How Jimmy Carter refused to release UFO files over national security fears

Around seven years before he was elected US president, Jimmy Carter was preparing to give a speech to a Lions Club in Georgia when he saw a light in the sky.

The light got closer and closer to him and the rest of the group before coming to a stop hovering above some pine trees. It remained in view for around 10 minutes.

As the men watched in amazement, it turned blue, then red, then white, then the light slowly disappeared.

In future interviews, the one-term president – who died yesterday aged 100 – was never shy about discussing what happened that night in 1969.

Speaking to GQ, Carter said bluntly: ‘I saw an unidentified flying object.’

More than four years after the incident, while he was serving as governor of Georgia, Carter was asked by the International UFO Bureau to file a report.

Luckily, he had been carrying a dictaphone that night to take notes from the meeting, and he had been able to record his observations while his eyes were still fixed on the glowing object.

He later recalled: ‘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.’

The president declared he knew ‘enough physics to know that you can’t have vehicles that are tangible in nature flying from Mars, looking around, and then flying back’.

According to Politico, a researcher in 2016 claimed to have worked out what Carter had actually seen that night.

It was, in fact, a cloud of barium that had been released in the upper atmosphere by scientists from the US Air Force and Nasa who wanted to study wind patterns.

But that was not the only close encounter with the bizarre Carter had in his long life.

While he was in the White House, a small twin-engine plane crashed in the Central African Republic, and the US government dedicated masses of technological resources to tracking it down without success.

Then, Carter said, ‘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.’

During his first campaign for president in 1976, Carter promised he would ‘make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists’.

However, that pledge was not fulfilled, and he later suggested the information could not be divulged due to its implications for national defence.

Whatever he discovered on the topic during his four years in office wasn’t made public – and following his death, it’s likely that it never will be.

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