In a June 15, 2004 ruling, the US Supreme Court decided to overturn the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the reference to ’under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional since it violated the separation of church and state http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41802-2004Jun14.html. The Pledge of Allegiance is recited daily by over 60 million American school children and is the foremost symbol of American patriotism. The Pledge was given official support in 1892 by school superintendents around the country who agreed to school children reciting the following: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The Pledge was first revised in 1924 to replace the words "my flag" with the words "the flag of the United States of America". Another revision was made by Congress in 1954 and took effect on June 14 to include the phrase ’under God’ ostensibly due to a need to differentiate US society from the ’godless communism’. This revision occurred during the height of the McCarthy era so it might have been indeed predicted that those fearful of communist expansion would have aligned themselves with President Eisenhower and the US Congress who supported the change in revising the Pledge in this way. Indeed, fear of communism may have led to most US citizens supporting almost any initiative to distinguish American society from Soviet society and the ’communist threat’. There is, however, an alternative explanation for what initiated the revision of the Pledge of Allegiance.

On February 20-21, 1954, President Eisenhower and his top national security officials reportedly met with a delegation of extraterrestrial visitors who were concerned about the development and testing of the Hydrogen bomb. President Eisenhower did not agree with the extraterrestrials request and this resulted in the largest Hydrogen bomb test by the US on March 1, 1954. The meeting was the first in a series of meetings with different extraterrestrial races but the initial meeting reportedly had the effect of deeply unnerving President Eisenhower and his top advisors. What was it that could have unnerved President Eisenhower’s national security team? There may be a number of different explanations,

• the existence of advanced extraterrestrial life forms

• their advanced extraterrestrial technologies

• the knowledge the extraterrestrials possessed about the genesis of humanity

It can be hypothesized that what the extraterrestrials said about the origins of the human species challenged the traditional religious belief in humans being created by an all powerful transcendent religious being or ’God’. This knowledge about the truth of the human origins so unnerved Eisenhower and his team, that they reacted in an entirely predictable way. They initiated a Congressional process to revise the Pledge of Allegiance to buttress their world view which was based in a traditional religious belief that humanity’s origins were clearly associated with the divine intervention of a ’transcendent being’ or ’God’. Introducing the revision of ’under God’ into the Pledge would be a way of maintaining a human perspective which had now become a matter of US national security given the knowledge the extraterrestrials claimed to possess about humanity’s true origins.

The alternative explanation for what motivated President Eisenhower in supporting a revision to the Pledge of Allegiance clearly challenges the conventional thinking that it was ’godless communism’ that spurred the 1954 revision. The truth about what motivated Eisenhower in supporting the revision will be better known once the facts are revealed about reports of his administration’s various meetings with extraterrestrial races. The alleged February 20-21, 1954 meeting is the most significant due to the ’coincidence’ of its occurrence in early 1954, and the Congressional process that resulted in the Pledge being officially revised less than four months later on June 14.

One way to help lift the veil of secrecy surrounding Eisenhower’s meetings with extraterrestrials and the significance of this is to launch a US Congressional inquiry into allegations of such meetings. Such an inquiry would be a catalyst for those individuals with knowledge about the Eisenhower administration’s meetings with extraterrestrials, and the meetings’ significance on public policy to come forward and give their testimony under Congressional immunity. A petition has been created to initiate an inquiry by the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee into the purported February 20-21, 1954 Eisenhower-Extraterrestrial meeting and can be viewed and signed at: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/584805497

The current Pledge of Allegiance with the inclusion of ’under God’ may be little more than an historic overreaction by American Society to the threat posed by Soviet Communism. Alternatively, the inclusion may be evidence that a visiting extraterrestrial race so unnerved an American administration that the latter reacted in a very reflexive way to promote a religious perspective that the extraterrestrials demonstrated had little validity in explaining humanity’s genesis. The truth of why President Eisenhower supported a revision of the Pledge, awaits further investigation.