The UFO Phenomenon

Mysteries revisited: Jimmy Carter's 1969 UFO sighting in Georgia

By T.K. Randall
January 1, 2025 ·  6 comments

Jimmy Carter photographed in 1979. Image Credit: Ansel Adams / PD Like many of the more recent US presidents, Jimmy Carter - who died on December 29th at the grand old age of 100 - touched upon the subject of UFOs both before and during his time in office.

Most famously, he actually reported witnessing a UFO himself back in 1969.

At the time, he had been scheduled to give a speech at a Lions Club meeting in Leary, Georgia when some of the other guests directed his attention to a peculiar object in the sky.

It was described as a bright object that moved toward them before stopping a short way off.

It then proceeded to change color a few times before disappearing into the distance.

"There were about twenty of us standing outside of a little restaurant, I believe, a high school lunch room, and a kind of green light appeared in the western sky," he recalled in 1973."This was right after sundown. It got brighter and brighter. And then it eventually disappeared. It didn't have any solid substance to it, it was just a very peculiar-looking light."

"None of us could understand what it was."

Carter famously submitted a report to the International UFO Bureau detailing the sighting a few years later when he was Governor of Georgia and even promised to "make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists" while he was campaigning to become President of the United States.

Ultimately, though, such disclosure never came to pass, mainly due to national security concerns.

During a 2007 podcast interview, he played down suggestions that the object he had seen in 1969 was the planet Venus and thought that it was most likely to be a secretive military vehicle of some kind.

He also stated that he did not believe that aliens were visiting the Earth and denied claims that the government had been covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Source: Metro.co.uk | Comments (6)

Tags: Jimmy Carter