Close Encounters Of The Bermuda Kind
A 1953 flying saucer alert in Bermuda when US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and French Premier Joseph Laniel were preparing to meet at the Mid Ocean Club was laughed off by security personnel — who said any visiting aliens would be turned away from the exclusive Tucker’s Town property if they had travelled to Earth without tuxedos.
The Bermuda “Big Three” summit was Sir Winston Churchill’s idea and a major initiative of his second term as Prime Minister.
In the aftermath of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s death earlier in the year and Moscow’s development of a hydrogen bomb, he hoped to gain President Eisenhower’s support for a top-level dialogue with the new Soviet leadership.
Originally planned for the summer, the was postponed until December after the British leader — who had previously visited Bermuda in1942– suffered a serious stroke.
“The Martians — if that’s where the flying saucers come from — are quite interested in what President Eisenhower, Prime Minister Churchill and French Premier Laniel will be doing here this weekend,” said an international news service report issued on the eve of the December 4-8 Bermuda meeting.
“A foreman for a commercial aircraft company here reported at 1.20 in the morning earlier this week that a flying saucer was circling the island.
“This man described it as a ‘silvery yellow’ object. US Air Force officers were not at all alarmed and the [President's] advance party from Washington took no extra precautions.”
The report concluded the Martians could not get into the Mid Ocean Club — even if they landed a fleet of flying saucers in Bermuda — “for the simple reason they have no proper passes and probably would arrive without dinner jackets.”
Sir Winston inspects Bermuda Militia Artillery troops during his 1953 visit
There were successive waves of Unidentified Flying Object [UFO] sightings in North America, Europe, the Soviet Union and other countries beginning in the immediate post-Second World War period, leading to fanciful media and public speculation about space ships visiting the Earth from distant planets.
But in his recent book “Mirage Men”, author Mark Pilkington argues that for decades the military in countries involved in the East-West Cold War stand-off encouraged their publics to think that they had seen flying saucers rather than prototype aircraft, high-altitude reconnaissance planes or classified missile tests.
“It goes back as far as the U2 spy plane in 1956,” said Mr. Pilkington recently. “The early version was shiny, which meant it could be seen from a long distance. Air Force staff would visit people who’d seen it and tell them it was Venus or a weather balloon – but, if that didn’t work, they were quite happy to leave them with the impression that it was an alien spacecraft.”
A Churchill College, Cambridge summary of the 1953 summit — which no alien visitors are known to have gate-crashed — says: “The Bermuda conference is not generally regarded as having been successful.
“It did lead to an inconclusive four-power summit meeting with the Russians at Foreign Secretary level in Berlin, but Eisenhower was extremely critical of Churchill’s wish to pursue a dialogue with the new Soviet leadership, and was resistant to information sharing in the nuclear sphere.
“There can be no doubt that Churchill relished reprising his wartime role on the international stage, but he was also motivated by a desire to break the stalemate of the Cold War and avert a possible nuclear war.
“Such an achievement would have crowned his career and established him as a great peacemaker as well as war leader. It was not to be, although several scholars have pointed out that the Bermuda Conference did set the precedent for future Cold War summits.”
President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Churchill pictured at the Mid Ocean Club
Bermuda is full of Aliens