IncidentThe Jimmy Carter UFO Sighting (6 January 1969)

While waiting outside a Lions Club meeting in Leary, Georgia around 7:15 pm, Carter (then a Georgia state senator) and ~10-12 others saw a single self-luminous object ‘about as bright as the moon,’ ~30 degrees above the western horizon, that appeared to approach and recede, cycled white-blue-red-white, and after ~10-12 minutes receded and vanished; Carter noted it had no solid substance, no sound, and produced no wind. He filed a typed report with NICAP / the International UFO Bureau in 1973 (‘the darndest thing I’ve ever seen’) but never claimed it was alien, later calling it ‘probably an electronic occurrence’ and saying he did not believe ETs visit Earth. The leading explanation (Robert Sheaffer’s analysis, supported by Allan Hendry) is the planet Venus, which was near maximum brilliance at ~25 degrees altitude in the WSW that evening, essentially where Carter placed his object - the apparent approach/recession and size/color changes being the classic Venus-misperception signature; a high-altitude barium-cloud rocket experiment is a minor alternative. The most famous credible-witness sighting (a future US president) that is nonetheless best explained as a bright astronomical body - the corpus’s premier study in how observer credibility does not transfer to the anomalousness of the stimulus.