Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, is among the most frequently cited witnesses in Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) research: a future president who reported his own sighting before taking office and pledged, on the campaign trail, to make government files public. Carter openly discussed how he had personally witnessed an unidentified glowing object hovering over Leary, Georgia, in 1969,1 and promised voters that if elected he would release any US government UFO files.2 He proclaimed he had seen unidentified lights in the sky and said he was no longer laughing at those who report flying saucers.3 He subsequently testified about the sighting,4 and newspaper clippings of that testimony were later displayed in Alien Encounters from Tomorrowland.5 Carter is counted among the witnesses of UFO sightings alongside trained United States Air Force (USAF) observers, pilots, police officers and members of the public who were not looking for UFOs.6
Carter described a separate encounter in 1973, witnessed together with his son Jeff Carter. He said the object was changing colour from red to green,7 and recalled an incandescent mass in the sky, as brilliant and as large as the Moon, moving at high speed.8 He said he personally heard no noise from the object, but that Jeff Carter later told him he had heard a metallic sound coming from it.9 According to Carter, the object hovered above the two of them for about ten minutes before moving south, changing route repeatedly, moving east, and disappearing over the horizon.10 In 1976, ahead of Carter’s election, a contactee group published a message purportedly channelled by telepathy from a space entity called Adoniesis, addressed to Carter and dated from Italy, Sicily, Nicolosi, 1976-11-04.11 The 1976 Adoniensis message to Jimmy Carter stated that his authority had been granted from above and urged him not to do as others had done, according to Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults.12 The same source reported that the channel of Adoniensis claimed Carter had been secretly programmed.13 Researcher Jacques Vallée traced the message to the Study Center of Cosmic Fraternity.14
Before his January 1977 inauguration, Carter reportedly sought a meeting with the then Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director, George Herbert Walker Bush, to obtain a UFO briefing, according to Daniel Sheehan.15 Sheehan said Bush flatly refused, telling the president-elect he had no ’need to know’,16 and instead suggested Carter seek a briefing through the Congressional Research Service (CRS).17 Bush’s term as CIA Director ended just before Carter’s inauguration in January 1977.18 Once in office, Carter pressed the issue, and the CRS’s specialist on space and aerospace, Marcia Smith, was tasked to investigate.19 Carter also asked press secretary Jody Powell and science adviser Frank Press to look into what could be done about the UFO issue.20 Two classified reports on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) and extra-terrestrial intelligence were prepared for Carter in 1977, written for the Library of Congress’ Science and Technology Division before being sent to the president; Sheehan saw both.21 According to In Plain Sight, the 1977 classified reports on UAPs and extra-terrestrial intelligence for President Carter concluded there were many cases in which official USAF investigations could not rule out the possibility that some of the vehicles were extra-terrestrial.22 Sheehan told the author of In Plain Sight that in 1977 the CIA Director flatly refused Carter a briefing on UAPs, and that what the president was subsequently told in briefing documents did not reveal what Sheehan had discovered.23 While investigating on Carter’s behalf that year, Sheehan said he discovered archival photographs of a ‘flying saucer’ craft being retrieved by the US military.24 It has never been revealed what Carter or any other US president was told, if anything, about the UAP phenomenon,25 and neither Carter nor Marcia Smith ever issued a statement denying Sheehan’s claims about the 1977 Project Blue Book viewing and classified reports.26
In July 1977, Frank Press asked the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to consider investigating public inquiries concerning UFOs.27 There was never any explanation for why Carter did not simply order NASA to conduct the inquiry itself.28 According to In Plain Sight, UFO disclosure groups such as the Mutual Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) Network (MUFON) hoped Carter would open decades of still-classified Project Blue Book files that were widely known to be withheld from public release.29 A search of Carter’s presidential library archives found he had had an extremely high interest in UFOs during his administration, though his efforts to disclose them were stymied, according to researcher Grant Cameron.30 Ronald Reagan’s conservative Republican presidency followed Carter’s liberal administration in 1981.31 Whitley Strieber said Carter had seen a UFO before entering office and had promised he would find out the truth about it.32 During his administration, Carter revealed nothing about UFOs,33 and when later queried about UFOs by researcher Stanton Friedman, he refused to discuss the matter at all.34 Strieber said Carter, as president, apparently asked the DOD to tell the public the story about UFOs,35 and attributed Carter’s subsequent refusal to discuss the topic to Carter having been told that presidential disclosure would be a ’trip wire’.36
According to Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, Carter referenced to the media the case of a remote viewer locating a crashed Russian jet in the Congo,37 and Carter matter-of-factly revealed the existence of the psychic Stargate programme to the media.38 Alonzo McDonald served as Carter’s staff director.39 Researcher Luis Elizondo has said he believes Carter was among a group of US presidents - including Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush and Donald Trump - who were briefed in some way on UAP.40 Researcher Jason Samosa has similarly said his research indicates that Richard Nixon, Carter, Reagan and George H. W. Bush all appear to have received briefings on the UFO subject.41 When Bill Clinton became president in 1993, he asked questions about UAPs, just as Carter had done in 1977.42