'Fraught with perils'

Jimmy Carter and NASA's last strange trip into UFO territory

A number of US Presidents have expressed an interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials but only one has ever reported a sighting: Jimmy Carter. The 39^th 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’.

Jimmy Carter in 1977 (credit: Department of Defense. Department of the Navy. Naval Photographic Center)

Gairy’s move 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’ (Daily Telegraph, London, 2 June 1976).

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’ (8 June 1976).

Six months after he became President, Carter instructed his science advisor Dr Frank Press to ask NASA to evaluate whether it was time for the US government to launch a new UFO investigation. The letter dated 21 June 1977 avoided reference to the President’s personal interest but said the White House ‘is becoming a focal point for an increasing number of inquiries about UFOs’. He suggested that NASA was ideally qualified to establish ‘a small panel of inquiry’ to examine any new evidence that had emerged since the Condon report. The White House said the spike in public interest was ‘a public relations problem as much as anything else’ and suggested high profile scientists such as Carl Sagan, who had expressed interest in UFOs, should be invited to join the panel.

In stark contrast to the current UAP study, in 1977 NASA successfully resisted political pressure to dive into the UFO ‘problem’. The White House’s overture landed on the desk of NASA administrator Dr Robert Frosch who responded to say any panel of inquiry ‘would require some additional resources … and for follow on activity’ and the agency had to satisfy itself that such expenditure was warranted. Unlike the existing independent panel, Frosch suggested that NASA might appoint a project officer to review unexplained reports received since the closure of Project Blue Book. But in December of that year he wrote again stating bluntly that after giving ‘considerable thought’ to the proposal NASA had decided to ‘take no steps to establish a research activity in this area [UFOs] or to convene a symposium on the subject’. The reason? ‘There is an absence of tangible or physical evidence available for a thorough laboratory analysis,’ he wrote. ‘And because of the absence of evidence, we have not been able to devise a sound scientific procedure for investigating these phenomena’. To embark on a research project without a clear methodology would, he said, be ‘wasteful and unproductive’.

Astrophysicist Richard Henry described Froch’s letter as ‘remarkable’. Henry was employed by NASA when Press’s letter arrived and engaged with the the internal debate that led Frosch to stamp on Carter’s proposal. Despite his access to what he calls ‘the secret NASA UFO file’ Henry revealed that he could not explain how and why the decision was made. But he pointed to a line in an internal exchange that bemoaned not only the lack of hard evidence but also ‘the plethora of secondary source material’ that relied upon human observations. It also referred to other ‘problems’ defined as: ‘the probability of hoaxes, the delicate interface of the Government with any private individual reporting an incident, and the danger of projecting an inaccurate NASA image’. All these things meant that ‘undertaking a formal study…appears fraught with perils’.

In his formal response to the White House Frosch was keen to point out that NASA retained an open mind and was willing to examine any bona fide physical evidence it received in future from ‘credible sources’. Significantly, NASA’s Information Sheet on UFOs, released early 1978, refers directly to President Carter’s UFO sighting that was listed as ‘unidentified’ by the civilian UFO group NICAP. NASA coyly noted that ‘some students of aerial phenomena’ were confident there was a simple explanation for the President’s close encounter.

In fact an exhaustive investigation by sceptic Bob Sheaffer led him to discover the true date and time of the sighting differed from the original news reports that implied it had occurred in 1973. When Sheaffer computed the positions of the planets in January 1969 he found that Venus ‘was a conspicuous evening star’ in the cold, clear sky. The planet often nicknamed ‘the queen of UFOs’ was nearing its ‘maximum brilliance’ in the southwest at 7.15 pm, at 25 degrees elevation, ‘in virtually the exact position that Carter reported his UFO’ (The UFO Verdict, Prometheus Books 1981, chapter 2). Sheaffer notes that despite providing this satisfying explanation numerous media and TV programmes continue to uncritically repeat the claim that ‘Jimmy Carter has seen a UFO’.

As British UFO author Tim Good pointed out, the President of the USA is (or at that time was) a credible witness par excellence: ‘as a graduate of nuclear physics who served on US Navy nuclear submarines, Carter would not have been fooled by anything so prosaic as Venus’

This is an extract from my article Take Me To Your Leaders: NASA’s long, strange relationship with UFOs, Fortean Times 440 (January 2024).