A number of US Presidents have expressed an interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials but only one has ever reported a sighting: Jimmy Carter. The 39th President held office from 1977 until 1981 during a period of intense public interest in UFOs.
Soon after Carter took office Sir Eric Gairy, president of the small Caribbean island republic of Grenada, called upon the United Nations General Assembly to make 1978 ‘the year of the UFO’. His attempts failed to gain any traction but the release of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind – with its plot based around a government conspiracy to hide direct contact with friendly ETs – raised the political stakes.
During the election campaign in 1976 Carter said: ‘one thing’s for sure I’ll never make fun of people who say they have seen unidentified objects in the sky. If I become President, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the government and the scientists’.
Carter’s interest was a direct result of his own experience in 1969, two years before he became Governor of Georgia. On the evening of 6 January he was preparing to speak in the town of Leary when one of the guests drew his attention to a bright white light, 30 degrees above the horizon, to the west of their position. As he and a dozen others watched, the light appeared to move towards them to hover behind a belt of pine trees. It changed colour from blue to red and then back to white. Eventually the light, that he compared to the size of the full moon, disappeared into the distance. Carter later filled out a NICAP UFO sighting questionnaire but his story only emerged in 1976 when he told the National Enquirer ‘It was the darndest thing I’ve ever seen …none of us could figure out what it was’….
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David Clarke is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Arts and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He teaches media law and his research specialism is contemporary legend. Previously he worked as a journalist for The Sheffield Star and Yorkshire Post and spent four years working as a Press Officer in local government. His PhD in Folklore and was completed at the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition, University of Sheffield, in 1999. From 2008-13 he acted as consultant and curator of the MoD UFO files project with The National Archives. His books include The Angel of Mons (2004) and How UFOs Conquered the World: the history of a modern myth (2015). In 2018 he co-founded the Centre for Contemporary Legend at Sheffield Hallam University. This blog covers his twin research interests in journalism and folklore. The views expressed in the contents are entirely his own.
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