Nixon’s Gift to UFOlogy

Last Updated on June 2, 2020 by

Richard Nixon is remembered as a villain by some, but there are still others that say his actions and those that caught him allowed 1974 America to make a much needed post World War II transition that may not have happened otherwise.  And with this transition came the information that would eventually be publicized regarding Roswell.

After World War II, the idea of a government cover-up was something seen by post-war America as a positive thing.  If the public didn’t know about it neither did the enemy.  This attitude would maintain the majority for several years.  One of the events that drastically changed public opinion was the scandal directly involving then president Richard Nixon and the Watergate hotel.

On June 17, 1972 burglars connected through a slush fund to reelect president Richard Nixon were discovered to have broken into the Watergate Hotel.  The act was one of the first major incidents to implicate the president in a major crime.  President Nixon, the man who had ended Vietnam, greatly reduced segregation in schools, improved borderline catastrophic relations with the Soviet Union, and began a formal relationship with China, would be remembered as a villain and a liar and would cause many who had thus far held steadfast trust in the government to rethink their position.  In the end, after Nixon’s reign as president many would find trusting the government all but impossible.

But it didn’t end there.  For then an incident known to the public as the Roswell weather balloon crash that was hardly considered an incident at all would soon gain publicity and even become a full fledged phenomenon.  Far too many people had witnessed the incident to simply let it die the way many had hoped it would.  Instead, witnesses would come out of the woodwork for years afterward revealing various stories that ultimately came to one conclusion: that the official story was another lie, just like the one Nixon had told.

We may never know if Nixon was directly briefed on any information regarding flying saucers or their involvement in human affairs.  We may never even be able to know for sure if he believed in them or not in his heart.  But we can know that it was the deception Nixon gave that would ultimately lead to a great amount of cold war mistrust being placed not only on the Soviet Union, but a generalized anxiety that everyone everywhere was trying to manipulate the average American citizen.  This paranoia would manifest in years to come in various ways as information everywhere from WACO to the Moon landing.  The country has been shrouded in an air of conspiracy ever since.

Unwittingly Nixon actually helped the UFO community uncover what would eventually be a staggering body of evidence until eventually the country would be left with approximately one third of the country’s citizens believing that even 9/11 had been orchestrated in part or in full by some faction of the government.  By the standards of the late 1940’s when the Roswell incident first took place, to implicate the US government in such a horrific event would have been unheard of.

Of course there were other factors involved, but the conspiracy perpetrated by Nixon had a monumental lasting effect on a culture that would persist for decades afterward.  And where would the field of UFOlogy be without mistrust of the official story?