Carter reported a sighting, Obama asked about secret labs: How have US presidents handled UFOs?

The fringe world of “UFOlogy” has seen

But in the last few years, the US military’s own footage has changed the equation, and coupled with eyewitness testimonies from numerous pilots has not just revived the idea of extraterrestrial visitors but also kicked mainstream politicians into action, forcing them to acknowledge what military pilots have been seeing during airborne exercises off the US’s east and west coasts.

For years, they have reported sightings of fast-moving objects – sometimes called “tic tacs” – that hover, rotate, accelerate and decelerate in ways that defy explanation. And rather than vague stories told by one or two unreliable witnesses, these are experiences shared by numerous active service members and recorded using military equipment.

The latest videos hardly come out of nowhere: similar sightings were being compiled and  examined by the Pentagon as long ago as 2007 under the auspices of the out-of-view Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which officially closed in 2012 – but in fact gave way to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, which will issue a report to Congress, which is due at the start of June.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CBS’s 60 Minutes that it is time for frontline politicians to get past the issue’s association with the ludicrous and unhinged and take the military’s reports seriously.

“There’s a stigma on Capitol Hill,” said the senator. “Some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and some kind of giggle when you bring it up, but I don’t think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.”

“Maybe it has a very simple answer,” he speculated. “Maybe it doesn’t.”

The truth, however, is that just beneath the surface, US presidents have been intrigued by reports of UFOs for decades, and more than one of them motivated to look for anything particularly astonishing.

Barack Obama, for one, had questions about matters extraterrestrial at the time of his inauguration, though as he has made clear before, they weren’t exactly top of his list.

“When I came into office,” he said in an interview with James Corden when the latest videos became public, “I asked, is there the lab somewhere where we’re keeping the alien specimens and a spaceship?

“They did a little bit of research and the answer is no,” he continued. “But what is true and I’m actually being serious here, is there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are. “We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern.”

This tallies with the footage and eyewitness accounts from recent years, which include particularly vivid descriptions of the objects’ strange movements – flying between military aircraft at close range, freezing and pivoting on the spot, and accelerating to incredible speed before coming to a complete halt instantaneously.

Also intrigued by the truth about mysterious aerial sightings was Bill Clinton, who in 2014 told Jimmy Kimmel he had “all the Roswell papers reviewed” and found nothing, and that if he had found anything, he would have shared it with the public. Still, he said, “if we were visited someday, I wouldn’t be surprised”.

Hillary Clinton herself opened up to Mr Kimmel about this a little during her 2016 run, telling the host that despite her husband’s investigations, she would be looking into the matter again for herself. “If there is something there, unless it’s a threat to national security, I think we ought to share it with the public,” she said.

Of course, it wasn’t to be – and while the first of the military videos showing “tic tacs” off California became public on his watch, former President Donald Trump showed little interest in the subject, though he did acknowledge it in a bizarre interview with his son.

One president is in a league of his own on UFO matters: Jimmy Carter, who actually reported a UFO sighting of his own in 1969.

Describing the experience in Leary, Georgia during his presidential campaign years later, he recalled his encounter with “the darndest thing I’ve ever seen”: a bright object of “changing colours” that was “about the size of the moon”.

As he put it later, he and a few others were “standing outside of a little restaurant, I believe, a high school lunchroom, and a kind of green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown. It got brighter and brighter. And then it eventually disappeared. It didn’t have any solid substance to it, it was just a very peculiar looking light. None of us could understand what it was.”

According to Mr Carter, who was one of a number of witnesses, “the object hovered about 30 degrees above the horizon and moved in toward the earth and away before disappearing into the distance”.

The future president reported the sighting in 1973, and when elected promised to reveal as much as he could about the US government’s investigations into such things – but in the end, his four years in office saw nothing much revealed at all.

Under Joe Biden – not a known UFO witness himself – that may be about to change.