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’. His attempts 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’.

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’….

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