Seven years before his presidency, former President Jimmy Carter saw what he called, “the darndest thing I’ve ever seen.”
The incident took place in Leary, Georgia, just a stone’s throw south of Columbus. It was October 1969, the year before he was elected governor. At around 7:30 p.m., while waiting to give a speech at a Lion’s Club meeting, Carter says he saw an unidentified flying object.
Carter was not alone. About a dozen others reported seeing the UFO with “very bright changing colors and about the size of the moon,” according to History.com. He reported the object started out blue and then turned red and was “luminous, not solid.”
The incident made a lasting impression; Carter was still talking about it years later at a 1973 Southern Governors Conference. He retrospectively filed two official reports when word of the incident reached the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in Kensington, Maryland, according to the Washington Post. He listed his occupation as “governor” and his address as the “state capitol, Atlanta.”
The first was a handwritten report in July 1973 to the International UFO Bureau after they sent him a form to complete. He responded to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in Kensington, Maryland, when the group sent him a similar form three months later.
Carter said, “the object hovered about 30 degrees above the horizon and moved in toward the earth and away before disappearing into the distance.
“It returned, then departed,” Carter added. “It came close... maybe 300 to 1,000 yards... moved away, came close and then moved away.”
When Carter ran for president in 1976, he emphasized honesty and ridding the government of the secrecy that led to Watergate, “I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a misleading statement. I’ll never betray the confidence that any of you had in me. And I’ll never avoid a controversial issue.”
When it came to the UFO sighting, Carter backpedaled a bit. He told a campaign reporter that he had seen a light in the sky he could not identify, but did not call it a UFO.
“I have no idea what it was,” he said. “I think it was a light beckoning me to run in the California primary.”
Mona Moore
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