Free Earth by Timothy Good

major networks flew to Spence Field, Moultrie, Georgia, some twenty-five miles north of Thomasville. Columbine III landed there two and a half hours later.
    With its two thousand acres of prime bird-hunting land, Milestone Plantation suited Eisenhower’s requirements for privacy. With the exception of a previously arranged photo op, none of the media was allowed on the grounds. “The plantation was so secure,” Art told me, “that Ike was able to go there four times in the 1950s. This was his second trip. The press was housed some eight miles away at Scott Hotel in Thomasville. James Hagerty, Ike’s press secretary, gave daily international news and briefings in the hotel lounge.”
    Many commentators wondered why the president had taken a few days’ hunting trip at a time when international tensions were mounting. Fear of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union was paramount—and a very real threat. As the British journalist and historian Sir Max Hastings succinctly puts it: “A younger generation finds it hard to believe that it was plausible that America and the Soviet Union would come to nuclear blows. Armies and navies, together with fleets of bombers and batteries of missiles capable of destroying civilization many times over, confronted each other at instant readiness….” 4
    The hunting party reached the lodgings at Milestone, changed quickly, and reached the hunting area at about 17:30. Media attendees included well-known journalists Ed Darby of Time , John Edwards of ABC, and William Lawrence of The New York Times . Why all the prestigious press for a quail shoot? Perhaps the reason lay in the fact that a week earlier, Josef Stalin’s replacement leader, Georgi Malenkov, had been forced to resign and was replaced by Marshal Nikolai Bulganin. “A famous military leader taking over an aggressive Cold War government gave the world a severe case of the jitters,” Campbell believes.
    Arthur Godfrey
    Campbell questions the presence of Arthur Godfrey on the trip. A famous television personality at the time, Godfrey’s shows were watched by millions and helped define the first decade of 1950s television and radio. “Whatwas the one and only indomitable Arthur Godfrey doing on the president’s plane?” asks Campbell. “He was not seated with Ike or his social guests in the main passenger section, but in the forward crew compartment with about a dozen others, including the flight crew and some Secret Service agents.”
    According to news sources years later—including Ted Gup of Time magazine—Godfrey and Ed Murrow were part of a huge civil defense effort to assist the government in making pre-recorded taped messages to be transmitted on television and radio in the event of a nuclear attack. Campbell continues:
    â€œGup said in his article that a number of newsmen had taken oaths of secrecy and had agreed to accompany the president to the relocation site of his choosing, to lend their familiar names and voices to help calm the surviving audience. Recalling the separate press plane that accompanied Eisenhower to Spence air base and Thomasville, one wonders if any of these spokesmen were also along on this strange trip. Was this trip a true potential national emergency? Or another trial run of apparently many in those days?
    â€œThere were a number of facilities in the mid-1950s where government could relocate to in the event of a national emergency. One was an underground bunker named Mount Weather, near Godfrey’s home in Berryville, Virginia, and another was a facility named Raven Rock, near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where Eisenhower and his cabinet convened on a number of ‘practice occasions.’”
    Of incidental interest, Godfrey had flown for the Air Force and Navy in World War II. In 1965 he reported on his own show that he had been buzzed by a UFO while flying a light plane. 5
    The Witnesses
    On the day following the