Jackie Gleason (1916–1987) was an American comedian, actor and composer, billed as "The Great One." Born Herbert Walton Gleason Jr. in Brooklyn, he hosted The Jackie Gleason Show in its various forms from 1952 to 1970 and created bus driver Ralph Kramden of The Honeymooners. He was nominated for an Academy Award as Minnesota Fats in The Hustler (1961), played Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit films, and released a run of best-selling "mood music" albums, the first of which, Music for Lovers Only, spent 153 weeks on the Billboard Top Ten chart. In 1964 he moved his show's production to Miami Beach, and he spent the rest of his life in South Florida, dying in Lauderhill in 1987.

Off camera Gleason was a devoted reader on the paranormal, from parapsychology and the afterlife to UFOs. In the 1950s he was a semi-regular guest on Long John Nebel's paranormal-themed overnight radio show, and he wrote the introduction to a biography of Nebel. He built a library of more than 3,000 volumes on esoteric subjects; after his death his widow, Marilyn, gave about 1,700 of them to the University of Miami, where the collection includes titles such as How to Contact Space People. UFO researcher Joe Murgia has noted that Gleason built a UFO-shaped house he called "The Mothership"; his round main house at Peekskill, New York, completed in 1959, took him two years to design.

The story most often told about him comes from Beverly McKittrick, whom he married in 1970 and divorced in 1975. In an unpublished memoir, "The Great One," she wrote that Gleason came home shaken one night in 1973 and told her that his friend President Richard Nixon had taken him under tight security to Homestead Air Force Base, south of Miami, where he saw the embalmed bodies of four dead aliens on operating tables. Her account appeared in the MUFON Journal in February 1988, the year after Gleason's death, alongside speculation from New York UFO researcher Mike Luckman that the bodies came from Roswell.

The surrounding facts are documented; the visit is not. Nixon opened the Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic, the comedian's charity golf tournament in Lauderhill, on February 19, 1973, joking with Gleason in remarks preserved in his public papers, and Air Force One landed at Homestead when Nixon visited his home at Key Biscayne. No record of a base tour has been published, and Gleason is not known to have confirmed the account publicly. When political operative Roger Stone retold the story in February 2026, saying Gleason's ex-wife had related it to him, Murgia replied that "Gleason's ex-wife is the only source for this story."

Steven Spielberg's 2026 film Disclosure Day put the legend on screen, with a character clearly intended as Gleason, identified only as "Some old TV comedian," appearing alongside Nixon in its version of the alleged visit, and the film renewed online interest in what happened in 1973. Gleason's professional legacy rests on Ralph Kramden and two decades of variety television, while his paranormal library and the Homestead story have given him a lasting, if unverified, place in American UFO folklore.