What We Know —and Don ’ t Know —About UFOs After the Congressional Hearing

Jimmy Carter waited four years before he at last went public with the news that he’d seen a UFO. It was in 1969, when Carter was a private citizen—between his service as a Georgia state senator and the governor of the state—that he saw a mysteriously luminous object hanging in the sky one night after attending a Lion’s Club meeting. Carter kept the sighting to himself, deciding only in 1973 to file his report with the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The verdict? Nothing to see here. A little basic astronomical forensics revealed that what Carter saw on that date and at that spot in the sky was Venus—whose extreme luminosity has fooled no shortage of UFO believers before. Carter is not the only prominent public official who has shown an interest in what are now more decorously referred to as “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP). In 2016, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, when asked in an interview about UAP, responded: “I don’t know. I want to see what the information shows. There’s enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up.” In 2021, former President Barack Obama responded to a similar question, saying, “There’s footage and records of objects in the skies…We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. And so, I think that people still take seriou...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news