Former President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, developed a reputation for folksy candor about issues that politicians often shy away from — including acknowledging that he once personally observed a UFO, though he remained a skeptic about the possibility that aliens had landed on Earth.
“I saw an unidentified flying object,” Carter told GQ magazine in 2005, recounting a story he first publicly shared in the early 1970s before he became Georgia’s governor and then US president.
“I’ve never believed that it came from Mars. I know enough physics to know that you can’t have vehicles that are tangible in nature flying from Mars, looking around, and then flying back. But I saw an object one night when I was preparing to give a speech to a Lions Club,” he said.
The sighting occurred in 1969 in southwest Georgia and the ex-president said that he dictated the incident into an audio tape recorder.
“There were about 25 of us men standing around. It was almost time for the Lions Club supper to start, which I would eat and then I would give a speech,” Carter recalled.
“And 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 color to blue, and then it changed to red, then back to white.”
Carter said: “I dictated my observations. And when I got home, I wrote them down. So that’s an accurate description of what I saw. It was a flying object that was unidentified. But I have never thought that it was from outer space.”
But the 39th president poured cold water, however, on the possibility that aliens had landed anywhere on Earth — including at Roswell, N.M., in 1947 in an incident that conspiracy theorists say was followed by a government coverup featuring the recovery of alien bodies.
“As far as covering up possible flights from distant satellites or distant heavenly bodies, I don’t believe in that, and there’s no evidence that it was ever covered up. Or extraterrestrial people coming to Earth, I don’t think that’s ever happened,” Carter said.
Asked about his 1976 campaign pledge to look into Roswell, Carter told GQ that “in a way” he did — and in probing the encounter learned that the government once used a California psychic to learn the location of a plane lost in Africa.
“I became more aware of what our intelligence services were doing. There was only one instance that I’ll talk about now,” Carter said.
“We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic — a twin engine plane, small plane. And we couldn’t find it. And so we oriented satellites that were going around the Earth every 90 minutes to fly over that spot where we thought it might be and take photographs. We couldn’t find it. So the director of the CIA came and told me that he had contacted a woman in California that claimed to have supernatural capabilities. And she went in a trance, and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and we sent our satellite over that latitude and longitude, and there was the plane.”
Presidents from Harry S. Truman to Donald Trump have publicly addressed UFOs and popular theories involving aliens — and Carter’s successor, President Ronald Reagan, also said that he had personally observed a UFO while flying in a Cessna above Bakersfield, Calif., in 1974.
“It was a fairly steady light until it began to accelerate. Then it appeared to elongate. Then the light took off. It went up at a 45-degree angle at a high rate of speed. Everyone on the plane was surprised,” Reagan said. “The UFO went from a normal cruise speed to a fantastic speed instantly. If you give an airplane power, it will accelerate — but not like a hot rod, and that’s what this was like. It went straight up into the heavens.”
Carter’s reputation for candor extended to other subjects, with the longtime Sunday school teacher even sitting for five hours of interviews with Playboy magazine while running for president in 1976 and memorably commenting on his own impure thoughts.
“I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do — and I have done it — and God forgives me for it,” Carter said.
“But that doesn’t mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock. Christ says, ‘don’t consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife.’”
