One night in Georgia in 1969, Jimmy Carter looked up over the pines and saw a moving orb, as bright as the moon.
He stood outside the local Lions’ Club in Leary, where he planned to address the gathering. But local politics quickly faded from his mind. The sphere “seemed to move towards us from a distance, to stop, to move partly away, to return, and then to depart,” he said later, describing it first as “bluish, then reddish, luminous, not solid” . He called it “the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Carter’s encounter with a UFO might appear as a line in some of his obituaries, sandwiched between the sober analysis of his presidency and the remarkable humanitarian work since. And like all politicians, he should be judged by his successes and failures, both in office and out. But more than just a funny footnote, this story gives us important insight into who he was as a man.
We have almost forgotten what it is like to have leaders who can be amazed by the unknown. Despite all the problems the country faced during his presidency, Jimmy Carter would openly ponder the mysteries of life – before, during and after his time in the White House – and he should be remembered for that.
Carter was not ashamed to talk about his UFO sighting. In 1973, while governor of Georgia, he submitted a report documenting the sighting to the International UFO Bureau. He later said that after his own encounter he would never again mock anyone who reported a similar experience.
His openness was rooted in the scientific training he received at university in Georgia, at the US Naval Academy, and later in his work on nuclear submarines. Carter claimed that just because something may be a UFO does not mean it is extraterrestrial. Ultimately, he believed that what he saw – while inexplicable – was probably man-made.
Regardless, the encounter stayed with him for years. During his 1976 campaign, he promised that as president he would declassify all UFO-related documents. According to some accounts, he did indeed meet with then-CIA Director George HW Bush after his election to make that request. Whatever was or was not said at that meeting, Carter never seemed to talk about UFOs again — at least not publicly in his official capacity as president.
He would later tell the American public that releasing such information would harm national security interests.
Jimmy Carter at his peanut farm in Plains, Georgia, in 1976
A file photo of a UFO in 1951
However, Carter’s interest in UFOs did not disappear completely. In 1977, NASA, with the help of Carl Sagan, sent the Voyager spacecraft into space with a gold record containing recordings of greetings and music from different countries and cultures.
President Carter sent a message that read in part: “This is a gift from a small, distant world…We hope to one day, after we have solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our resolve, and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”
It is difficult to imagine many of his successors using such language. No other president has even attempted to address UFO sightings head-on. Clinton would have said he would tell people if he saw any evidence, but he never did. George W. Bush joked to late-night host Jimmy Kimmel that such a revelation “could put you in orbit.” Obama seemed to give up on the cosmos altogether, effectively cutting off NASA’s funding. President Trump created Space Force, but with national security rather than space exploration in mind. About UFOs, Trump said: “I don’t believe in them, but anything is possible.”
Carter’s fascination with the unknown stayed with him long after he left the White House. In 1994 he published a poem entitled ‘Considering the Void’ – a meditation on the images returned to Earth by the Voyager spacecraft.
Nearly twenty years after he sent his letter into space, the ’emptiness’ still haunts him: ‘When I behold the charm of the evening sky, their soothing endurance… the celestial landscape of our Milky Way with in its glittering disc an infinite number of suns ( or say a thousand billion)… knowing that this galaxy of ours is one of the multitudes in what we call heaven, it disturbs me. It worries me.’
If he was concerned about the vastness of the cosmos, it is certainly because he had the will to try to understand it – and that is something to be admired in a leader.
Shane Cashman is a writer for Timcast News and author of the new book Tales from the World Upside Down: Ghosts of the Civil War.