Ronald Reagan
PersonPoliticianRonald Reagan
PersonPoliticianRonald Reagan was the 40th U.S. president (1981–89), whose repeated musings about an alien threat uniting humanity are his documented link to UFO history.
Ronald Reagan was the 40th U.S. president (1981–89), whose repeated musings about an alien threat uniting humanity are his documented link to UFO history.
Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911–2004) was an American actor and politician who served as governor of California from 1967 to 1975 and as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. His documented place in UFO history is rhetorical: in speeches and in private talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he returned again and again to the idea that a threat from another world would unite humanity. Later claims that he knew of real visitors or recovered craft come from other people and remain secondhand.
Born in Tampico, Illinois, on February 6, 1911, Reagan worked as a radio sports announcer before moving to Hollywood in 1937, where he appeared in 53 films, among them Kings Row (1942). He twice led the Screen Actors Guild, became a prominent conservative speaker, and won the California governorship in 1966. As president he cut taxes and expanded military spending, and on March 23, 1983, he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile-defense plan long championed by physicist Edward Teller. His negotiations with Gorbachev produced the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. He passed away in Los Angeles on June 5, 2004.
The alien theme is well recorded. At the Geneva summit in November 1985, Reagan asked Gorbachev whether the Soviet Union would help if the United States were attacked from space, an exchange Gorbachev later recalled, and he raised the idea again at a summit dinner. Two weeks later he told students in Maryland how easy his task and Gorbachev's might be "if suddenly there was a threat to this world." Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on September 21, 1987, he said, "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world," before asking whether war itself was the alien force already among us. He used the image again in Chicago in May 1988. Each time it served as a metaphor for common human interest.
In 2026 several secondhand stories put Reagan's circle back in the news. Producer Brent Friedman says that in 1981 Reagan appointee John Herrington, later his energy secretary, told him he had been briefed on aliens; Herrington called the story "total BS" and in an October 2026 interview denied any such briefing. Documentary director Dan Farah told the Danny Jones Podcast that after a White House screening of E.T. for Steven Spielberg in June 1982, Reagan remarked that some people in the room knew how close to true the story was; the anecdote is secondhand and unconfirmed. An account of Reagan seeing an unidentified light from his plane near Bakersfield in 1974, recirculated online in October 2026, likewise rests on later retelling rather than any official report.
Reagan's lasting contribution to the subject is a phrase rather than a disclosure. A Cold War president used the prospect of an extraterrestrial threat to argue that the superpowers shared a common fate, and that line, delivered from the floor of the United Nations, has been quoted in UFO circles ever since. The stories about briefings and private remarks attached to his administration remain the accounts of others, and the people named in them have either denied them or left no record confirming them.
Brent's never changed or wavered in his story. Herrington, in contrast, told you one thing (Brent never drove his cars across country) and told Jesse something [Quoted] 'Total BS': Reagan's Energy Secretary speaks out on alien meltdown story In this week's Signs of Life, I tracked down John Herrington, who served as Ronald Reagan's energy secretary and deputy Navy secretary -- to ask him about his role in longstanding UFO lore. For years, Hollywood writer/producer Brent Friedman has told a st...
[Retweeted] Ronald Reagan reportedly spotted a UFO while flying near Bakersfield in 1974. When it suddenly shot away, he joked to his pilot, “Let’s follow it!” https://t.co/16rWHbNh9b
Ronald Reagan reportedly spotted a UFO while flying near Bakersfield in 1974. When it suddenly shot away, he joked to his pilot, “Let’s follow it!” https://t.co/16rWHbNh9b
[Retweeted] 🚨BREAKING🚨: A former Secretary of Energy, who ran America's nuclear weapons complex, says there are UFOs flying over the most sensitive American military facilities that are wholly unidentified. He also says that UFOs seen by Navy Fighter pilots and caught by thermal imaging are legitimate sightings of craft that transcend human physics and engineering and that the most interesting place to look for physical evidence of UFOs might be on the seafloor. John Herrington ran the Depa...
[Retweeted] 'Total BS': Reagan's Energy Secretary speaks out on alien meltdown story In this week's Signs of Life, I tracked down John Herrington, who served as Ronald Reagan's energy secretary and deputy Navy secretary -- to ask him about his role in longstanding UFO lore. For years, Hollywood writer/producer Brent Friedman has told a story about a disturbing dinner he allegedly had with Herrington in the summer of 1981, when Friedman had just graduated high school and Herrington had just jo...
[Retweeted] 🚨BREAKING🚨: A former Secretary of Energy, who ran America's nuclear weapons complex, says there are UFOs flying over the most sensitive American military facilities that are wholly unidentified. He also says that UFOs seen by Navy Fighter pilots and caught by thermal imaging are legitimate sightings of craft that transcend human physics and engineering and that the most interesting place to look for physical evidence of UFOs might be on the seafloor. John Herrington ran the Depa...
[Retweeted] 🚨BREAKING🚨: A former Secretary of Energy, who ran America's nuclear weapons complex, says there are UFOs flying over the most sensitive American military facilities that are wholly unidentified. He also says that UFOs seen by Navy Fighter pilots and caught by thermal imaging are legitimate sightings of craft that transcend human physics and engineering and that the most interesting place to look for physical evidence of UFOs might be on the seafloor. John Herrington ran the Depa...
SO pumped to watch this! Jesse of @AmericanALCHMY locked in a historic interview. What will we learn? https://t.co/RUleb9fZBQ [Quoted] 🚨BREAKING🚨: A former Secretary of Energy, who ran America's nuclear weapons complex, says there are UFOs flying over the most sensitive American military facilities that are wholly unidentified. He also says that UFOs seen by Navy Fighter pilots and caught by thermal imaging are legitimate sightings of craft that transcend human physics and engineering and t...
[Retweeted] 🚨BREAKING🚨: A former Secretary of Energy, who ran America's nuclear weapons complex, says there are UFOs seen flying over the most sensitive American military facilities that are wholly unidentified. He also says that UFOs seen by Navy Fighter pilots and caught by thermal imaging are legitimate sightings of craft that transcends human physics and engineering and that the most interesting place to look for physical evidence of UFOs might be on the seafloor. John Herrington ran th...
OUT NOW! https://t.co/BILKGVutwD [Quoted] 🚨BREAKING🚨: A former Secretary of Energy, who ran America's nuclear weapons complex, says there are UFOs seen flying over the most sensitive American military facilities that are wholly unidentified. He also says that UFOs seen by Navy Fighter pilots and caught by thermal imaging are legitimate sightings of craft that transcends human physics and engineering and that the most interesting place to look for physical evidence of UFOs might be on the se...
