Expert in UFOs and the paranormal, Bill Knell shared details of UFO cases, and sightings by such people as Walter Cronkite, Jackie Gleason, and JFK. During a lunch he had with Cronkite, the veteran newsman told him he witnessed a UFO shoot a blue beam at a missile in the 1950's. The military claimed it was a test to see how the media would react to a UFO event, but Cronkite and other reporters there didn't buy this explanation, Knell recounted.

At the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, MA, JFK and guests witnessed a disc-shaped craft around 60 ft.-in-diameter hovering several hundred feet from their boat, Knell reported. Howard Hughes was said to be taken to a military base in 1947 and shown crashed UFO materials. It was "damnedest stuff I've ever seen," he reportedly commented. The government wanted him to find out what it was made of, said Knell.

Knell met with Jackie Gleason in Fort Lauderdale in the mid-1980s to discuss UFOs, and Gleason shared details of his viewing of a "spacecraft" and alien bodies, arranged for him by his good friend, Pres. Richard Nixon. The viewing took place in a large hangar at MacDill AFB in Tampa, where he was shown a broken disc, parts of which were still hovering. Gleason also told Knell that he saw alien bodies, "in a good state of preservation," that resembled what we think of as greys.

Pilot Sightings

First hour guest Dr. Richard Haines of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) spoke about his organization which was begun in 2000 as a place for pilots to make confidential reports. UFOs are sometimes observed keeping pace with planes, as though the plane was their object of study. In a 1978 Australian incident, a pilot reported being "persecuted" by a long, metallic shaped-craft with green lights-- the pilot and his plane both ended up vanishing, he detailed.