UFOs have been a part of American history, with Presidents George Washington at Valley Forge, Thomas Jefferson, and Ronald Reagan all having their own UFO sightings. 

However, few of the calls for official presidential disclosure of the UFO phenomenon have mentioned that it was President Harry Truman in 1950 who told the American people that what they had seen in the skies they couldn’t identify were UFOs. This admission came two years before the UFO invasion of Washington, DC, in 1952.

The next clear UFO sighting, reported in newspapers, was the sighting of a UFO over President Theodore Roosevelt’s house at Sagamore Hill. Teddy Roosevelt was well aware of this sighting and, according to UFO historians, was extremely impressed with it.

As a precursor to what Ronald Reagan told Soviet Chairman Gorbachev and then the United Nations General Assembly, Roosevelt argued for an international body to bring nations together to forge a codification of the rules of war and an international peace treaty.

President Harry Truman could be considered the first UFO president because it was on his watch in 1947 that the purported crash of a UFO at Roswell took place. Instead of simply being a witness to reports of the crash, President Truman took affirmative action and ordered the Army to find the lowest common denominator of technology retrieved from the crash and deliver it to American companies working on similar technologies. The first piece of debris to reach American industry was a piece of electronic circuitry from the crashed craft, which was sent to Bell Labs where scientists were working on an electronic switch to replace the Edison tube, essentially an incandescent light bulb. When the scientists received the piece of circuitry from the crashed UFO, they were able to discern its chemical composition and reverse engineer a device built on a silicon base doped with arsenic that allowed one electron at a time to pass across it. This combination of a transmitter and resistor was named a transistor, which Bell Labs patented in 1948 and won its commercial patent the following year. By the early 1950s, tiny transistor radios became some of the most popular devices of the decade, and the transistor went on to become the main component of electronic circuit boards, spurring the evolution of digital computers and today’s Internet Age.

President Eisenhower, who succeeded Truman in office, was also an eyewitness to UFOs when they appeared over the North Sea during the first NATO joint naval, air, and ground exercises designed to prevent the Soviet Union from sending its submarines out of the North Sea into the Atlantic. Witnesses aboard the bridge of the new US aircraft carrier, the USS FDR, witnessed UFOs flying out of the water and shooting off into the atmosphere. There is a story long believed by UFO historians that President Eisenhower was asked to meet with extraterrestrials at MUROC Air Force Base where the president was said to have structured a form of an “open skies” treaty with them. While no records of this meeting or this treaty have come to light, Eisenhower’s structuring the same type of agreement with the Soviet Union—called “Open Skies”—to prevent each side’s launching a nuclear attack by mistake leads people to believe that the UFO treaty was the basis for this agreement with the Soviet Union.

Many UFO historians and conspiracy theorists believe that it was the UFO question that resulted in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. During his romantic relationship with movie star Marilyn Monroe, Kennedy was said to have engaged in pillow talk during which he revealed the secrets not only of Area 51 but also about what Marilyn said were “little men from space” that the US kept in captivity there. When she threatened Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy over the phone with exposing her affair with both him and his brother, she referred to what the president told her about crashed debris from space and “little people,” a conversation that was wiretapped and transcribed by the CIA. If JFK had been revealing some of our nation’s most closely guarded UFO secrets, the CIA knew about it and had taken steps to keep further leaks from taking place.

In 1962, Marilyn Monroe died of suicide, and JFK was assassinated the following year. UFOs also played a role during President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, flying over US installations in Vietnam during the Vietnam War and at the crash in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania in 1965. The Johnson administration was also made aware of the 1966 Hillsdale, Michigan, UFO, which prompted then Representative and later President Gerald Ford to write to Mendel Rivers of the House Armed Services Committee to open hearings on UFOs.

President Richard Nixon allowed Jackie Gleason to travel to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida where he viewed the body of an extraterrestrial. Although Gleason had been badgering Nixon for years to tell him about the presence of UFOs, Nixon had refused him. Finally, Nixon relented and arranged for Gleason to see the proof of UFOs for himself, an event that so unnerved Gleason that he told his wife and his costars at Sony Pictures where he was filming Nothing in Common with Tom Hanks. Just as a too-aggressive policy on UFO disclosure might have contributed to JFK’s assassination, so did it almost contribute to President Gerald Ford’s after he told people after he ascended to the Oval Office upon Nixon’s resignation that he would reveal the truth about UFOs to the American people. When he was in California, not one but two members of the notorious Manson family made assassination attempts on Ford.

Was it because of his UFO promise? Charles Manson revealed to psychologist and author Joel Norris that he was working for the US government, specifically the CIA under nonofficial cover.

Gerald Ford was succeeded in office by Jimmy Carter, who defeated him for reelection in 1976. Carter had experienced a UFO sighting himself in Georgia years earlier, a sighting that he described to a UFO reporting agency in a formal report. He went back on his promise after one of his advisors, one with top security clearance, entered the Oval Office with a threat that if he talked about UFOs, his presidency would end and his family would be endangered. Carter, as president-elect, also asked his Director of Intelligence during his transition briefing if he would be told what the CIA knew about UFOs. But the director, George H. W. Bush, told him flatly, “Mr. President-Elect, you do not need to know.”

Jimmy Carter was succeeded in office by California governor Ronald Reagan, who had two separate UFO sightings, one over the Mojave desert and another over the Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu. The first sighting took place as Reagan was flying in his plane from Los Angeles to Sacramento, the state capitol. He spotted a UFO through the window and directed his pilot to follow it over the desert. The UFO simply disappeared from view at a fantastic speed. Reagan was so impressed with what he saw when he landed he told the Sacramento Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal exactly what he saw and that he would tell Nancy as soon as he got to the Governor’s Mansion.

Ronald Reagan’s UFO experiences, historians say, prompted his idea of the Space Defense Initiative, or the “Star Wars” weapon system, not to shoot down Soviet missiles but, more importantly, to defend the planet against UFOs. Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, told President Jimmy Carter that he did not need to know what the CIA had in its files on UFOs. He repeated this statement years later during his son Jeb’s primary campaign, telling people who asked him about UFOs that Americans “can’t handle the truth about UFOs.”