The Presidents Who Asked About UFOs — and Were Told No

Written by Samuel Orlando

I. The Man Who Asked

STAUNTON, VIRGINIA - The most powerful man in the world made a simple request.He wanted to know the truth.

In early 1977, President Jimmy Carter summoned his intelligence advisers and asked to see what America really knew about UFOs—what officials had begun to call “unidentified aerial phenomena.” It wasn’t a whim. Eight years earlier, Carter had stood outside a Georgia Lions Club and watched a glowing object hover above the trees, shifting colors before vanishing into the sky. He filed an official report. He told reporters he’d never forget it.

Now, sitting in the Oval Office, he expected answers. The man with nuclear launch codes wanted access to a few files inside his own government.

He didn’t get them.

According to later accounts, Carter was told the material was “classified above presidential clearance.” The CIA explained that the data were entangled with sensitive defense programs and couldn’t be separated. In plain English: even the President of the United States didn’t have a need to know.

It was a polite but stunning refusal. Carter—an engineer, a Navy man, a believer in transparency—had just discovered that there were vaults inside his own government that even he wasn’t allowed to open.

And he wasn’t the first to find that out.

II. The Wall Every President Hits

Since the dawn of the Cold War, presidents have approached the UFO question with curiosity, caution, and frustration. None have truly pierced the veil.

Truman and Eisenhower: The Birth of Secrecy

In 1947, only months after creating the CIA, Harry Truman watched the nation’s first modern UFO panic unfold in Roswell, New Mexico. The Army Air Force first claimed it had recovered a “flying disc,” then abruptly reversed itself. Whatever was found was quietly transported to military custody, and the story was buried under layers of denial and contradiction.

Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, presided over the rise of classified aviation—the U-2, the SR-71, and reconnaissance satellites that could peer across continents. Each secret project produced sightings the public couldn’t explain. Eisenhower’s farewell warning about the “military-industrial complex” was more than rhetoric. He’d seen how quickly secrecy could outgrow supervision.

III. Kennedy’s Last Request

On November 12, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed a memorandum to CIA Director John McCone. In it, he asked for a review of high-level classified UFO data and a plan to share “unidentified aerial phenomena” information with the Soviet Union.

The purpose wasn’t sensational—it was strategic. With both superpowers launching spacecraft and nuclear warheads, Kennedy wanted to ensure that a radar blip or re-entry capsule wasn’t mistaken for an attack. “Distinguish between known and unknowns,” the memo read.

Ten days later, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The memo vanished into the archives until it was declassified decades later. No one can say if he ever saw a single page of the report he requested.

For many historians, that unanswered document became symbolic—a moment when an elected president reached toward the vault of secrecy and never came back.

IV. Johnson to Nixon: The Silence Deepens

Lyndon Johnson avoided the subject entirely. Richard Nixon oversaw the creation of Special Access Programs—ultra-classified projects hidden even from most of Congress. Some produced stealth aircraft; others remain obscure.

The story that Nixon once showed entertainer Jackie Gleason “alien bodies” at a Florida Air Force base is probably apocryphal, but its endurance reveals something real: by the early 1970s, secrecy had become a permanent feature of American governance. The machinery of classification no longer served only the president. It served itself.

V. Carter’s Question

When Jimmy Carter asked in 1977, the wall was already built. The CIA and NASA deflected his requests, citing compartmentalization and “national security.” Carter, the idealist, accepted the explanation—but it clearly stayed with him.

Decades later, when asked what he learned, he smiled and said, “I can say with absolute honesty that I don’t think there’s any evidence that aliens have visited Earth.” Then he paused. “But I was told it was classified.”

That pause still resonates.

VI. Reagan to Obama: The Age of Ambiguity

Ronald Reagan had his own UFO story—he once told pilots he’d seen a strange light while flying over California—and later warned the United Nations that “perhaps we need some outside, universal threat” to unite humanity. Whether metaphor or belief, it betrayed a fascination he never fully explained.

Bill Clinton tasked Associate Attorney General Webb Hubbell with finding “the truth about UFOs.” Hubbell came back empty-handed and wrote, “They wouldn’t tell me.” Clinton himself admitted he’d looked and found nothing he could verify.

Barack Obama was more reserved but no less telling. In 2021 he said, “There’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.” It was the most straightforward acknowledgment yet that the mystery persists at the highest levels.

VII. The Machinery of Secrecy

To understand how even presidents can be excluded, you have to understand how secrecy works in practice.

Information about advanced aerospace systems, nuclear weapons, or intelligence sensors is protected within Special Access Programs—compartments inside compartments. Some are “acknowledged.” Some are “unacknowledged.” A few are “waived-unacknowledged,” meaning even Congress may not know they exist.

Clearance alone doesn’t guarantee access. You must also have a need to know. That rule applies to everyone, including the president.

In theory, the president could demand access to anything. In reality, the bureaucracy can stall, misdirect, or claim legal constraint. As one retired intelligence officer put it, “You have to know what to ask for—and most presidents don’t even know what exists to ask about.”

It’s a system built to protect secrets—but it can just as easily hide them from oversight.

VIII. Rubio’s Warning

In 2025, a new documentary titled The Age of Disclosure reignited the debate. Among its 34 insiders appears Senator Marco Rubio, vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. His statement landed like a thunderclap:

“Even presidents have been operating on a need-to-know basis, but that begins to ramp out of control.”

Rubio went further, claiming that unidentified craft had appeared over restricted nuclear facilities—and that “it’s not ours.”

Those three words—not ours—rattled analysts and lawmakers alike. If not ours, then whose?

Rubio didn’t declare alien visitation. But he implied something equally serious: that the U.S. government’s classified infrastructure has become so autonomous that even elected leaders can no longer penetrate it. “There’s stuff flying in our airspace,” he told CBS, “and we don’t know what it is.”

His words echoed Carter’s experience almost half a century earlier. The issue isn’t just the unknown in the sky—it’s the unknown inside government.

IX. The Democratic Crisis

When a president can be denied access to information held by his own agencies, the constitutional chain of command is inverted. The people’s government becomes an independent organism.

Political scientist Michael Glennon calls this the “double government”: the visible, elected layer and the hidden, permanent one. The visible layer campaigns and legislates; the hidden layer classifies, surveils, and continues regardless of elections.

Most secrecy serves real purposes—protecting lives, capabilities, and alliances. But when classification becomes a reflex, secrecy becomes a form of power. It dictates who can speak, what can be known, and which truths are off-limits even to the president.

Carter’s 1977 denial wasn’t just a curiosity of history. It was a warning about the limits of elected authority in the age of the permanent security state.

X. The Possibility Beyond

Still, one question lingers: what if the reason for the secrecy isn’t just bureaucratic, but existential?

What if some portion of the classified record actually points to technology or phenomena beyond human origin?

Skeptics rightly remind us that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But NASA’s own 2023 report admitted that some encounters remain unexplained even after rigorous analysis. The stigma around investigation is fading because the data, whatever it is, refuses to go away.

If the vaults contain nothing more than decades of misidentified aircraft and sensor anomalies, then sunlight should clear the air. If they contain something more, the argument for secrecy is understandable—but no less troubling. Either way, what’s hidden has outgrown what democracy can justify.

XI. The Vault Remains Closed

In his later years, Jimmy Carter spoke softly about the subject that once animated him. “I don’t think there’s evidence that aliens have visited Earth,” he said, “but I was told it was classified.”

Nearly every president since has performed the same strange ritual: a smile, a joke, a shrug. They laugh on camera but ask the same question in private—what’s really up there, and who truly knows?

If secrecy protects something mundane, its endurance makes no sense.If it protects something extraordinary, its endurance makes perfect sense—and changes everything.

Either way, the outcome is the same: the people are left in the dark, and the men elected to lead them are kept on a need-to-know basis.

Rubio’s warning lingers: even presidents are out of the loop.

If that’s true, the real mystery isn’t in the skies. It’s here on Earth—buried under stamped folders, locked vaults, and the quiet realization that the republic may no longer control all of its own secrets.

Sources & Notes

• National Archives: Declassified CIA/NASA correspondence (1977); JFK memo to CIA Director John McCone, Nov. 12, 1963.

• The Age of Disclosure (2025), interviews with Sen. Marco Rubio.

• Michael J. Glennon, National Security and Double Government (2014).

• NASA UAP Study Report (2023).

• Public statements from Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama, Trump, and Biden (1977–2024).