Early in Ronald Reagan’s second term, he asked his Soviet counterpart a seemingly off-the-wall question. Ostensibly, he and Mikhail Gorbachev had come to Lake Geneva for an arms control summit. But on a private walk around the lake, Reagan turned to his Cold War enemy and said:
‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’” Gorbachev later recounted. “I said, ‘No doubt about it.’ He said, ‘We too.’ So that’s interesting.”
To the U.S. president, the question was an opportunity to recognize a shared desire to protect humanity on Earth, a species that might very well succumb to the horrors of nuclear war. But his reference to aliens as a possible shared enemy wasn’t as random as it might sound. Reagan was a lifelong fan of science fiction and he’d had an encounter with a UFO while riding in plane in the 1970s.
Reagan, it turns out, wasn’t the only president who has had a more than passing interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
For the past half-century, almost every president has come to office pledging — publicly or privately — to get to the bottom of UFOs. Ever since the modern UFO age began during Harry Truman’s administration, presidents have nosed around hoping to find the truth. In 1947 and 1948, waves of “flying saucer” sightings captured the public imagination — the Pentagon feared they represented not aliens but secret Soviet spacecraft built by kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists — and as the sightings increased month and month, Truman’s own interest piqued. One afternoon in 1948, Truman summoned his military aide, Col. Robert Landry to the Oval Office and “talked about UFO reports and what might be the meaning for all these rather way-out reports of sightings, and the subject in general,” Landry recalled. “All manner of objects and things were being seen in the sky by people.”
Hellbound and Down 