Long ago and far away

Remembering Jimmy Carter's campaign pledge

2025 has gotten off to a shitty start, and as I try to wrap my brain around fire hurricanes, this garish foreshadowing seems like a rerun or some other shopworn exploding cliche from Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich. An ISIS maniac turns his F-150 into a bowling ball on crowded Bourbon Street; hours later on New Year’s Day, guilt-wracked, war-addled multiple Bronze Star recipient Matt Livelsberger idles in his Cybertruck, where he contemplates endings. Beneath the portico of a Trump/Vegas hotel, he commits. He puts his gun to his head and fires point-blank. Then both he and the Tesla get blown to smithereens.

But Livelsberger leaves an Easter egg behind, in an email revealed by a podcaster. Claiming to hold active security clearances “with UAP USAP access,” the decorated Army veteran wants to the world to know what’s happening upstairs: China has mastered “gravitic propulsion.” That’s what the drone surveillance is all about. Uncle Sam has the same tech, but it’s not as good as China’s, at least not anymore. Launching from submarines, our rival snoops “basically have an unlimited payload capacity and can park it over the WH if they wanted,” Livelsberger writes. “It's checkmate.”

The feds deny it, but what’s real anymore? UFOs have been breaking Earth’s laws since the invention of religion. If there’s anything to Livelsberger’s charges, it means our dreams of exercising unlimited ungovernable power are within our reach. Finally. At long last. Thank God.

Now into this mix of burning animals, red-hot tribalism at home and street jubilation abroad over a pause to the killing in the so-called Holy Land, come retrospectives on Jimmy Carter. His obit hammers the final nail into the boarded portal of a place and time where we might’ve made different choices.

The other day on Weekend Edition, a tribute from NPR’s Scott Simon recalled a conversation he’d had with the late president long after Carter left office. Because the subject was UFOs, Simon assured 39 their chat was off the record. At issue was Carter’s famous statement to the National Enquirer in 1976:

“If I become president, I’ll make every piece of information this country has on UFOs available to the public, and the scientists. I’m convinced they exist because I have seen one.”

But it wasn’t a lie

In 1969, Carter was so impressed by a bright light he and friends observed hovering in Georgia’s night sky that he filed a UFO report. Asked by Simon if “there’s anything we should know?” as a result of his transparency efforts, Carter pulled a yawner. "No,” he said. “But remember, a UFO is simply something we haven't identified. There are dozens of unexplained incursions of our airspace every year. They're usually some experiment. You'd be surprised how often the Navy doesn't know what the Air Force is up to, and so forth.”

Zzzz. In addition to skirting the government coverup angle, Carter also said if off-world life exists, “it has nothing to do with UFOs. If there's some other civilization out there, I doubt they'd send big, bulky airships. They'd probably just keep watch and leave us alone."

Given his Watergate-era promise to never lie to the American people, coupled with the rectitude of his life before and after his time in office, his minimalism might pass for veracity. Nevertheless, Carter’s campaign pledge generated thousands of enthusiastic letters. They ran the gamut, from schoolkids to scientists wanting to join the process.

With anticipation cresting, U.S. News and World Report went out on a limb in April 1977: “Before the year is out, the Government – perhaps the President – is expected to make what are described as ‘unsettling disclosures’ about UFOs . . . Such revelations, based on information from the CIA, would be a reversal of official policy that in the past has downgraded UFO incidents.”

Citing this “national revival” of interest in UFOs by a “younger generation,” White House Science Policy Advisor Frank Press contacted NASA Administrator Robert Frosch in July ‘77, encouraging the space agency take the lead on UFO queries. Press also urged NASA to consider organizing a “small panel of inquiry” to formally revisit the issue, which had been abandoned by the Air Force after 1969.

Such a ‘keen sense’

Two months later, a cautiously enthusiastic Frosch told Press that he was “inclined to agree with your recommendation.” Such a panel “might possibly discover new significant findings,” and “could lead to the designation of NASA as the focal point for UFO matters.” Frosch imagined appointing a “NASA project officer” to evaluate new cases accumulated since the termination of Project Blue Book; this designated NPO, in turn, would determine if there was enough decent evidence to convene a panel. That decision, the NASA boss added, should be rendered “by the end of the year.”

When December ’77 rolled around, however, Frosch changed his tune in a stunning about-face. In a letter to Press, he recommended that “NASA take no steps to establish a research activity in this area or to convene a symposium on this subject.” Frosch cited “the absence of tangible or physical evidence available for thorough laboratory analysis.” Therefore, ergo, with nothing to work with, he shrugged, developing a scientific methodology is impossible: “To proceed on a research task without a disciplinary framework and an exploratory technique in mind, would be wasteful and probably unproductive.”

But hey, chin up, he assured Press: “Institutionally, we retain an open mind, a keen sense of scientific curiosity, and a willingness to analyze technical problems within our competence.”

Frosch never did explain how he arrived at No Evidence To Evaluate. Nor, curiously, did he mention what happened to the NPO idea. But that was pretty much the end of Jimmy Carter’s campaign promise. Fortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story.

Meanwhile, behind the curtain . . .

In 1988, the scientist being considered for “NASA project officer” offered a detailed glimpse into what happened backstage. Dr. Richard C. Henry, the Johns Hopkins University professor of physics and astronomy who was largely responsible for bringing the Space Telescope Institute to JHU, went public in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.

Openly inquisitive about UFOs, he had been an astrophysics consultant for the private Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization, and he belonged to J. Allen Hynek’s informal “Invisible College.” Henry briefly left academia in 1976 to join the astrophysics division of NASA’s Office of Space Science. Upon hearing his name being circulated as the potential UFO guy in 1977, Henry assured his boss –Space Science Associate Administrator Noel Hinners – that he had not sought the job. Moreover, in clarifying his reservations, Henry compared his UFO research to a child on Christmas morning who “found only a pile of horse manure under the tree. Undeterred,” Henry went on, “he cheerfully dug away, reasoning there had to be a pony somewhere!”

Still, Henry thought the position was critical, and he feared Frosch’s suggestions to Press were unrealistic. Writing to Hinners in October 1977, Henry said, “the volume of reports for the last ten years is far beyond what even a moderately, well-staffed project at a NASA center could possibly reevaluate between now and the end of the year.” Such a rush job “would open NASA to a valid charge of either whitewash or idiocy (depending on which way the recommendation went.”

But here was the deal-breaker: Henry insisted the NASA project officer would need “the highest U.S. security clearance, and also be provided with a letter from President Carter establishing his ‘need to know’ regarding unidentified aerial phenomena. If this procedure is not followed, there will be a hole as big as a barn door in any NASA ‘specific recommendation’ that is negative on UFOs.”

So much for the NASA project officer.

With all this in mind, last month I sent a long-shot email to Meira Bernstein, NASA’s senior advisor for communications. I was hoping to get a word with lame-duck Administrator Bill Nelson, 82, now in the final days of a long public service career. Nelson’s reputation as a straight shooter went back more than 40 years, to his time as a Florida congressman representing my district on the Space Coast.

Please shut up now

In 2021, the former three-term U.S. senator appeared to show real interest in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report on UAP/UFOs, which acknowledged the reality of genuine unknowns traversing our atmosphere. Between that and the Navy pilot encounter stories drawing huge coverage, Nelson stated for the record that Earthlings may not be alone. A tepid understatement, for sure, but huge for NASA. The space agency even encouraged the formation of an Independent Study Team to develop better methods and sensors for analyzing available and future UFO data.

Two years later, however, at a presser announcing the Team’s recommendations for NASA to play a “more prominent role” in UAP research, something was off. Even as they lauded the virtues of transparency, agency managers refused to divulge the name of their new Director of UAP Research. (Subsequent howls of derision forced NASA to reverse itself seven hours later and feed Mark McInerney to the lions.) Then Nelson himself stumbled into active misrepresentation.

In July 2023, former intelligence officer David Grusch told a House committee that, as a UAP Task Force member, he got the inside dope on classified UFO crash-retrieval reverse-engineering programs from “more than 40” military/intel sources. He urged lawmakers to create a safe haven for those contacts and release them from their nondisclosure agreements. Congress hasn’t come through, and none of Grusch’s witnesses have stepped up. But that’s beside the point.

Asked to weigh in on Grusch’s claims two months later, Nelson distorted his testimony, which had been delivered under oath. “What he said, if I recall having seen this on the nightly news,” Nelson began, “was that he had a friend that knew where a warehouse was that had a UFO locked up in a warehouse. He also said he had another friend that said that he had parts of an alien. Whatever he said, ‘Where’s the evidence?’ is my response.”

Ruh-roh.

Anyway, in reminding NASA’s Bernstein that I was one of Nelson’s first constituents, I wondered if her boss might have any advice for the new regime on moving ahead with UAP studies. And maybe find out whatever happened to Mark McInerney. And maybe find out what happened to Nelson’s attitude between 2021 and 2023.

The phone should ring any day now.

Souvenir from Plains, an old railroad spike

Years ago, I made a pilgrimage to Plains, Georgia, in hopes of slipping Carter a quickie about who made the call on killing NASA’s “panel of inquiry” – him or Bob Frosch? Although I managed to catch his sermon at Maranatha Baptist Church, access was too tightly controlled for that sort of spontaneity. He chatted up some scripture from Romans, I forget which verses, but the larger focus was on his own legacy.

Carter talked about how well he and Deng Xiaoping got along. He told a full house the Chinese leader was so jacked about their new fellowship, Deng asked what else do you need? Carter said let people in China get Bibles if they want. Deng said OK. As a result, Carter informed the congregation, the PRC now counted 1 million Christians. He gestured toward the rear of the room and said, “I’d like to introduce you to some of them.” There were 20 or so, young Chinese men and women, lining the rear wall, formally dressed, smiling.

Lately, I’ve been lingering in that brief encounter, and how it was instigated decades earlier by a bicentennial election that installed the last American president whose armed forces never fired a shot or a dropped a bomb.

Among the eulogies, the one that I most needed to hear involved Voyagers 1 and 2, slung toward the outer solar system in 1977, destination infinity. I watched one of those launches from the beach. Both craft were fitted with 12-inch, copper-plated gold records, in hopes that someday, someone out yonder might put as much faith in us as we had in them.

Etched into the phonographic introduction to the wonders of the only world we’ve ever known was President Carter’s idealism, now an analogue fossil hurtling away from us at 38,000 mph. “This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America,” Carter began. “We are a community of 240 million human beings among more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.”

Carter believed this time capsule might “survive a billion years into our future,” when “our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed.” In the event that Voyager found a receptive audience, Carter wrote, “here is our message:

“‘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. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problem we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”

At last glance, Jimmy Carter’s message was 166 astronomical units, or 15.5 billion miles, away from home.