Jimmy Carter's UFO
On what happened on a curious evening in 1969
Around 7:15 pm on a clear night in 1969, Jimmy Carter was standing outside the Lions’ Club in Leary, Georgia preparing to give a speech. This was two years before his eventual election as Governor of Georgia. As a group of a dozen people milled about outside the building, someone pointed to the sky and said: “Look! Over in the West!”
It was a moving orb, as bright as the moon. The orb was floating about 30 degrees above the horizon, and it moved toward the group, stopping above the pine trees. The object changed color: from white to blue to red to white again. It was luminous, not solid. Then, it receded into the distance. The entire event lasted about ten minutes. “None of us could understand what it was,” Carter said. He called it “the darnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Four years later, Carter filed a report on the incident with the International UFO Bureau.
People have questioned the details of this event. According to the report, Carter saw the object in October 1969, but the Lions Club records have the event at nine months earlier. An investigation in 1976 also found that most people at the Lions Club meeting did not remember the UFO sighting, and the one person who did recollected that it might have been “like some kind of weather balloon.” Some scholars hypothesize the object was Venus near its maximum brightness, but Carter himself dismissed this theory; in a 2007 interview, he said he was “thoroughly familiar with Venus” thanks to his experience as an amateur astronomer and that he thought the orb was not the suspected planet.
Carter was, after all, a man of science. He received robust training in physics and the basic sciences while at Georgia Tech and the US Naval Academy. Based on this knowledge, he also didn’t believe the object was an alien spacecraft. “I have never thought there was any extraterrestrial involvement but surmised it was some kind of military balloon or other device from nearby Fort Benning,” Carter explained. A UFO, after all, is merely an unidentified object — not necessarily an alien object.
When he was later on the presidential campaign trail, Carter promised to “make every piece of information that this country has about UFO sightings available to the public.” This, ultimately, didn’t come to pass. After his election, he likely met with CIA Director George H.W. Bush to make this request. There are no public records of this meeting and if it actually happened, but no matter what, Carter never mentioned UFOs again in his official capacity as president. Years later though, he said releasing records about UFOs could harm national security, and in a 2007 interview, he noted that “so far as I know, [the government is] not hiding information.”
This is not a story about policy or public service. It’s about a curious man fascinated by something he saw in the night sky. Sure, he’d later go on to be President, but on that day in 1969, he just stared at something mysterious. Jimmy Carter was in awe, and that moment stuck with him for the rest of his life. Because, sometimes, it’s the little moments in our lives — of wonder, of curiosity, of amazement — that we’ll remember as much as any grand accomplishments we achieve.
