YESTERDAY, WE SET THE STAGE FOR LRB LETTERS connecting the words of our title. My sincere acknowledgement and thanks to the three writers, Paul Sutton, Bearsden, East Dunbartonshire; Robert Hunter, Washington DC; and Benjamin Friedman, New York.
Vol. 47 No. 1 January 2025. Paul Sutton recounts, “Edmund Gordon writes about UFOs (LRB, 26 December 2024). Belief in flying saucers doesn’t normally have much consequence. But on at least one occasion it has had. In March 1979 Eric Gairy, the autocratic prime minister of Grenada, left the island to address the United Nations, not for the first time, on the UFO phenomenon and to plead further investigations. He also left instructions that while he was out of the country leading figures opposed to his rule should be imprisoned and possibly murdered.”
“In response,” Sutton continues, “these leaders staged an insurrection which was supported by the vast majority of the country, who happily chanted the slogan: ‘Freedom Come, Gairy Go, Gairy gone with UFO.’ Four and a half years of revolution followed led by the New Jewel Movement, ending only with the US invasion of October 1983.”
I especially like the Freedom chant.
Vol. 47 No. 3 February 20, 2025. Robert Hunter continues the tale: “Paul Sutton writes about the Grenadian prime minister Eric Gairy and his fixation on UFOs (Letters, 23 January). In September 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty and invited each of the Latin American leaders in attendance to an individual meeting. That included Gairy.”
Hunter relates, “Carter, his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the NSC staff member for Latin America met with Gairy in the White House cabinet room, where he unfurled a large scroll, highly illuminated. This was an invitation for Carter to visit Titania, a moon of Saturn, from its supreme leader. Carter did not react. But Brzezinski asked deadpan whether Titania had good relations with the other moons of Saturn and whether, if Carter were to visit Titania, he would be expected to give a speech.”
I like the part about querying Titania’s relations with other moons.
Vol. 47 No. 4 March 6, 2025. Benjamin Friedman recalls President Carter’s UFO pledge: “Robert Hunter recounts a 1977 meeting between President Jimmy Carter and the Grenadian prime minister Eric Gairy, who was known for his obsession with UFOs, during which Gairy presented Carter with an invitation to visit Saturn’s moon Titania, from its supreme leader (Letters, 20 February). ‘Carter did not react,’ Hunter writes, ‘but he may have been more sympathetic than many. He himself had sighted an unidentified flying object in Georgia in 1969 and had even filed a report on the incident with the International UFO Bureau. During his presidential campaign in 1976, Carter had pledged: ‘I’ll never make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky.’”
And What Was That UFO? Wikipedia recounts, “In 2016, the hosts of episode #561 of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast read a letter forwarded by a member of the Carter family from Carl G. ‘Jere’ Justus, giving his explanation of Carter’s UFO sighting: ‘In the 1960s and early 70s, I worked on an Air Force sponsored project that studied the upper atmosphere using releases of glowing chemical clouds, produced by rockets launched from Eglin AFB rocket range in Florida. Some of these chemical clouds, notably sodium and barium, were visible by the process of resonance scattering of sunlight.’”
He recalled one such cloud at the time of Carter’s sighting: “The reported altitude for this cloud was 152 km. With a distance between Leary, GA and Eglin AFB, FL of about 234 km, this cloud would have appeared in the sky at an elevation of 33 degrees (consistent with Carter’s estimate of a 30 degree elevation)…. Carter reported the UFO ‘appeared from West.’ The direction of Eglin AFB from Leary, GA is approximately WSW…. Furthermore, the appearance reported by Carter is totally consistent with a high-altitude barium cloud. His report stated that it was ‘bluish at first, then reddish, luminous, not solid.’ A neutral barium cloud would initially glow bluish or greenish, with parts of it taking on a reddish glow as some of the barium becomes ionized in the high altitude sunlight. The size and brightness, reported as being about that of the moon, would also be consistent with a barium cloud at Eglin, as viewed from Leary, GA.”
Wikipedia concludes, “In 2020, Justus completed an extensive study of the high-altitude barium release clouds, concluding that what Carter saw was ‘totally consistent’ with what was launched that evening from Eglin AFB. Justus described several physical aspects supporting consistency, and submitted a copy of the report for archival at the Jimmy Carter Library.”
By contrast, I found no further reports from Saturn’s Titania. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025