NEW YORK – The clamorous cry To the moon. ALice” frequently delivered on the “Honeymooners” by the late, great Jackie Gleason, may have been inspired in part by the comic’s fascination with outer space.
Gleason was an avowed believer in UFOs and, according to his ex-wife Beverly McKittrick, he even got involved in some spaced-out exploits with his friend Richard Nixon.
Beverly was 37-year-old divorcee with a great golf game when Jackie met her at Miami country club. Their four year marriage ended in 1974.
In her unpublished biography of the funnyman entitled “The Great One,” Beverly, Gleason’s second spouse, describes a bizarre trip Jackie took with the then President in 1973 to Homestead AFB in Florida to see what see says were bodies of four dead space aliens recovered by the Air Force.
The aliens were supposedly embalmed and displayed on operating tables and classified as top-secret material. Gleason and Nixon visited the base under extremely tight security, she says.
“The significance of the information is tremendous,” said Mike Luckman, director of the UFO research Center in New York. “The four bodies that Gleason saw were probably the same ones the the Army recovered in 1947 at Roswell, N.M. We want to establish that link.”
Gleason had a lifelong interest in the supernatural and accumulated one of the largest private libraries of esoteric and psychic literature in the country.
He even named his Peekskill N.Y. home “The Mothership” and had architects build everything in the round to resemble a flying saucer. Said Luckman: “Most of the furniture was circular. So was the garage, which he called the Scout Ship.”
Source: MUFON Journal February 1988 Number 238