Paul Blake Smith
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Paul Blake Smith is an American author and independent researcher from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who has investigated alleged encounters between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and non-human intelligent beings, as well as an earlier UFO crash in his hometown. He is the author of MO41: The Notable Before Roswell and President Eisenhower's Close Encounters (2020, Foundations Books), and a third book focusing on President Richard Nixon and UFOs was in preparation as of 2022.
Biography
Background
Smith grew up in Cape Girardeau, a conservative river town of approximately 20,000 people in 1941, where his grandfather served as a county judge and his father was a resident at the time of the alleged 1941 UFO crash outside the city. He describes himself not as a UFO witness but as a researcher: "I've never seen a UFO. I have no idea how I would react if I did see one... I just do research and write books." He began researching the Eisenhower encounters in the 1980s and 1990s, set the project aside twice, and finally completed the manuscript between 2016 and 2019.
Research and publications
MO41: The Notable Before Roswell
Smith's first book investigates the alleged Cape Girardeau UFO crash of 1941, in which a disc-shaped craft reportedly came down in a farm field outside town and three small gray-skinned bodies were recovered. According to accounts Smith collected, a local Christian pastor attended the scene, looked inside the cracked-open craft, and observed a small seat, instrument dials, and the bodies of beings approximately four feet tall with gray, rubbery skin — possibly wearing close-fitting flight suits that were difficult to distinguish from their skin in low light. Military personnel from a nearby training program in Sikeston and an FBI agent who had opened a Cape Girardeau field office weeks earlier reportedly secured the site and swore witnesses to secrecy. A statement by a German scientist employed in the U.S. post-war program, who reportedly said at an early 1960s atomic test that the technology for the atomic bomb program had been advanced by the recovery of a "spaceship crash in the Ozarks in Missouri in 1941."
President Eisenhower's Close Encounters (2020)
Smith's second book argues that President Eisenhower had at least three meetings with human-like extraterrestrials in 1954–1955. The book's central argument rests on a cluster of corroborating sources assembled to support each phase of the narrative.
The 1948 Aztec crash and "Sets"
A central piece of evidence is a 47-page document believed to have been prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in January 1989 as a briefing for the incoming George H. W. Bush administration, and leaked publicly in June 2017 by radio host Heather Wade. According to the document, a silver disc craft made a soft landing against a canyon wall near Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948, and military scientists who entered the craft inadvertently killed most occupants by opening the sleep-state pods incorrectly, leaving a single survivor — a human-like being the document refers to by a name Smith renders as "Sets" or "Semass." This being was reportedly held under diplomatic status at a facility in rural Vermont, then returned to his people at Kirtland Air Force Base in August 1949. Eisenhower — then on leave from the Army and serving as president of Columbia University — may have met Sets during visits to Vermont in the summer of 1948, establishing a relationship before Eisenhower's own presidency.
The February 1954 Edwards encounter
The February 1954 meeting at Edwards Air Force Base was pre-arranged rather than spontaneous, and that Eisenhower's Palm Springs golf holiday served as a pretext to place him near the base. Based on a witness account relayed by a woman whose friend attended a dinner the following night, that the widely reported dental emergency actually occurred on Saturday, February 20 — when Eisenhower bit buckshot in a duck leg — meaning the president's disappearance on Friday, February 19 was a separate event unconnected to any dentist visit.
Key claims assembled for the February 1954 meeting include: five craft (three circular, two elongated) landed on an Edwards airstrip in front of a hangar; the beings spoke fluent English; a trusted circle of six men including Georgia State Troopers accompanied Eisenhower; the meeting was filmed using hand-cranked cameras because electronic equipment failed in the electromagnetic fields; and one craft was left behind and stored at Edwards, later described by witnesses in the 1950s–1970s as a lightweight silver metallic disc. The beings requested that the U.S. halt nuclear weapons testing and sought permission to begin a public education program about their existence; Eisenhower declined both requests, reportedly fearing social disorder and unwilling to disarm unilaterally. According to a test pilot colonel who came forward in the early 1980s as the last surviving witness, the meeting ended when the beings demonstrated an ability to render themselves invisible and reappear — a display that Eisenhower found deeply alarming.
Additional corroboration comes from Don Phillips, a Skunk Works associate of Kelly Johnson, who stated he had reviewed classified files confirming the encounter was filmed and that technology transfer agreements may have been reached, and Skunk Works contractor Chris Barbata's report of a Vatican source confirming that Cardinal James Francis McIntyre — present at a subsequent April 1954 visit to Edwards alongside three other observers — defied U.S. government warnings and flew to brief Pope Pius XII.
Subsequent meetings
On the basis of the 1989 DIA document and the independent research of UFO investigator Art Campbell that two further meetings followed: one at a New Mexico Air Force base around July 1954, and a third at Holloman Air Force Base in February 1955, when Eisenhower departed from a quail-hunting vacation in Georgia and a second craft reportedly landed near Air Force One. The 1955 Holloman meeting resulted in a formal agreement under which the extraterrestrial visitors would remain discreet in exchange for technology exchanges at a pre-arranged site in the Nevada desert.
Churchill–Eisenhower secrecy agreement
The book also covers a reported wartime agreement between Winston Churchill and Eisenhower — when the latter was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe — to suppress UFO sightings, reportedly out of concern that such reports would undermine public faith in Christianity and cause social panic.
Reception and cross-referencing
Smith's research on the Aztec crash and the Eisenhower encounters has been discussed in independent investigations of the same events. Michael Salla cited Smith's book in a 2024 interview with Laura Magdalene Eisenhower, noting that Smith's reconstruction of the 1948 Aztec crash survivor and Eisenhower's pre-presidential contact with the being connected to the later diplomatic meetings at Edwards Air Force Base in February 1954. Laura Eisenhower responded that she had encountered overlapping accounts from within the Eisenhower family tradition and from independent contactee literature, though she had not fully read Smith's book at the time.
The 1948 Aztec crash, which forms a central element of Smith's narrative in President Eisenhower's Close Encounters, was the subject of a comprehensive independent documentary investigation by UAP Gerb in 2025, which corroborated key elements of the crash narrative — including the recovery of a 99.9-foot disc by the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit, the involvement of Vannevar Bush, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and John von Neumann at the crash site, and the transport of the craft to Los Alamos National Labs.
Skepticism of the Valiant Thor account
The Frank Stranges account of Valiant Thor is treated skeptically, a Venusian who allegedly visited the Pentagon for three years beginning in 1957. Presidential records show Eisenhower was not in the country on the specific date given for Thor's alleged White House arrival, and that multiple circulating photographs purporting to show Thor are inconsistent with each other.