Dwight David Eisenhower (1890–1969) was an American Army general and the 34th president of the United States, serving two terms from 1953 to 1961. Born in Denison, Texas, and raised in Abilene, Kansas, he graduated from West Point in 1915. In the Second World War he commanded the Allied invasion of North Africa and, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, the Normandy landings of June 1944, finishing the war as a five-star General of the Army. He then served as Army chief of staff, president of Columbia University and NATO's first Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

His administration began the Interstate Highway System and answered the Soviet Sputnik launch with measures that included the creation of NASA. In his farewell address he warned against the growing influence of the "military–industrial complex." The Air Force's Project Blue Book investigated UFO reports throughout his presidency, and several hundred pages of its reports are held by the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene. He passed away in Washington on March 28, 1969.

Eisenhower's place in UFO lore begins with a disputed document. The central Majestic 12 paper, which reached researcher Jaime Shandera on undeveloped film in December 1984, presents itself as a top-secret briefing prepared for President-elect Eisenhower on November 18, 1952, about a committee managing recovered craft. In 1988 the Air Force Office of Special Investigations told the FBI that no such committee had been authorized, and the Bureau's Majestic 12 file records the paper as bogus. The National Archives found that a related memo attributed to his aide Robert Cutler was dated on a day Cutler was overseas.

A second strand concerns February 1954, when Eisenhower, on a golfing vacation in Palm Springs, dropped from public view for an evening and the press was told he had seen a dentist after a cap came off a tooth. That April, Gerald Light sent the researcher Meade Layne a letter claiming that Eisenhower had inspected five "etherships" at Muroc, now Edwards Air Force Base. William Cooper's 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse asserted that Eisenhower met aliens on February 20, 1954, and signed a formal treaty, the pact later dubbed the Greada Treaty. Researcher Art Campbell has since published an anonymous former airman's account placing a meeting at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in February 1955, while the president was on a hunting trip in Georgia.

The stories reached new audiences in 2026. Former Pentagon policy adviser Matthew Brown said in August that the "oral tradition" inside an alleged legacy UAP program holds that the Truman and Eisenhower administrations reached a "business agreement" with non-human intelligence rather than a treaty, describing it as tradition rather than a document he could produce. The Eisenhower Library and the president's son John Eisenhower dismissed the meeting story in 2004, and according to Martin Teasley's study The Real Ike, library archivists helped thwart an attempt to plant fake "TOP SECRET/MAJIC" papers in National Archives files. Eisenhower's documented legacy is the liberation of Western Europe, the interstate network and the Cold War institutions he built; in UFO history his name anchors the best-known presidential contact stories, which rest on a briefing paper the FBI called bogus and on accounts no archive has confirmed.