Now, I know what you’re thinking, turn the page, this is another freak looking for aliens wearing a tinfoil hat. Not even close. Bear with me a moment, this goes in a completely different direction…
Since this was never officially classified as far as I know, and in 30 years nobody has ever knocked on my door to tell me not to tell it, so here goes:
Back in July of 1984, my father was a manager within Bell Telephone. His job was to work with the Olympic committee to coordinate communications design and implementation for the opening ceremonies.
He was indeed a sports fan and we watched everything from Golf to football. So when he got to work on the Olympics in LA, it was a big deal. He came home one evening, the night of the opening ceremonies and this is what happened:
He came home all agitated and upset, but at the same time excited. All of us were watching the Olympics on TV, but he stepped in front of the set and turned it off. “I have something really amazing to tell you. I just watched someone try to assassinate the President!” Now after the shock of that bold statement wore off, the five of us Kids clamored for him to spill the beans. You have to know my Father; he was, by far and away the most staunchly conservative man I had ever met and also the most no-nonsense. My Father was completely incapable of imagination of any substantial kind. To him, any story that was not fact, science, politics or sports was not worth the paper it was printed on, so for him to come out with a whopper like this one was for us, instant truth.
He continued to explain that two middle-eastern, credentialed journalists made their way through various security checkpoints until they reached the elevator. Coming out of the elevator just behind where the President’s box was located, they were discovered by the bomb-sniffing dog units stationed at the doors. With kill switches in hand, the suicide bombers were wrestled to the ground by the Secret Service before they could detonate themselves. Those two terrorists were never seen again.
Nobody wrote about it in the newspapers, nobody came forward to sell their story. Back then, with the Cold War on, I doubt many who knew about the event even gave telling about it a second thought. That story has lived in my memory for 30 years, and while most of the time I have never given it a second thought, it makes you wonder, why keep history like that a secret? And you know, it’s kind of ironic that while serving in the Army over in what was then West Germany, President Reagan called my barracks on Christmas eve to wish us well and thank us for representing the USA in the upcoming international Boeselager competition.
I’ve looked high and low for any trace of this story to surface, but so far it never has. Even the Reagan Library will not confirm the event. One wonders why? After 30 years, shouldn’t the attempted assassination of the single most popular President in our Nation’s History be worth recounting?
Perhaps it’s just because nobody ever brought it up… who knows. At the time I’m sure it had a lot of relevance, as we fought to break down Russia’s resolve during the Cold War. Many pundits of the time wondered why President Reagan took a much harsher stance on Russia during and after attending the Olympics that year; most expected him to soften his stance at that point. Who knows what role this event had in that decision…
In any case, I’m telling it now and this is not fiction.
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