Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from January 1969 until August 9, 1974, when he became the only president to resign as the Watergate scandal closed in on his administration. Born in Yorba Linda, California, he studied law at Duke, served in the Naval Reserve during World War II, won a House seat in 1946 and a Senate seat in 1950, and was vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961. He lost the 1960 presidential race to John F. Kennedy, won the White House in 1968 and was re-elected in a 1972 landslide. His presidency ended American combat in Vietnam, opened relations with China, produced arms agreements with the Soviet Union and created the Environmental Protection Agency.

The official UFO record of his presidency is brief. In December 1969, during his first year in office, the Air Force closed Project Blue Book, its investigation of UFO reports since 1952, after the University of Colorado's Condon study concluded that further research was unlikely to yield major scientific discoveries. Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans said continued funding "cannot be justified either on the grounds of national security or in the interest of science."

Nixon's place in UFO lore comes mostly from one story. Beverly McKittrick, the second wife of comedian Jackie Gleason, wrote in an unpublished memoir, "The Great One," that Gleason came home badly shaken one night in 1973 and said the president had taken him, under tight security, to a restricted area of Homestead Air Force Base in South Florida to see the remains of dead aliens. A 1988 MUFON Journal account of her claims described four embalmed bodies on operating tables. Later retellings, including one that UFO writer Larry Warren said he heard from Gleason himself, add that Nixon slipped away from his security detail to make the trip.

The documented part of the story is its setting. Nixon was in South Florida that February: on February 19, 1973, he opened the Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic, the comedian's charity golf tournament in Lauderhill, trading jokes with Gleason in informal remarks preserved among his public papers. No record of a base visit has been published, Gleason is not known to have confirmed the account publicly, and it rests on his former wife's memoir and secondhand retellings. Writer Larry Holcombe has gone further, arguing that Gleason's interest prompted Nixon to share UFO information with him and to disclose some UFO data publicly.

The story reached its widest audience in 2026, when Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day staged it as purported archive footage dated February 18, 1973, in which a Nixon figure and a character clearly meant to be Gleason, identified only as "Some old TV comedian," view mangled alien bodies. Nixon's documented link to the UFO question is the closing of Blue Book in his first year, while his larger role in the folklore rests on a single unverified account of one night in Florida.