In a recent article I read titled Democrats Believe in Man-Caused Global Warming and UFO’s over at the blog Strong as an Ox and Nearly as Smart, the author surmises that Democrats, when asked about belief in UFOs, will blame the Bush Administration for suppressing information. He then points out that when it comes to any administration disclosing possible evidence of UFOs, “neither would the Democrat administrations of Clinton and Carter.”

Well, not quite.

If anything, information exists that suggests both the Clinton and Carter administrations pursued the matter of UFO disclosure with interest. In an piece I wrote for the UFO Magazine Blog titled Will the Next US President be Forced to Disclose UFO Evidence, I point out what is known of President Clinton’s involvment:

Many past presidents have had an interest in UFOs. In fact, most recently the Clinton administration went after the matter when former President Bill Clinton appointed his friend, Webster Hubbell, as associate attorney general to the Department of Justice. Author Jim Marrs described in his book Rule By Secrecy how Hubbell was asked to “find the answers to two questions for me. One: who killed JFK, and two: are there UFOs?” A report from the New York Daily News had also reported around that time that Laurence Rockefeller (who was known for his interest in UFOs later in life), had met with Clinton and urged his administration to open government UFO files. “He was dead serious,” Hubbell said of the orders Clinton gave, noting in his memoir Friends in High Places that he had never received satisfaction with any answers he had found in pursuing the matter.

The Strong as an Ox article also targets former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, saying that “Although Podesta was chief of staff in the Clinton Administration, and could easily have asked his boss to show him and the World the proof, he’s waited until now to expose one of his weird beliefs.” Although it is known that John Podesta has aggressively pursued the matter of UFOs independently over the years, it may not be fair to call UFOs “one of his weird beliefs.” In fact, Podesta has denied publicly any belief in UFOs or extraterrestrials, instead expressing that his issue has to do with excessive government secrecy. “My tendency is to try to err on the side of openness rather than on the side of secrecy, and I think that a thorough review about whether more information could be brought to light (about Area 51) would be a worthwhile enterprise,” he told the Las Vegas Review Journal in 2002.

So far as the assertion that Podesta “could easily have asked his boss to show him and the World the proof”, in an upcoming essay that will appear in my UFO Magazine column Mirror Images, I discuss how President Clinton was even said to have been dissatisfied with briefings given to his administration by the CIA! According to sources, Clinton felt that the CIA briefings conflicted with information regarding UFOs independently acquired by his Science Advisor, Jack Gibbons. Had Clinton felt that he was being given any reasonable information himself, perhaps he would have had something to share with Podesta in the first place!

As in the case of Podesta’s beliefs, it seems that government secrecy is the real key issue here, and since it is known that many US Presidents have gone on the record describing interest n UFOs, why even the commander in Chief of the United States can’t be briefed on the matter remains a mystery. That being the case however, it might be worth our while to ask why Jimmy Carter is the only other President mentioned in the Strong as an Ox article, where John Podesta is accused of “joining the ranks” of Democrats like Carter. Is Carter alone named here because he publicly claimed to have seen a UFO? Is it because he professed to have interest in them? Or perhaps, in the eyes of the author, could it be because he was a Democratic President who did these things? 

Keep in mind that Republican Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan both expressed interest in UFOs as well. In fact, prior to running for office way back in 1966, Ford went to bat against Project Bluebook investigator J. Allen Hynek’s now famous “swamp gas” explanation as a solution to one widely reported sighting over Michigan at the time. Ford, then a Senate Representative for Michigan, countered Hynek’s assumption that the witness, Frank Manor, had been mistaken in describing what he saw as a foreign craft, and sent a letter to the House Armed Services Committee and the House Science and Astronautics Committee stating the following:

I have taken special interest in these (UFO) accounts because many of the latest reported sightings have been made in my home state of Michigan…Because I think there may be substance to some of these reports and because I believe The American people are entitled to a more thorough explanation than has been given them by the Air force to date, I am proposing either the Science and Astronautics Committee or the Armed services Committee of the House, schedule hearings on the subject of UFOs and invite testimony from both the executive branch of the Government and some of the persons who claim to have seen UFOs.

As for Ronald Reagan, if we look back to his days as governor of California, it appears the well-loved Republican President had described his own encounter to the Wall Street Journal. “I was in a plane last week when I looked out the window and saw this white light. It was zigzagging around. I went up to the pilot and said, ‘Have you seen anything like that before?’ He was shocked and said, ‘Nope.’ And I said to him: ‘Let’s follow it!’ We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light. We followed it to Bakersfield, and all of a sudden, to our utter amazement it went straight up into the heavens. When we got off the plane, I told Nancy all about it.”

Finally, now that we’ve ruled out that Carter wasn’t singled out solely for having been one of these “crazy UFO people”, let’s get back to the former President’s involvement in the matter at hand. Indeed, Carter also attempted to gain access to information about UFOs while in office, and as historians will point out, during the period that future president George Herbert Walker Bush served as director of the CIA. When asked for information regarding UFOs, the CIA told Carter and his staff that they “did not have clearance for that information” with regard to classified government UFO documents. Subsequent to Carter’s inquiry, a government memo disclosed in a 1995 UFO documentary produced by the Disney Corporation also seems to have verified this. “When Carter assumed the office of President of the United States, his staff attempted to explore the availability of official investigations into alien contact,” the documentary explained, suggesting that there must be “some security secrets outside the jurisdiction of the White House.” One must ponder, if any given US President—Democrat, Republican, or otherwise—doesn’t fall within the jurisdiction of being able to know about government UFO documentation, who does?