President Carter’s
UFO Sighting
Date: January 6, 1969
Location: Georgia, United States
Apart from being the thirty-ninth president of the United States, Jimmy Carter is also an avid believer in extraterrestrial life. During the electoral campaign of 1976, Carter claimed that if he were to be elected, he would release every piece of information the government had on alien life. Unsurprisingly, even though he was elected, he wasn’t granted permission to release any classified information. What many people do not know about Carter is that he himself had seen a UFO in 1969 when he was giving a speech in Georgia.
“One thing is for sure. I will never make fun of people who say they have seen unidentified objects in the sky. If I become president, I will make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.” 39
On January 6, 1969, at 19:15, as Carter was delivering a speech at the Lions Club in Georgia, one of the attendees noticed a bright object in the sky and pointed it out to Carter. The object was located to Carter’s left side, flying at a low altitude, and was significantly brighter than the moon and stars. Hovering silently over the treetops, the object started changing its color in a sequential order, from a bright white to blue, red, green, and then back to white. The spherical object remained in the sky for a total of twelve minutes before it disappeared from the sky.
“There were about twenty of us standing outside of a little restaurant, I believe, a high school lunchroom, and a kind of green light appeared in the western sky,” Carter later recalled. “This was right after sundown. It got brighter and brighter. And then it eventually disappeared. It did not have any solid substance to it, it was just a very peculiar-looking light. None of us could understand what it was.” 40
In several interviews throughout the years, Carter has frequently been asked about what he thought the unidentified light was. In one interview in 2005, Carter said, “All of a sudden, one of the men looked up and said, ‘Look over in the west!’ and there was a bright light in the sky. We all saw it. And then the light, it got closer and closer to us. And then it stopped, I don’t know how far away, but it stopped beyond the pine trees. And all of a sudden, it changed its color to blue, and then it changed to red, then back to white. And we were trying to figure out what in the world it could be, and then it receded into the distance.” 41
The Investigation
Nearly seven years after the sighting, a number of theorists looked into the event. Naturally, so much time had passed that many of the witnesses had forgotten details about the sighting. Out of the twenty witnesses, only one of them remembered the details vividly; the other witnesses simply stated that they recalled seeing a strange object in the sky.
Not having a lot of details to work with, a conclusion was drawn shortly after the initiation. The report stated that the unidentified light was a bright Venus. Robert Sheaffer, a UFO skeptic, stated that the position of Venus matched the position of the UFO in the sky.
Sheaffer later wrote, “Mr. Carter reports that his UFO was in the western sky at about thirty degrees elevation. This almost perfectly matches the known position of Venus, which was in the west-
southwest at an altitude of twenty-five degrees.” 42
However, over the years, many have criticized this conclusion. It’s been argued that if the light was a bright Venus, it would have been noticed much earlier in the night. Moreover, Carter said that the object changed its color from blue to red, green, and to white, and hovered over the treetops before it disappeared, not to be seen again. These characteristics have proved to many that what Carter and the other witnesses saw was not a bright Venus but an interplanetary aircraft.
Conclusion
Although the characteristics described by Carter do not resemble features of Venus, we must keep in mind that there is not enough evidence to come to a definite conclusion. We cannot prove that the object was extraterrestrial, nor can we confirm that it was a bright Venus.
39. Timothy Good, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-up (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987), 368.
40. Robert Sheaffer, UFO Sightings: The Evidence (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 20–21.
41. Will Hylton, “The Gospel According to Jimmy,” GQ Magazine, December 6, 2005, https://www.gq.com/story/jimmy-carter-ted-kennedy-ufo-republicans.
42. Robert Sheaffer, “President Carter’s ‘UFO’ Is Identified as the Planet Venus,” The Humanist, July/August 1977, 46.