That Time Jimmy Carter Saw a UFO; And the 'Wicked' Bible that Promoted Adultery
That Time Jimmy Carter Saw a UFO
It happened in October of 1969, right before the future president was about to give a speech to the Leary Lions Club - of which he himself was a member - in the small town of Leary, Georgia.
In this case, it took the form of a bright ball of bluish-red light that suddenly appeared above him and 25 other friends and allies while the group was hanging around outside the high school cafeteria in which his talk was set to be held. It hovered in the sky above them for around 10 minutes, then suddenly darted out of sight.
The authoritative account of the incident was recorded by Carter himself in a 1973 report he sent to the International UFO Bureau, a private organization based out of Oklahoma City. Only excerpts can be found online, but the original handwritten copy does still exist and is today on display at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in his small hometown Plains, Georgia.
According to a Washington Post article published shortly after he was inaugurated in 1977, the group reached out to him after they’d gotten word that he’d ‘offhandedly mentioned’ the sighting to a group of friends at a Southern Governors Conference. In the piece, he was quoted as telling them, after he finished the story:
‘I don't laugh at people any more when they say they've seen UFOs, because I've seen one myself.’
In his statement, then-Governor Carter wrote:
‘[it was] about the same as moon, maybe a little smaller. [The object] varied from brighter/larger than [a] planet to [the] apparent size of [the] moon.’
Then, 10-12 minutes after it appeared…
‘[The ball of light] seemed to move toward us from a distance, stopped-moved partially away-returned, then departed. Bluish at first, then reddish, luminous, not solid.’
In a separate report he filed with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), dated September 18, 1973, Carter described it a little differently, as is typical with accounts of UFO sightings:
‘There were about twenty of us standing outside of a little restaurant, I believe, a high school lunchroom…. And a kind of green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown. It got brighter and brighter. And then it eventually disappeared.’
In any case, he clearly believed that whatever he saw was in fact a UFO - rather than some kind of natural phenomenon - in the years after the sighting, and still very much did during his 1976 presidential campaign. In one particular speech, the The National Enquirer reported him as saying:
‘If I become President, I'll make every piece of information that this country has about UFO sightings available to the public. I am convinced that UFOs exist because I have seen one.’
An overpromise, that turned out to be. A year into his term, when asked whether he planned to follow through on his pledge, he backtracked, vaguely citing national security concerns. From then on, he avoided speaking publicly about the UFO phenomenon.
He broke his relative silence in a 2005 interview with GQ, when he added a little more detail to the story of his close encounter:
‘All of a sudden, one of the men looked up and said, 'Look, over in the west!' And there was a bright light in the sky. We all saw it. And then the light, it got closer and closer to us. And then it stopped, I don't know how far away, but it stopped beyond the pine trees. And all of a sudden it changed color to blue, and then it changed to red, then back to white. And we were trying to figure out what in the world it could be, and then it receded into the distance.’
He later went onto say that he stands by his original 1973 report to the International UFO Bureau, since it was based entirely on his and the other witnesses’ live reactions, which were captured via a running tape recorder he’d fortuitously brought to document the speech he was about to give. Even still, he refused to speculate about what it actually may have been.
There are also a few cases - unfortunately, to some - where he’s been totally dismissive of the possibility that it was some kind of paranormal phenomenon, most recently in 2007, when he told the hosts - who described the interview as a chance to ‘set the record straight’ - of the podcast ‘Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe:’
‘All of us were aghast at what we were seeing. We couldn’t figure it out… I’m a scientist by training, and I have never thought there were extraterrestrial beings on a ship from outer space or anything.’
Even still, he stands by his claim that it was in fact a UFO because, as he went on to say:
‘It was obviously unidentified, it was flying, and it was an object…’
The ‘Wicked’ Bible that Promoted Adultery
It was the result of a notorious typo in a 1631 edition of the King James Bible, which has the Seventh Commandment reading, rather than ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery:’
‘Thou shalt commit adultery’ (Exodus 20:14)
Oops.
The error was made by English printer Robert Barker who, prior to the now immortal blunder, was one of the most respected in the whole of the rapidly growing Empire. Roughly 1,000 copies of these ‘Wicked’ or ‘Sinners’ Bibles - as they were later dubbed - ended up making it into circulation before a concerned citizen reported the mistake to the Crown officials more than a year after it was originally published.
Immediately after the blasphemous scandal went public, an enraged King Charles I called Barker and his associate Martin Lucas in front of the Star Chamber, which was essentially a civil court, and put them on trial for their negligence. In the end, each of them was fined £300, the equivalent of $66,000 in our era, and stripped of their licenses to print.
Steep, and perhaps not even justified.
After a second equally sensational error was spotted a little while later in Deuteronomy 5:24, which hailed God’s ‘great-asse,’ rather than his ‘greatnesse,’ the printers’ allies and defenders cried sabotage, specifically from one of Barker’s business partners: Bonham Norton, who, so their theory went, was looking to take control over the entire operation. That is indeed how it ended up playing out, but no one ever found any evidence of deliberate sabotage.
The full Deuteronomy passage:
‘And ye said, Behold, the LORD our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse, and we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire: we have seen this day that God doth talk with man, and he liveth.’
There have been plenty of other unfortunate Biblical typos through the years, most of which are nicely laid out in the 2004 book Let it Go Among Our People: An Illustrated History of the English Bible from John Wyclif to the King James Version, by David Price and Charles C. Ryrie:
The ‘Breeches Bible’ of 1560, which referred to Adam and Eve as wearing ‘breeches’ rather than aprons in Genesis 3:7
The ‘Printers' Bible’ of 1702, which attributed David's persecution to ‘printers’ rather than ‘princes’ in Psalm 119:161.
The ‘Murderer’s Bible’ of 1795, which has Mark 7:27 reading: ‘Let the children be killed,’ instead of ‘filled.’
The ‘Vinegar Bible’ of 1717, which features, rather than the ‘Parable of the Vineyard’ in Luke 20:9, the ‘Parable of the Vinegar’
Even though King Charles sent out an inquisition to round up and ceremoniously burn each and every copy of these wicked Bibles in the aftermath of the trial, quite a few of them ended up evading capture. Around 15 copies have surfaced in Britain, the US, and even New Zealand since the turn of the 20th century, but only one of them is on public display: a particularly well preserved leather-bound edition housed in a case on the fourth floor Washington DC’s Museum of the Bible. The rest are in private collections.
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