Jimmy Carter UFO Sighting, Leary, Georgia

Leary sits in Calhoun County, Georgia, about 40 miles from Plains. In January 1969 Jimmy Carter had lost the 1966 governor's race. He was also a Lions Club district governor. On Monday, January 6, he came to Leary to give a speech.

About 7:15 pm. Shortly after dark. The men stood outdoors, waiting for the meeting to begin at 7:30. Carter later placed them outside "a little restaurant, I believe, a high school lunch room."

Then one of the men looked up and said, "Look, over in the west!" A bright light hung in the sky, about 30 degrees above the horizon. "We all saw it," Carter recalled. "And then the light, it got closer and closer to us. And then it stopped, I don't know how far away, but it stopped beyond the pine trees."

It was sharply outlined and self-luminous. At one time, as bright as the moon. It varied from about the size of a planet to roughly the apparent size of the moon. It turned blue, then red, then back to white. It moved partially away. It came back. Then it moved into the distance and disappeared. It lasted 10 to 12 minutes. "It didn't have any solid substance to it," Carter said in 1973. "It was just a very peculiar-looking light."

September 1973. Carter was now Governor of Georgia. Hayden C. Hewes, director of the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City, asked for an account. Carter filled in the form on September 18. He dated the sighting "October 1969" and listed the witnesses as "Ten members of Leary Georgia Lions Club." The original now sits at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.

In 1976 he promised: "If I become President, I'll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists." Once in office he pulled back, citing "defense implications." In July 1977 his science adviser, Frank Press, floated "a small panel of inquiry" to NASA Administrator Robert Frosch. NASA declined.

The sceptic Robert Sheaffer found the Lions Club records that fixed the date at January 6, 1969. His answer was Venus, "in the west-southwest at an altitude of 25 degrees" and "brighter than anything else in the sky." Allan Hendry's calculations agreed. Carter did not. He was an amateur astronomer, he said, and knew what Venus looked like.

Fred Hart, the 1969 club president, recalled "a blue light or something or other in the sky that night," like "some kind of weather balloon." In 1978 journalist Tom Tiede reported that "there is no one in Leary who remembers sighting a UFO in company with the future president." Carter's own retellings drifted too, from ten witnesses to "about twenty," and to "a kind of green light."

In 2016, Carl G. "Jere" Justus, a former Georgia Tech professor, pointed to a barium cloud from a rocket launched at Eglin AFB, released on January 6, 1969, at 7:35 pm EST. At 152 km up, it would have appeared 33 degrees above the horizon from Leary. Such a cloud glows bluish or greenish at first, with parts turning reddish. His 2020 paper calls it "totally consistent" with Carter's report. Carter remembered 7:15 pm. But he was reconstructing the time more than four years later.

Carter never claimed a visitor. "It was a flying object that was unidentified," he said. "But I have never thought that it was from outer space." He would not accept Venus either. In his words, it remained "the darndest thing I've ever seen."