Curtis Emerson LeMay (1906–1990) was an American Air Force general who directed the B-29 bombing campaign against Japan, built Strategic Air Command into the country's nuclear strike force and served as Air Force chief of staff from 1961 to 1965. In UFO history he appears mainly through Senator Barry Goldwater's account of asking him for access to secret material at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and through later reverse-engineering claims.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, LeMay earned a civil engineering degree at Ohio State University and joined the Army's air arm. In World War II he commanded the 305th Bomb Group in England, where he helped develop the "combat box" formation, before moving to the Pacific to lead XXI Bomber Command. He directed incendiary raids on 67 Japanese cities, including the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9–10, 1945, the most destructive single air raid of the war. Afterward he served briefly at the Pentagon as deputy chief of the Air Staff for research and development, then commanded US Air Forces in Europe during the 1948 Berlin Airlift.

From 1948 to 1957 he headed Strategic Air Command, turning a few understrength B-29 groups into an all-jet bomber force with aerial refueling, ballistic missiles and constant readiness. As vice chief of staff from 1957 and chief from 1961 he clashed with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and with President Kennedy, whom he urged to bomb the Soviet missile sites in Cuba during the 1962 crisis. Pushed out over his opposition to Johnson's Vietnam policy, he retired in February 1965, and in 1968 he ran for vice president on George Wallace's American Independent Party ticket, which carried five states. He passed away in 1990 at March Air Force Base, California.

The documented UFO record involving LeMay centers on a 1947 answer. During that summer's flying-disc wave, Army Air Forces intelligence asked the service's research offices, including LeMay's, whether the discs could be an American project, and according to the Sign Oral History Project's history the answer was no; the inquiry then went to Nathan Twining's Air Materiel Command. The better-known story came from Goldwater, who wrote in 1975 that he had been denied access to the building at Wright-Patterson where the Air Force's UFO information was stored, material he called "still classified above Top Secret." On Larry King Live in 1994 he said he had asked LeMay to let him into the room "where you put all this secret stuff," and that LeMay "got madder than hell at me, cussed me out." He qualified his belief that the government knew about UFOs with "I can't back that up."

Newer claims center on his research post. In March 2026, Reddit posts argued that Liberation Times reporting on alleged 1946 attempts to reverse-engineer the Magenta craft lined up with the Army Air Forces' Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft project, launched in May 1946 while LeMay held the research post; the project's documented work was a nuclear-powered aircraft study, folded into a joint Atomic Energy Commission and Air Force program in 1951. LeMay's documented legacy is Strategic Air Command and the nuclear bomber force, and his place in UFO history rests on one 1947 denial that his offices had a disc project and on Goldwater's memory of an angry phone call.