Carters UFO hounded him for years. Few knew his expertise in astronomy.
After calls with foreign leaders, rap sessions with lawmakers, and long classified briefings with advisers, President Jimmy Carter would often escape to the roof of the White House.
There his son Jeffrey had set up a tracking telescope, Carter said in his book, A Full Life. Feeling the weight of the world, he would gaze at the stars and contemplate his place among them.
“I recall one winter night going to the White House roof to study the Orion nebulae, but we could barely see the stars, their images so paled by city lights,” he waxed in a poem.
That particular evening, on Dec. 18, 1977, the astrophysicist Carl Sagan joined him. They had just visited the U.S. Naval Observatory next to the vice president’s mansion, where they discussed all things space — planets, stars, black holes, and astrobiology. Carter himself was a man of science: He studied engineering in college and did graduate work in nuclear physics.
“It was a welcome diversion from earthly concerns,” he wrote in a thank-you note to Sagan.
Carter, who died on Dec. 29, 2024 at 100, was an avid astronomer, with a profound curiosity for the cosmos, a part of his story that isn’t well-known. It began when he was a lab assistant to an astronomy teacher his freshman year in college, and it continued as he learned celestial navigation in the U.S. Navy, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant. One Christmas while on a ship with his family, he asked the captain if the crew had a sextant on board, a tool for measuring the angle between the horizon and an object in the sky. The captain proceeded to show him one, he said, displayed like a museum artifact in a glass case.
But politics often eclipsed the former president’s appreciation for space. Though his first budget funded the program that became NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope, Carter was maligned for not supporting human spaceflight in the vein of the Apollo program, said Steven Hochman, former special assistant to the president at the Carter Center. He was a supporter of robotic exploration and research that could benefit people’s lives, but when it came to the exorbitant cost of sending astronauts into deep space, he preferred spending on domestic concerns.
“NASA, I believe, has not given him the credit he deserves,” Hochman told Mashable. “I believe it is because he was critical of the Space Shuttle program and didn’t provide funding for future missions to the moon or Mars.”
For years political adversaries ridiculed Carter for having a tinfoil hat, stemming from an incident in 1969 that later circulated in the press. After a Lions Club meeting in Leary, Georgia, Carter and a few other men spotted something strange moving in the sky: a luminous object, first blue then red, the apparent size and brightness of the moon. About four years later, Carter reported the unidentified flying object to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma.
Though Carter never claimed to have spotted aliens or a flying saucer — to him this was literally an unknown object in the air — people snickered and mistook his UFO sighting as such. Skeptics, who likely knew nothing of Carter’s astronomy background, suggested he had merely seen Venus.
“It was not Venus,” Carter said in a 2007 interview on “The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe” podcast.
In fact, his UFO sighting had taken on such mythic proportions, some had wondered whether it was the reason Carter wanted NASA to investigate UFOs in 1977. Despite a White House request expressing a need to address the general UFO “public relations problem,” NASA had, surprisingly, declined.
The subject prompted The Journal of Scientific Exploration to invite Richard C. Henry, the agency’s deputy director of astrophysics during Carter’s administration, to write an essay about it more than a decade later. Henry, a semi-retired professor at Johns Hopkins University today, came to no definitive conclusions on why NASA rebuffed the White House. But, in a postscript, Henry said he sent his draft to Carter before publication in 1988.
“The most important point that you could clarify, if you will, is whether you yourself were behind (the UFO panel proposal) letter of July 21, 1977, to NASA,” Henry wrote.
Beside the sentence, Carter jotted his reply in one word: No.
Yet buried within Henry’s paper was a small window into Carter’s passion for astronomy. In November 1977, the president and his son sent a message to NASA headquarters asking to borrow a seven-inch Questar telescope. Given that there were no telescopes at headquarters — just paper, Henry said — he tried to hunt one down at another NASA campus.
It turned out Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, had one.
“By great luck, a NASA plane was flying from Huntsville to Washington the next day ([Science adviser Frank] Press was emphatic that the President wanted no special flights or other waste of taxpayer dollars),” Henry wrote.
The NASA official and his wife, Rita Mahon, picked up the Questar at Washington National Airport and promptly took it to the White House. They then unpacked the telescope from a large wooden crate and showed the Carters how to set it up on the Truman balcony overlooking the South Lawn. The night was cloudy, but they trained on the moon.
The president then proceeded to take the telescope with him to Camp David near Thurmont, Maryland, on Nov. 23, 1977, where he and his family spent Thanksgiving, according to his daily diary. He returned it about a week later.
One has to wonder if Carter brought a telescope with him again just 10 months later, when he invited Egyptian President Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to join him at the retreat. The renowned talks would result in the Camp David Accords, which later earned the Middle East leaders a Nobel Peace Prize.
There’s an amusing irony to the false urban legend that Carter believed he was visited by aliens: He is, after all, the most likely person to make humanity’s introduction to extraterrestrials.
Some 15.5 billion miles away from Earth, hurtling through the cold, uncharted abyss, is NASA’s Voyager 1 probe. It is the farthest spacecraft from home, having left the solar system in 2012. Soaring through interstellar space at 38,000 mph, it carries a gold-plated record produced by Sagan, with a melange of sounds from the planet.
Crickets. Wind. Greetings in 55 languages, from Akkadian to Wu. A mother kissing her child. These and a letter from Carter are among the recordings on the disk.
The odds of making contact with aliens, if they exist, are slight, if not insurmountable. Galaxies are spinning away from each other into the infinite unknown. The speed at which space is expanding far outpaces our technology to overcome it. It’s as if the universe were contrived to keep its inhabitants apart.
But should some other intelligent life forms encounter Voyager — or Voyager 2, which carries a duplicate record — thousands or even billions of years into the future, they will discover Carter’s words:
“This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings,” he wrote. “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”
Many knew Carter’s intimate relationship with his faith. He grew up Southern Baptist, the son of a farmer in the boomtown of Plains, Georgia. He referred to himself as a born-again Christian. Long after his presidency, he attended regular church services and taught Sunday School.
But how his evangelical beliefs squared with his thoughts on the universe aren’t clear. He wrote in a poem, titled “Considering the Void:”
When I behold the charm / of evening skies, their lulling endurance; / the patterns of stars with names / of bears and dogs, a swan, a virgin; / other planets that our Voyager showed / were like and so unlike our own, / with all their moons, / bright discs, weird rings, and cratered faces; / comets with their streaming tails / bent by pressure from our sun; / the skyscape of our Milky Way / holding in its shimmering disc /an infinity of suns / (or say a thousand billion); / knowing there are holes of darkness / gulping mass and even light, / knowing that this galaxy of ours / is one of multitudes / in what we call the heavens, / it troubles me. It troubles me.
What exactly was haunting Carter? Was he expressing a collision of faith and science in what lies beyond? An existential crisis of never knowing the big picture?
Perhaps, as he wished, humankind will survive this time so that we may live to know more.
