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Which Presidents Have Seen UFOs? Yep, It’s More Than One.
11/17/2023 05:00 AM EST
A wild history of Oval Office obsession with the biggest conspiracy theory of the modern era.
Early in Ronald Reagan’s second term, he asked his Soviet counterpart a seemingly off-the-wall question. Ostensibly, he and Mikhail Gorbachev had come to Lake Geneva for an arms control summit. But on a private walk around the lake, Reagan turned to his Cold War enemy and said:
‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’” Gorbachev later recounted. “I said, ‘No doubt about it.’ He said, ‘We too.’ So that’s interesting.”
To the U.S. president, the question was an opportunity to recognize a shared desire to protect humanity on Earth, a species that might very well succumb to the horrors of nuclear war. But his reference to aliens as a possible shared enemy wasn’t as random as it might sound. Reagan was a lifelong fan of science fiction and he’d had an encounter with a UFO while riding in plane in the 1970s.
Reagan, it turns out, wasn’t the only president who has had a more than passing interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
For the past half-century, almost every president has come to office pledging — publicly or privately — to get to the bottom of UFOs. Ever since the modern UFO age began during Harry Truman’s administration, presidents have nosed around hoping to find the truth. In 1947 and 1948, waves of “flying saucer” sightings captured the public imagination — the Pentagon feared they represented not aliens but secret Soviet spacecraft built by kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists — and as the sightings increased month and month, Truman’s own interest piqued. One afternoon in 1948, Truman summoned his military aide, Col. Robert Landry to the Oval Office and “talked about UFO reports and what might be the meaning for all these rather way-out reports of sightings, and the subject in general,” Landry recalled. “All manner of objects and things were being seen in the sky by people.”
Truman told Landry that he hadn’t given much serious thought to the reports, but was worried about the possibility of new and underestimated threats. “If there was any evidence of a strategic threat to the national security,” the president said, “the collection and evaluation of UFO data by Central Intelligence warranted more intense study and attention at the highest government level.” Moving forward, he wanted a quarterly oral report from Landry and the Air Force on whether any of the UFO sightings presented any real danger. Over the rest of Truman’s presidency, Landry regularly provided the briefings, but as he later recalled in an oral history, “Nothing of substance considered credible or threatening to the country was ever received from intelligence.” But the sightings never fully went away and solid explanations never materialized. Truman himself eavesdropped on Landry as he phone-banked Air Force officers in an unsuccessful search of answers to a wave of UFO sightings over the capital region in 1952.
The problem — and puzzle — of UFOs would continue to confound many of Truman’s successors, right up to modern times. As the 42nd president of the United States, Bill Clinton’s framed portrait hung in nearly every government office across the country — and at least one imaginary one in Hollywood: the office of FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner, the fictional boss of special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the protagonists of The X-Files. As millions tuned in every Friday night on Fox to watch the criminal profiler Mulder and medical doctor Scully work to uncover the truth about extraterrestrials, circling ever closer to an alien invasion, Clinton’s very real administration also found itself repeatedly considering the possibility of life “out there.”
Like his Oval Office predecessors, the former Arkansas governor had expressed interest in aliens as soon as he had taken the oath of office. When Webb Hubbell, Clinton’s longtime friend, started as the associate attorney general, Clinton gave him specific marching orders: “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?” (“He was dead serious,” Hubbell later wrote in his memoir. “I had looked into both, but wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting.”)
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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/17/us-presidents-ufo-obsession-00127519