Case Study: Jimmy Carter’s 1969 UFO Sighting, Leary, Georgia

Jimmy Carter is the only American president known to have filed a formal UFO sighting report. He did it in September 1973, as the sitting Governor of Georgia, on a standard questionnaire from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), at the request of the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City. The sighting itself had happened years earlier, outside a Lions Club meeting in the small town of Leary, in southwest Georgia.

Carter never claimed he had seen a spacecraft from another world, and he said so plainly for the rest of his life. What makes his case matter is everything around it: a careful observer who reported what he saw without embarrassment, a presidential candidate who promised the public the truth about UFOs, and a president who found, once in office, that the promise ran into the national security state.

This NPI Preliminary Review sets out what Carter reported, what he said about it afterward, what happened to his promise, and how skeptics have explained the sighting.

Sources: Carter’s NICAP sighting report (Sept. 18, 1973), via The Black Vault · HISTORY.com · Wikipedia, “Jimmy Carter UFO incident”

What Carter Reported

Carter’s own report is short, specific and careful not to claim more than he saw.

According to the report, Carter was standing outdoors at about 7:15 in the evening, “waiting for a meeting to begin at 7:30pm,” when a light appeared in the western sky about 30 degrees above the horizon. In his words on the form, “10-12 men all watched it. Brightness attracted us.”

He described a single, self-luminous, sharply outlined object, brighter than the sky around it and “at one time, as bright as the moon.” It appeared to stand still at times, and it changed in brightness, color and size. Its apparent size, he wrote, was “about the same as moon, maybe a little smaller. Varied from brighter/larger than planet to apparent size of moon.” In his own summary on the form, the object “seemed to move toward us from a distance, stopped-moved partially away-returned, then departed. Bluish at first, then reddish, luminous, not solid.” It then “moved to distance then disappeared.” He timed the event at 10 to 12 minutes and put the distance at “maybe 300-1000 yards,” while noting that judging it was “difficult.” He listed the witnesses as “ten members of Leary Georgia Lions Club.”

One answer stands out for what it does not say. Next to the question “What do you think you saw?”, Carter wrote nothing at all.

Source: Carter’s NICAP report, Sept. 18, 1973, scanned copy via The Black Vault, “Presidential Library UFO Records.”

When Did It Happen?

The date on Carter’s form is almost certainly wrong, and correcting it has helped both sides of the argument.

Carter’s report gives the date as October 1969. Researchers later found that he had addressed the Leary Lions Club on January 6, 1969, as the organization’s district governor, and that the Leary club had disbanded months before October. Most investigators, skeptics and believers alike, now date the sighting to the evening of January 6, 1969. Carter filed his report from memory, more than four years after the fact.

What Carter Said, and What He Didn’t

Carter’s credibility on this subject comes from the same place as the rest of his reputation: he did not overstate it.

Carter spoke about the sighting for decades, and his account barely moved. During the 1976 campaign he called it “the darndest thing I’ve ever seen” and said, “none of us could figure out what it was.”

He was just as clear about what he did not believe. In a 2005 interview with GQ, he said, “I saw an unidentified flying object,” and in the same interview, “I have never thought that it was from outer space.” He told the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast in 2007 that whatever he saw, he was confident it was not the planet Venus.

That combination, a former Navy officer who would neither dismiss what he saw nor dress it up, is exactly the kind of witness the UFO subject has always needed and rarely gotten. Carter showed that an American politician could say “I saw something I can’t explain” in public and survive it. He also showed something else: that he would not make fun of anyone who said the same.

Sources: HISTORY.com · Volume One (Jan. 22, 2025) · New York Post (Dec. 30, 2024) · SGU Episode 981 transcript

The Promise, and the Presidency

On the campaign trail, Carter promised openness. In office, he met the limits that every president since has met.

At a news conference at the Appleton, Wisconsin, airport on March 31, 1976, candidate Carter said that if elected he would work to release government information on UFO sightings to the public and to scientists. It was, as far as the record shows, the first explicit UFO transparency pledge by a major-party presidential candidate.

Once in office, Carter backed away. Releasing some of that information, he said, could have “defense implications.”

The White House did not drop the subject entirely. In July 1977, Carter’s science adviser, Frank Press, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote to NASA Administrator Robert Frosch suggesting NASA consider whether it should open an active research program on UFOs. NASA said no. In a December 21, 1977 letter, Frosch wrote that “there is an absence of tangible or physical evidence available for thorough laboratory analysis,” and proposed that “NASA take no steps to establish research in this area.” He added that NASA would “stand ready to respond to any bona fide physical evidence from credible sources.”

Nearly fifty years later, the question of what the government holds, and whether even a president can get it released, is still open. Testimony before Congress since 2023 has alleged that information on UAP has been withheld from elected officials, including from Congress itself. Carter’s experience is an early and very public example of how a president’s good intentions can stall once the subject touches defense.

Sources: Volume One (Jan. 22, 2025) · HISTORY.com · NASA information sheet on the 1977 Press-Frosch correspondence, released via the Department of Defense FOIA reading room · Dr. David Clarke (Jan. 11, 2024)

Skepticism and Alternative Explanations

Two explanations dominate. Carter rejected the first. The second, if correct, points to a government experiment, not a planet.

Venus. Investigator Robert Sheaffer and others argued that Carter and the Lions saw Venus, which was bright in the western evening sky in early January 1969. Carter, who had been a Navy officer and was familiar with the night sky, rejected that explanation. A planet also does not appear to approach, recede and approach again, shift from blue to red, or grow to the apparent size of the moon, all of which Carter reported.

A rocket experiment. In 2016, retired NASA scientist Carl “Jere” Justus proposed that the light was a barium vapor cloud released by a sounding rocket launched from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, at 7:35 p.m. Eastern on January 6, 1969, which he calculated would have appeared low in the western sky from Leary. His 2020 study called the sighting “totally consistent” with that launch, and he submitted the work to the Jimmy Carter Library. Carter reportedly came to accept it.

If that explanation is right, it does not make Carter wrong. It means a future president saw a military rocket experiment in the sky over Georgia, could not identify it, reported it honestly, and was never told what it was. That is its own lesson about secrecy.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Jimmy Carter UFO incident” (citing Sheaffer, Hendry, and Justus 2016 and 2020) · SGU Episode 981 transcript

Why Carter Matters

Carter’s sighting is not evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, and he never presented it that way. Its importance is different, and in some ways larger.

It shows what a responsible witness looks like: specific, cautious, consistent over fifty years, and willing to put his name on a report. It shows that the stigma around this subject is a choice, and that a public figure can refuse it. And it shows a president promising the public the truth about UFOs and then discovering how difficult it is to deliver.

Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, at the age of 100. The files he hoped to open remain, in large part, closed. NPI has called for binding executive action and direct congressional oversight to finish the work he started.

Further Reading

• Jimmy Carter, NICAP sighting report, Sept. 18, 1973 (via The Black Vault, “Presidential Library UFO Records”)
• “Jimmy Carter files report on UFO sighting,” HISTORY.com
• BJ Hollars, “A Presidential Promise on UFOs, Right Here in Wisconsin,” Volume One, Jan. 22, 2025
• Dr. David Clarke, “‘Fraught with Perils’: Jimmy Carter and NASA’s last strange trip into UFO territory,” Jan. 11, 2024
• NPI press release: “The New Paradigm Institute Calls for Binding Executive Order and Assertion of Direct Congressional Control Over Full and Immediate UFO/UAP and ET/NHI Disclosure” (Feb. 2026)

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