WILLIAM SHATNER: A missing brain
that could unravel America’s most infamous assassination.
A deceased president roaming the halls of the White House.
And an alleged meeting
between the leader of the free world
and visitors from outer space.
The men who have had the honor
of being the president of the United States
are celebrated as esteemed leaders,
their names immortalized in the annals of history.
But what’s less commonly known
is that there are many bizarre tales
involving U.S. Presidents.
Strange stories that encompass everything
from the unusual circumstances of their death
to matters of national security and even...
encounters with extraterrestrial life.
Could the truth behind these astonishing accounts
re-write America’s past, and perhaps re-shape its future?
Well, that is what we’ll try and find out.
♪ ♪
SHATNER: A crowd of excited well-wishers gathers
to greet President John F. Kennedy
and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy
as they step off of Air Force One.
The Kennedys join Texas governor John Connally
and his wife, Nellie, in a waiting convertible limousine
and ride in a motorcade through the heart of the city,
surrounded by cheering onlookers.
LEE MANDEL: There were roughly 150,000 to 200,000 people
waiting in the crowds,
and Governor Connally’s wife said,
"Mr. President, you can’t say that Texas doesn’t love you."
And he said, "No, you certainly can’t."
And those were the last words he ever spoke.
SHATNER: As the motorcade drives through the downtown district,
three gunshots are fired in quick succession.
And two bullets strike President Kennedy
in the throat and head, critically wounding him.
By the time that first agent reached the president,
it was already almost too late.
The president had been shot twice,
and it was the immediate call to go right to the hospital.
SHATNER: President Kennedy was swiftly
taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital,
arriving just six minutes after being shot.
WILLIAM MADSEN LAW: They put him on a gurney. They take him
and they wheel him into Trauma Room 1.
After President Kennedy’s brought in,
they did these lifesaving procedures,
but I think, basically, they knew he was gone,
and then he’s pronounced dead at 1:00.
SHATNER: News that President Kennedy had been assassinated
instantly spread throughout the country.
But while Americans were experiencing
both shock and grief,
a series of strange occurrences
was unfolding back at Parkland Hospital in Dallas
that would ultimately lead many people to wonder
if there was a government conspiracy
to cover up the truth about JFK’s assassination.
LAW: After President Kennedy was dead,
there was a problem in the fact
that the Secret Service came in,
and they wanted to take the body.
Now, by law in Texas,
the, uh, coroner,
Dr. Earl Rose, said, "You’re not taking him.
"I have jurisdiction here.
He has to stay here and have an autopsy done."
One of the Secret Service said, "You’re either gonna
get out of our way, or we’re gonna run over you."
The Secret Service was saying, "Yes,
we are taking the body back to Washington D.C."
However, this is a homicide investigation locally,
by the Dallas Police Department, the D.A.’s office.
The medical examiner has a duty not to release that body.
Eventually, Vice President Johnson got involved,
and the body was released.
SHATNER: President Kennedy’s body was flown from Dallas
to Washington, D.C.,
and then taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.
But why was the Secret Service so determined
to move JFK’s remains halfway across the country?
Perhaps the answer lies in examining the bizarre events
that transpired during the president’s autopsy,
which took place late in the evening
following his assassination.
LAW: There was a full autopsy done at Bethesda, Maryland.
And the two doctors were James Humes and James Boswell.
However, they were not board-certified pathologists.
Instead, they were pure military guys,
who would follow orders.
In essence, this may be the heart
of the mystery of whether there was conspiracy or not.
SHATNER: Even more questionable
than the presence of military doctors
is the fact that, during this autopsy,
President Kennedy’s brain
was actually removed from his head
and placed in a collection of evidence labeled simply
"item number nine."
Item number nine was a stainless steel bucket
that was about seven inches high,
eight and a half inches in diameter,
that contained President Kennedy’s brain.
Also in item number nine were several autopsy slides,
tissue slides, and also several boxes
of paraffin tissue samples.
And so, there’s something very unusual about the way
the whole thing was handled.
SHATNER: Three days after the autopsy,
on November 25, 1963,
President John F. Kennedy was laid to rest
at Arlington National Cemetery.
However, not all of his remains were buried
because, for some strange reason,
JFK’s brain was still locked inside a steel bucket.
And, as it turns out, over the next few years,
the president’s brain
would be moved to multiple locations
in and around Washington D.C.
MANDEL: Dr. George Burkley, who was the White House physician,
requested the brain be delivered to him
immediately after the first autopsy.
And the brain was sent from Bethesda
to the White House, where it was stored
at the old executive office building.
And it stayed there until April of 1965,
when Senator Robert Kennedy
requested that his brother’s brain
and all the autopsy materials that were at the White House
be brought to the National Archives
and given to Evelyn Lincoln.
Evelyn Lincoln was President Kennedy’s personal secretary.
And she wasn’t an employee of the National Archives,
but she was working there,
getting his papers ready, things like that.
And she put it, the next day, in a footlocker
in the National Archives and locked it up.
SHATNER: The idea of JFK’s brain
sitting in an ordinary footlocker
in the National Archives
is surreal, to say the least.
But what’s even more bizarre is that, on Halloween Day,
October 31, 1966,
President Kennedy’s brain simply disappeared.
They opened the footlocker, and, lo and behold,
none of the items from item number nine were there.
The brain was gone.
No one knows what happened to it.
It was never seen again.
The popular story is, is that Robert Kennedy
took the brain and all that stuff because
he didn’t want it to be a sideshow.
If Robert Kennedy did steal the brain
and took the slides and tissues and that sort of thing,
he muddied the waters,
and that’s why we have all these mysteries.
SHATNER: Did Robert Kennedy steal his late brother’s brain
in order to keep it out of the public eye?
Perhaps.
But others are convinced
that the disappearance of JFK’s brain
is connected to the much larger mystery surrounding his murder,
which remains the most infamous assassination
in American history.
MARTIN K. A. MORGAN: Six decades out from the great tragedy that unfolded
in Dallas in November 1963,
we are no closer to having a sharp picture
of what happened to our president.
If we had the brain, there would be small particles
from whatever bullet struck him in the head.
Those particles could be analyzed.
But we don’t have that brain.
So we’re left with question marks.
And when you combine the fact that the Secret Service
illegally takes possession of the presidential body,
violating the laws of the state of Texas,
with the fact that the president’s brain
later disappears,
it’s very difficult not to be suspicious, now isn’t it?
SHATNER: As part of a 12-day tour of Asia,
President Donald Trump lands in the Chinese capital.
He is greeted by government authorities
and boards a secure limousine
and a U.S. military aide follows closely behind
carrying a mysterious black briefcase.
Later that day, President Trump
travels to a state legislative building,
where he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
His aide continues to follow close at hand,
with the briefcase in tow,
but is then confronted by security.
A scuffle breaks out between the Secret Service
and Chinese soldiers,
because the briefcase in question
happens to be the nuclear football.
The nuclear football is a briefcase that carries
information and materials that are associated
with reacting to a nuclear strike
or authorizing a nuclear strike.
And whenever the president is traveling,
he will be accompanied by a military officer
that’s carrying what’s called "the football."
And so, when President Trump
is in China, and this
military member of his staff is stopped,
a Secret Service agent ultimately grabs
one of the Chinese security agents,
throws him to the floor,
because it is absolutely critical
that the president cannot be separated from the football.
SHATNER: The nuclear football is one of the world’s
most mysterious objects.
For decades, people have wondered
what exactly is this so-called football?
And how does a seemingly ordinary briefcase
allow the president to launch America’s nuclear arsenal
at any time?
PETER FEAVER: The nuclear football is a critical part
of the command and control of the military.
The official name is the president’s emergency satchel.
It’s a briefcase.
But everybody inside the White House
would refer to it as "the football."
Part of the mystique is just the fact that it’s a visible,
tangible sign of this awesome power
that the President of the United States has
to make a decision to execute a nuclear strike.
WACKROW: When it comes to the nuclear football,
everybody, including our foreign adversaries,
are very keenly aware
of what it is,
and they want to know how it works.
However, you need to have secret compartmentalized clearance
that’s beyond top secret to really fully understand
what’s within the nuclear football.
SHATNER: What is contained
within this highly classified black briefcase?
It’s a mystery that dates back to when the nuclear football
was created, more than 60 years ago.
American spy planes discover that the Soviet Union
has installed nuclear missiles in Cuba,
just 90 miles from the coast of Florida.
President John F. Kennedy guides the United States
through the ensuing military standoff,
which becomes known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
After 13 days of tense negotiations,
the two superpowers reach a diplomatic compromise,
narrowly averting an all-out nuclear war.
FEAVER: It’s clear that President Kennedy
was sobered by the kind of decision
that he was facing in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And the president and his team realized
that they needed a robust capacity
that would allow the president to talk
to the armed forces at any time.
That’s when the nuclear football apparatus,
and particularly linking the president to that,
was advanced significantly.
SHATNER: Although the nuclear football
has been shrouded in secrecy for decades,
there are a select few who possess intimate knowledge
of its contents.
They are known as the president’s military aides,
and they are responsible
for keeping the football close to the commander-in-chief
at all times.
One former presidential military aide
is retired U.S. Marine Peter Metzger.
I was the U.S. Marine military aide
to the President of the United States,
in this case, President Reagan.
Wherever the president went, I was trained to know
what to do in the event
the president had to exercise his constitutional authority.
SHATNER: As a matter of national security,
the military aides who have been privy to the secrets
of the nuclear football remain tight-lipped.
However, over the years,
some clues regarding the contents of the football
have been revealed.
Inside the briefcase is
a series of notebooks, effectively.
Think of them as notebooks that contain a list of options
that the president can choose from that would be passed
through the chain of command down to the operating forces
that would carry out the command.
I really can’t describe,
of course, in great detail what the options are,
but they would be a range from limited strikes
all the way to, perhaps, the full use
of the nuclear arsenal.
SHATNER: As a safeguard, the "menu" of nuclear options
can only be unlocked by using a special set of codes
that are printed on a small card
that is referred to as the "biscuit."
FEAVER: The biscuit is a card, almost like credit card size,
that the president carries on the president’s person.
And this combines with the information
in the nuclear football to authenticate that
this is the President of the United States
who is making these decisions.
SHATNER: The nuclear football and the biscuit combined
allow the president to unleash America’s nuclear arsenal
from anywhere in the world.
And it begs the question, what would happen
if the president accidentally lost the biscuit?
The presidential biscuit’s been misplaced a couple of times.
In March 1981, when President Reagan
had only been in office for a couple of months,
he was shot by a would-be assassin.
He was spirited off to a hospital.
When he reached the hospital,
the attending physicians and nurses
cut him out of his suit.
And as a part of cutting him out of his suit,
pieces of suit were thrown off into the corner,
and that included the presidential biscuit.
Which, when you think about it, is terrifying.
Luckily, the FBI ended up in custody
of the presidential biscuit, and nothing negative came of it.
SHATNER: Despite some concerning close calls
and a few tantalizing hints,
ultimately, the full details regarding
the president’s nuclear football will remain
a closely guarded government secret.
METZGER: As the mil aide carrying the football,
every time I touched it, I felt, "This is for keeps.
Whatever’s gonna happen, this is the real deal."
In terms of the football itself,
the systems that are there to protect it
are really, really good and are highly classified.
Period.
It’s easy to see why the secrets of the nuclear football
have never been revealed, and, hopefully, they never will.
But there’s another presidential mystery
that many historians are eager to solve.
It involves the surprisingly gruesome death
of President George Washington.
SHATNER: After serving two terms as America’s first president,
66-year-old George Washington has retired from public office,
hoping to find tranquility in his golden years.
Washington immerses himself in the daily management
of his expansive 8,000-acre estate at Mount Vernon.
But, as it turns out,
the former president’s peaceful retirement
doesn’t last long.
JEREMY RAY: On December 12, 1799,
Washington starts his day like he would almost any other.
He goes out and inspects all of the outlying farms.
While he’s out, a rainstorm starts.
Turns into sleet,
into snow.
When he returns that evening,
his outer coat is pretty much soaked.
He’s advised by his secretary to change his clothes.
Washington actually says, "No, I’m fine."
He knows he’s running late, and he has guests there.
He doesn’t want to keep them waiting for dinner.
So, instead of changing out his clothes,
he goes and has a seat, and he eats.
SHATNER: After entertaining his guests,
Washington retires for the evening,
but is awakened in the middle of the night
with a violent and mysterious throat illness.
(coughing)
Around 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning,
Washington awakes.
He’s coughing. He’s shivering.
Martha Washington insists on getting someone
to come help them.
But the worst thing someone could do to a sick person
in the 18th century was call a doctor.
They knew next to nothing, and so,
it never, ever improved the situation
and killed many people.
SHATNER: When doctors arrived at Washington’s Mount Vernon home,
they performed strange treatments
to battle his unknown illness.
Treatments that, by today’s standards,
sound like torture.
RAY: This is the private bedchamber of George and Martha Washington.
In the 18th century, doctors were working
with the tools and the knowledge
they had available to them at the time.
The thought process was that the body
had to remain in balance with its fluids:
blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.
So, all of these pastes are applied to Washington’s body
to create blisters so that they can open it up
and that these can ooze out,
so that they can remove any excess fluids
to try and reduce the inflammation.
Really, you’re looking at chemical burns being applied
to his body, uh, during all this.
SHATNER: Other treatments included applying dried beetles
-inside Washington’s throat... -(man coughing)
...and administering an enema.
But doctors also performed
a gruesome procedure which involved draining
Washington’s blood from his body.
RAY: They were doing this system of bloodletting to try
and reduce the blood and reduce the swelling in the body.
George Washington was bled four times that was recorded.
It is estimated around
about five pints of blood was removed from him.
So 40% of his total blood volume.
COE: What made it far worse
was that Washington kept insisting on being bled.
And Tobias Lear, his secretary, taking notes this entire time,
talks about how unnerving it was for everyone in the room
to see this, to see Washington clearly fading,
but begging, demanding that he be bled again.
And it got to the point where the blood didn’t even rush out.
It sort of slowly crawled out. He hardly had anything left.
LENGEL: Washington begins turning white from loss of blood.
He is deathly, deathly ill. He knows he doesn’t have long.
And then, finally, he takes a few more
labored breaths, and he dies.
And it’s almost as if a wail of anguish
spreads out across the whole country.
SHATNER: George Washington’s sudden and unexpected death
shocked and deeply saddened the entire nation.
But what was the mysterious illness
that ultimately sent Washington to his deathbed?
Because the truth behind his affliction
is clouded by incomplete information
and gruesome medical practices,
we may never know exactly how and why
America’s first president passed away so suddenly.
But according to one historical account,
Washington’s spirit may have lived on.
63 years after the death of George Washington,
a Union Army regiment battles Confederate forces
for control of a key strategic hill
known as Little Round Top.
MORGAN: The regiment is under the command
of a man named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.
He could not abandon Union positions on Little Round Top
because then the Confederacy would be in a position
to drive the Union off the field of battle.
Everyone’s wounded to some extent.
They’re almost out of ammunition.
And because of that, he was left with no choice
but to order, "Fix bayonets and charge."
It’s one of the most memorable moments
of the entire American Civil War.
SHATNER: In his memoirs about the Civil War,
General Chamberlain wrote that as the Union soldiers
prepared to launch their desperate charge...
...they were joined by an unlikely compatriot.
MORGAN: Chamberlain and other men,
they would say that they saw
someone wearing a tri-corner hat.
The type of hat that people quit wearing around about 1800.
And that that man was on horseback.
Chamberlain himself would even say
that it was the spirit of George Washington
that came back at this critical moment,
this moment when the fate of the republic
was held in the balance,
to encourage the men to charge the enemy rather than retreat.
Chamberlain even said that they saw Confederate soldiers
take shots at the man on horseback,
and their bullets couldn’t seem to stop George Washington.
It looked like they passed right through him.
And ultimately, Union forces stopped the Confederate invasion
because of the divine intervention
of George Washington, back from the grave,
to guide the republic and save it once again.
LENGEL: These are extraordinary circumstances.
Who really knows what these soldiers saw?
We do know that they felt something powerful.
And it helped them to do almost superhuman things.
So something gave them the strength
to do something extraordinary.
And only they knew what that was.
While the grim circumstances of George Washington’s death
and the accounts of his ghost
appearing at the Battle of Gettysburg are... shocking,
there are many more bizarre stories
that have been connected to American presidents,
including some that reportedly involve
alien encounters.
SHATNER: High above this remote oil-drilling outpost...
...the United States Air Force detects a mysterious,
unidentified flying object on radar.
A pair of F-22 Raptor fighter jets
are immediately scrambled to intercept the UFO,
and the pilots report seeing a strange,
cylindrical silver object floating in the sky.
It’s described as about the size of a car,
just kind of hovering around 40,000 feet.
It’s deemed a threat to civilian aircraft,
and so President Joe Biden orders it to be shot down.
And then the official statement was,
"We deemed it a threat to our airspace.
"We take those threats seriously.
We shot it down. It’s not a concern anymore."
That’s the end of the story.
BIRNES: There’s this strange object hovering over Alaska,
but the government never revealed what it was.
Was it from China?
Was it from Russia?
Or was it a flying saucer?
SHATNER: What was the mysterious UFO
that President Biden felt
needed to be shot out of the sky?
Officially, the White House claims that the object crashed
into the ocean, and has not been recovered.
But this is not the first time a UFO has come
to the attention of America’s Commander-in-Chief.
And many people are convinced that U.S. presidents
have been hiding the truth
about extraterrestrial spacecraft
for more than 70 years.
Air traffic controllers detect multiple unidentified objects
flying in the sky over the nation’s capital.
BIRNES: July 19, 1952, squadrons of UFOs
flew over the Capitol.
They flew over the Washington Monument.
They flew over the White House.
Go to The New York Times and you know what you’ll see?
UFOs flying over the Capitol. That’s what you’ll see.
Therefore, Harry Truman was the first president
to actually set American policy having to do with UFOs.
And here’s what he did.
Immediately, the explanation for all those UFOs
over Washington D.C. in 1952 was radar anomalies,
temperature inversion.
The pilots weren’t sure what they were seeing.
And so will the president say UFOs are among us?
Absolutely not.
SHATNER: Did the Truman administration cover up
the truth about alien spacecraft visiting our planet?
In the 1950s, many Americans believed that
the government was withholding important information about UFOs
and in fact, there are those who claim
that America’s next president
actually met with extraterrestrials.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower is on a winter holiday,
when, in the middle of the night,
he simply disappears.
When you’re president of the United States,
we should know where you are at all times.
But this one evening, in February of 1954,
Eisenhower just goes missing.
To the point where the Associated Press
put out a wire saying he died.
He died in the middle of the night.
And then two minutes later, they retracted it
and said, "No, our mistake."
And the next morning, he shows up at church.
So, something happened in the middle of that night
that is obviously off the books,
unexplained and really strange.
SHATNER: Where was President Eisenhower
during the time that he disappeared?
Well, according to numerous accounts
that surfaced after the incident,
Eisenhower allegedly attended a most unusual meeting.
There’s a story that on February 20, 1954,
President Eisenhower had
a meeting with extraterrestrials.
This took place at an airbase.
Eisenhower was presumably asked
to renounce and give up nuclear weapons.
And in exchange, the extraterrestrials would give
the U.S. technology which would change the world.
The story is that Eisenhower turned down this deal
because he couldn’t be sure that
the Soviets would do the same thing.
SHATNER: Did President Eisenhower
really meet with extraterrestrials?
Well, if he did, the government successfully covered up
any definitive evidence.
But in recent years,
it’s become harder to keep secrets about UFOs,
because multiple government organizations
have been actively investigating
this mysterious phenomenon.
There have been several recent hearings
on UFOs, both in Congress and with NASA.
And so what we’ve seen
is this subject increasingly moving
out of the fringe and into the mainstream.
Which makes me wonder,
what is it they’re not telling us?
The president, particularly in his capacity
as Commander-in-Chief, can make that call.
And maybe we will see it one day soon.
"My fellow Americans, people of the world,
we are not alone."
If American presidents know
that aliens are visiting Earth,
then they certainly haven’t shared that information
with the public.
And the same can be said about another secret
that’s known only to a select few.
It’s the unsettling possibility
that the White House is cursed.
SHATNER: After five years of harrowing conflict,
Confederate General Robert E. Lee
surrenders to Union General Ulysses S. Grant,
finally ending the Civil War.
Just five days later, in Washington D.C.,
President Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd,
enjoy a performance at Ford’s Theatre.
Abraham Lincoln goes to Ford’s Theatre
that fateful evening.
As he’s engrossed in the play,
there’s that terrible shot
that echoes through the theater.
(gunshot)
The back of Lincoln’s head is blown to pieces.
This was a horrifying, traumatic moment for the entire nation.
The assassination of a president
really at his moment of greatest triumph.
SHATNER: After President Lincoln’s assassination,
the country went into a period of profound mourning
that lasted for several months.
And in a surreal twist,
some even claimed that Lincoln’s murder
cast a dark, supernatural shadow
on the White House.
LENGEL: After his assassination,
it’s really only a short step from there
to people seeing Abraham Lincoln’s ghost
in the White House.
Apparently, Lincoln’s ghost
scared the dickens out of the entire White House staff.
And then Mary Todd Lincoln,
like many people at the time, in the mid-19th century,
was very interested in spiritualism.
And there is a photograph of her
showing a figure that appears to be Abraham Lincoln.
President Lincoln just kind of emerges
out of the background in this photograph.
It’s really quite creepy.
Now, where the Lincoln ghost came from, we don’t know.
But, there’s such a elemental power
to the Lincoln apparition
that the White House becomes
kind of a... a tragic epicenter
of all the nation’s suffering.
SHATNER: What are we to make of the bizarre sightings
of Abraham Lincoln’s ghost in the White House
in the years immediately after his death?
Were these incredible reports
merely hallucinations, fueled by grief?
Perhaps.
But curiously...
...over the years, the apparitions
of not just Abraham Lincoln
but numerous former presidents have been seen
roaming the halls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Witnesses have claimed to see Thomas Jefferson
playing the violin in the Yellow Oval Room.
Andrew Jackson laughing in the Rose Room.
And William Henry Harrison fumbling around the attic.
So, as crazy as it may sound,
is it possible that the White House
is the final resting place for the souls
of American presidents?
President Harry Truman lies fast asleep in his bed.
BELANGER: In a letter to his wife Bess, President Truman writes,
"At 4:00, I was awakened
by three distinct knocks on my bedroom door."
(knocking)
"I jumped up and put on my bathrobe,
"opened the door, and no one there.
"Went out and looked up and down the hall,
"looked into your room, still no one there.
The damn place is haunted, sure as shootin’."
LENGEL: Harry Truman is really unsettled by this experience,
and it was Truman who decided enough is enough
and he’s gonna get rid of the entire interior
of the White House.
He tears it all out.
And maybe he imagined in some way
that he was gonna get rid of the ghosts that way,
but, uh, it didn’t work.
BELANGER: During the reconstruction,
official White House photographer Abbie Rowe
clicks this picture.
And if you look way back
in the lower right-hand corner,
there’s this figure that’s almost see-through.
And you might say, "Well, come on, it’s 1950.
It’s an old camera, old technology."
But if you look just a little bit to the left
of that semi-see-through figure,
you’ll see three men standing there.
And you can make out their hat, their tie,
their clothes, and so on.
And they’re just as far away.
And so people point to this photo and suggest
this may be a documented ghost photo inside the White House.
SHATNER: Is the alleged apparition in the photo
merely a double exposure,
or a trick of light?
Or could it be definitive evidence
that supernatural spirits haunt the White House?
For now, all we can say for sure is that it’s unnerving
to think that the president’s residence might be haunted.
But there’s another potential scenario
that is even more concerning.
It’s the possibility that someone
other than the president
could be secretly running the country.
SHATNER: After leading the country to victory in World War I,
President Woodrow Wilson embarks on a grand speaking tour
across the United States
to encourage America to join
the newly-formed League of Nations.
Wilson travels more than 8,000 miles in just 22 days.
And the grueling journey takes a toll
on the president’s health.
Upon his return to the White House on October 2,
Wilson suffers a devastating stroke
and collapses on his bedroom floor.
LENGEL: Woodrow Wilson experiences a series
really debilitating strokes.
He recovers partially,
but he’s still unable to communicate clearly.
He’s unable to make any decisions.
He’s unable to carry out the functions of government.
And he’s hidden from view.
He’s hidden in a back room in the White House
behind curtains so that people can’t really see him.
SHATNER: With President Wilson incapacitated,
you would think that the vice president
and the cabinet would assume control of the country.
But remarkably, it was the First Lady, Edith Wilson,
who stepped in to fill the void.
LENGEL: Edith Wilson takes over.
She becomes the gatekeeper.
So, they have to go to Edith and say,
"What does the President want?"
And she says, "Well, let me tell you what he wants."
But it’s really what Edith wants.
And it’s a frightening situation
because she is intelligent,
but she doesn’t know anything about national affairs.
She doesn’t know anything about international affairs.
But nevertheless, she’s a very strong-minded woman.
And Wilson’s cabinet is too afraid
to do anything about it.
Edith Wilson is proxy president
for the remainder of Wilson’s second term.
But this is being hidden from the public.
It’s a dangerous situation,
but we only realized how dangerous
after Wilson left office.
SHATNER: While the thought of a proxy president
is obviously concerning,
the truth is that when it comes to the many strange tales
involving U.S. presidents,
we may never know the full story.
BELANGER: When you hear about these stories,
about past presidents
that are obviously off the books,
unexplained and really strange, we connect to it.
Because when you’re president of the United States,
you are privy to a lot of information
that affects a lot of people--
all the events, all the decisions
that have literally shaped our nation, shaped our world,
shaped who we are, and on and on.
We don’t like our presidents saying,
"I don’t know if I can trust you with this information,
and we don’t have all the answers yet."
LENGEL: The United States presidency
has so many legends
and stories associated with it
in its 225-year history,
and these are important stories.
Whether you believe them or not,
they expose the beating heart of the country.
They’re symbolic of our history as a nation.
And that’s one of the reasons
we really need to listen to them.
Even though the president of the United States
is perhaps the most public figure on Earth,
it’s surprising how many strange stories
lie hidden in the history of the Oval Office.
Could there be even more bizarre tales
that may one day be revealed?
Or are there some events
that are just too incredible to be shared
and should remain...
unexplained?
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY A+E NETWORKS