PRIMARY DOCUMENT

In his address to the 42nd United Nations General Assembly on September 21, 1987, President Ronald Reagan included the following passage: ‘I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet I ask — is not an alien force already among us?’ This was not an isolated comment. Reagan made nearly identical statements on at least four separate public occasions between 1985 and 1988, including to Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva Summit in 1985.

At the 1985 Geneva Summit, Reagan told Gorbachev privately — later confirmed by both Gorbachev and US officials — that he raised the question of whether the two superpowers could cooperate if faced with an alien invasion. Gorbachev confirmed this exchange publicly in 1987: ‘The President said that if the Earth faced an invasion by extraterrestrials, the United States and the Soviet Union would join forces to repel such an invasion.’ This exchange between the two most powerful men on Earth during the height of the Cold War has never been fully explained.

Reagan’s repeated references to an extraterrestrial threat have been interpreted in two ways: as a rhetorical device to argue for global cooperation, and as a genuine expression of knowledge he held about UAP reality. The frequency of the references — four known public statements over three years — and his willingness to raise it with Gorbachev in a private diplomatic summit suggest it was more than political metaphor. Reagan had been briefed on Project Blue Book and was known to have had at least one personal UAP sighting as Governor of California in 1974.

A sitting United States President referenced an extraterrestrial threat before the United Nations General Assembly and raised the same topic privately with the Soviet head of state. Whatever the intent, Reagan’s repeated statements constitute the highest-level public acknowledgment of the UAP question by any head of government in documented history.

Related Intelligence