1970s. Jackie and Beverly Gleason divorce.

1983. Beverly tells the story to the National Enquirer. It spreads around the world.

1986. Larry Warren, a former airman and witness in the Rendlesham Forest case, says he met Gleason, who told him a version of the same story privately after an evening of drinking.

24 June 1987. Gleason dies. He never confirms or denies the story publicly.

After his death. Gleason's UFO and occult library is donated to the University of Miami, where it's kept as a special collection.

Key figures

Jackie Gleason was a huge TV star, and his interest in UFOs was lifelong and public. He read widely, collected seriously, and talked about the subject on the radio. If a president wanted to show a civilian friend something, Gleason is the friend who'd most want to see it.

Richard Nixon was president, and in February 1973 was only weeks away from the Watergate scandal breaking fully open. He never spoke about the story.

Beverly McKittrick Gleason, Jackie's second wife, is the only direct source. She told the story about ten years after the night it describes, and after their divorce.

Larry Warren gave the only other account, second-hand, from Gleason himself.

Physical and documentary trail

On the paper: Beverly's 1983 account, Warren's later claim, and the documented friendship between Nixon and Gleason. The Nixon Library confirms Nixon was in the area that day and at Gleason's tournament. It shows no late-night trip, and no Secret Service or base record of such a visit has ever surfaced.

The gap is the obvious one: a sitting president leaving his security detail to drive a TV star to an air base would have been nearly impossible to do without anyone noticing. Supporters answer that this is exactly what a president could arrange, if he wanted to.

I've been at Homestead Air Force Base and I've seen the bodies of some aliens.

Competing explanations

It happened. A president with access to the most closely held secrets showed them to a trusted friend who'd spent his life wanting to know. Gleason's reaction, shaken and silent instead of thrilled, fits someone who saw something he didn't want to have seen.

A prank or a misunderstanding. Nixon may have taken Gleason somewhere, or told him something, as a joke on a friend he knew was obsessed. Gleason may have taken it more seriously than it was meant.

A story that grew. Beverly told it ten years later, after a divorce, to a tabloid known for paying for stories. Gleason loved a big tale, and Warren's version came after drinking.

Later life of the case

The Nixon-Gleason story is one of the best-loved UFO legends, repeated in books, podcasts, and TV documentaries, and revived whenever UFO disclosure is in the news. According to entertainment coverage, the 2026 film Disclosure Day brings the legend to the screen, giving it a new audience.

Finding

The frame of the story is real: Nixon was in Florida that day, he did go to Gleason's tournament, and Gleason's fascination with UFOs was genuine and deep. The night drive itself rests on one person retelling what her husband told her, and nothing on the record confirms it. That doesn't make it untrue. It makes it untested, and a story this specific, about a president and a man who wanted to believe, is hard to put down.

What still will not resolve: where Richard Nixon was after midnight on 19 February 1973, and what Jackie Gleason saw that left him so shaken.