Ronald Reagan's UFO sighting from the governor's plane near Bakersfield

In 1974 Ronald Reagan was Governor of California. One night that year he was aboard a Cessna Citation business jet flown by his pilot, Bill Paynter, with two security officers. The plane was approaching Bakersfield in Kern County. No source records the exact day, and no report was ever filed. What survives are two accounts, told years apart, that agree on the essentials and differ on the details.

It was, Paynter recalled, "maybe 9 or 10 o'clock at night." His passengers called his attention to "a big light flying a bit behind my plane." It appeared to be several hundred yards away.

For a while it was a fairly steady light. Then it began to accelerate, and it appeared to elongate. "Then the light took off," Paynter said. "It went up at a 45-degree angle, at a high rate of speed." He had logged thousands of hours in the sky. This, he said, "went from a normal cruise speed to a fantastic speed instantly." An airplane given power will accelerate, he explained, "but not like a hot rod, and that's what this was like."

"Everyone on the plane was surprised. Governor Reagan expressed amazement. I told the others I didn't know what it was."

About a week later Reagan told the story to Norman C. Miller, then Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. In his telling, he saw it first. "I was in a plane last week when I looked out the window and saw this white light. It was zigzagging around." He went up to the pilot. Paynter was shocked. "And I said to him: 'Let's follow it!'"

"We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light. We followed it to Bakersfield, and all of a sudden to our utter amazement it went straight up into the heavens." When he got off the plane, he told Nancy all about it.

According to the retelling, Miller expressed some doubt. A look of horror came over Reagan. It suddenly dawned on him that he was talking to a reporter. He clammed up. Later he called himself "neither a believer nor a non-believer." Paynter said they discussed the sighting from time to time, but nothing went on record. "We didn't file a report on the object because for a long time they considered you a nut if you saw a UFO." His account reached print only in 1988, in a tabloid article bylined Ken O'Hara and in London's Daily Star under the headline "REAGAN IN UFO FRIGHT."

The case has no photographs, no radar and no official file. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969. Users on Metabunk could not find Miller's own original write-up, and noted that the pilot's story surfaced about 14 years after the event. One suggested a jet kicking in its afterburner, the light elongating as it sped away. The two witnesses do not quite agree either. Zigzagging or steady. Straight up or 45 degrees.

The idea of visitors from outside returned in Reagan's later years. At the United Nations on 21 September 1987 he said: "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." At Geneva in 1985 he reportedly asked Gorbachev whether the USSR would help if the US were attacked from outer space. Today the Bakersfield sighting is often paired with Jimmy Carter's 1969 Leary, Georgia sighting in articles on presidents and UFOs, and on 15 February 2025 an episode of Richard Dolan's UFO Chronicles revisited it.