George Herbert Walker Bush (1924–2018) was an American politician, diplomat and intelligence chief who served as director of central intelligence in 1976 and 1977, as vice president under Ronald Reagan, and as the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993. His place in UFO history rests on what others say he told them, chiefly physicist Eric Davis, who says Bush privately described being briefed on a contact event when he took charge of the CIA. No documented statement by Bush himself describes such a briefing.

Born in Milton, Massachusetts, on June 12, 1924, Bush enlisted in the Navy on his 18th birthday, became one of its youngest aviators and flew 58 combat missions in the Pacific. He was shot down near Chichijima in 1944, rescued by a submarine and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. After Yale he co-founded Zapata Petroleum in Texas, served two terms in the House of Representatives, and held a run of appointments as ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee and chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing.

Bush led the CIA from January 30, 1976, to January 20, 1977. He then spent eight years as Reagan's vice president before winning the presidency in 1988. In the White House he oversaw the end of the Cold War, German reunification, the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War that expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He passed away at his home in Houston on November 30, 2018.

The UFO claims came later. Eric Davis, a physicist who worked on Pentagon-funded advanced aerospace studies, says that in conversations in 2003 Bush told him he had been briefed not as president but as incoming CIA director, by a liaison officer who said the U.S. government had been in contact with beings from another world. Davis repeated the account in the documentary The Age of Disclosure and in 2026 talks and interviews, tying it to an alleged early-1960s landing and meeting at Holloman Air Force Base, the subject of the long-running Holloman landing film story. According to Davis, Bush said he was given the basics but never shown the film. In a Sol Foundation video in June 2026, Davis also said Bush had confirmed details about the claims of the late Army officer Philip Corso. In June 2026, online summaries of British barrister Jonathan Caplan's book reported that it describes Bush being briefed on a human-looking non-human at Holloman. No released government record describes any of these briefings, and the accounts cannot be checked with Bush.

Bush's significance in UAP history is that of a war veteran, intelligence chief and president whose career placed him at the center of Cold War secrecy, which is why secondhand accounts of what he was told carry weight in the disclosure debate. The stories themselves come from Davis's recollection of private conversations and from authors drawing on unnamed sources, and they became widely discussed only after his passing.