6 U.S. Presidents Who Were Obsessed With UFOs
UFO sightings are nothing new for Americans. In fact, the first one dates back to 1639, centuries before humankind could even conceive of non-bird flight. But for some reason (ahem, Nazis), they really ramped up in the 1940s. What started out as a major headache for Harry Truman has turned into a neat little passion project that preoccupies modern presidents between drone strikes.
Here are a few Commanders in Chief who dreamed of little green men…
Harry Truman’s Lament
A couple of years into Truman’s presidency, the U.S. was absolutely plagued by UFOs, or what military aid Col. Robert Landry called “way-out reports of sightings.” By 1948, the sightings had only increased, and America was starting to freak out a little bit. Truman decided he had to respond, and so, he pressed Landry to give him quarterly updates on the whole alien situation.
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Landry dutifully kept Truman up-to-date, but there are only so many ways you can say “the Nazi’s made some crazy shit.” This apparently drove Truman a little bit insane — he was the most powerful man in the world, for crying out loud! If anybody on the planet knew about aliens, he had a right to know too! By 1952, Truman had secretly wiretapped Landry so he could eavesdrop on his conversations with Air Force personnel. But nothing juicy was ever discussed.
Gerald Ford’s Career-Long Nemesis
The fine people of Michigan’s 5th District elected Ford to Congress to look out for them, and dagnabbit, he was determined to deliver. When UFO fever hit the Mitten State in the ‘60s, Ford lept into action. As House minority leader, he spent his political capital calling for an official congressional investigation: “In the firm belief that the American public deserves a better explanation than that thus far given by the Air Force, I strongly recommend that there be a committee investigation of the UFO phenomena.”
What was his beef with the Air Force? An astrophysicist consulting with the Air Force had issued a complicated, yet condescending, explanation for two high-profile sightings in Michigan. Made famous decades later in Men in Black, Dr. J. Allen Hynek confidently asserted the “swamp gas” theory — gas bubbling up from swamplands spontaneously combusted, causing a bunch of country bumpkins to panic and start babbling about aliens.
Ford’s investigation never materialized, but he did manage to hold the first-ever official hearing on UFOs in 1966.
Jimmy Carter Saw One With His Own Eyes
In 1969, several years before he entered the Oval Office, Carter and some chums were hanging outside of a small-town Georgia Lion’s Club on a cold, clear January night. A dozen men all saw the same bizarre phenomenon: a bright disc seemed to be zooming toward and away from them, flashing red and blue.
Carter later filed an official report of what he witnessed, but he didn’t go full-blown Alex Jones, instead conceding it was “probably an electrical current of some sort.” But you can tell it vexed him for almost a decade, as he promised during his campaign that “if I become president, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.”
Well, he never made anything public. But in a crazy twist, an ex-Air Force scientist was able to pinpoint the exact phenomenon that Carter witnessed, almost half a century later. In 2016, scientist Jere Justus read Carter’s report and knew what he was describing: a high-altitude barium cloud, intentionally farted out by an Air Force rocket. He looked up some records, and quickly found the precise launch that caused Carter’s bright, confusing celestial fireworks show.
The Gipper Has the Gift of Gab
In 1974, seven years before he took office, Ronald Reagan reported seeing a UFO while flying over Bakersfield, California on an Air Force training mission. The pilot of the mission later described the phenomenon: “It was a fairly steady light until it began to accelerate. Then it appeared to elongate. Then the light took off. … The UFO went from a normal cruise speed to a fantastic speed instantly. If you give an airplane power, it will accelerate — but not like a hot rod, and that’s what this was like.”
Reagan himself described it more like a slack-jawed six-year-old at a county fair: “It went straight up into the heavens!” Cool man, glad you’re in charge of everything.
While tumbling around in his oatmeal brain, this harrowing ordeal seems to have blended with a few sci-fi films he’d acted in, because he became obsessed with aliens and outer space for the rest of his career. He chucked a bunch of sci-fi authors onto a “space advisory council,” and came up with a missile defense system (to which the press basically responded “You mean like Star Wars? You sound like you’re talking about Star Wars”). And he once tried to break the ice with his Cold War frenemy Mikhail Gorbachev by asking him, “What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?”
Masterful gambit, you Swiss cheese-brained bigot.
Bill Clinton Annoyed the Shit Out of His Coworkers
At one point early in his White House tenure, Clinton turned to his old pal Webb Hubbel and said, “Webb, if I put you over at Justice, I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?” Hubble, for his part, has said, “I had looked into both, but wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting.”
During a trip to Ireland in 1995, a little kid asked Clinton about Roswell. His answer betrayed a deep disappointment in the U.S. government’s collection of mushy green space corpses (or lack thereof): “No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it, either. And I want to know!”
Colin Powell grew quite sick of Clinton’s shit. Whenever it came up, Powell would roll his eyes and say, “Here come the little green men again.”
Barack Obama Kind of Ruined the Illusion
People have (rightly) pointed out that the best indication that there are no secret files about bug-eyed aliens is that Trump has never yapped about them. But Obama made some comments that pour cold water over anyone hoping to become an alien whisperer in a secure laboratory deep beneath Roswell.
Talking to James Corden for some reason, Obama said, “When I came into office, I was like, ‘All right, is there the lab somewhere where we’re keeping the alien specimens and spaceship?’ And you know, they did a little bit of research and the answer was ‘no.’”
Okay, sure, a likely story. But his next breadcrumb hinted at some more plausible, though less exciting sci-fi mystery: “There’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern.”
Unfortunately, it would make the most sense that the U.S. government simply sucks at spotting aliens, and the best they have is some blurry iPhone 5 footage.
