PIECES OF OUR PAST: I know I saw it!

Some folks said that Earl and Eleanor were seeing things. And, to top it all off, Earl and Eleanor lived in a haunted house for six years. And,  they unabashedly told several people of the strange and mysterious goings-on inside their old antebellum home and strange things in the sky.

Earl and Eleanor didn’t live an easy life at first. They lived in public housing for a while before Earl decided to take up farming full-time. They bought an old house which was built before the Civil War. Earl spent most of his adult years in college and the Navy. He knew only a little about farming, so he took classes to learn more about how to make a living in agriculture. Eleanor took accounting classes to learn how to manage the farm’s books. As Earl’s farming business continued to grow and grow, he began to pay it forward by serving others.

It was on Friday morning on Sept. 14, 1973, when Earl stopped in at the Dexter Café to say hello to his good friends, Levi, and his bride – the former Miss Collins.   He came to Dexter and Dublin to find out how could help the people here and make some new friends.

Eleanor had kin here in times past. Eleanor’s great-grandfather was born in Laurens County and lived on a large farm at the southwest corner of the Old Macon Road and Ga. 338 near what has long been called Lybrand’s Store.

Earl and the coffee-drinking crowd talked about crime and the recent robbery of the Knight State Bank in Dexter. They also talked about the dangerous traffic on Ga. 257 and the alarming number of accidents and deaths along that twisting thoroughfare.

As Earl was comparing Dublin and Dexter as similar to his own hometown,  he told the folks in Dublin that he was definitely planning to get out of political office for good.

Then a newspaper reporter asked Earl about a potentially embarrassing event that happened in Earl’s past some four years before. Somehow the story of the event had leaked out.

Earl told the reporter that he saw a blue, disc-shaped object during a visit to Leary, Georgia near Albany while Earl and about a dozen members of the Lions Club were standing around outside of the school cafeteria just after dark on a cold, fair, winter night, waiting for the meeting to start.

“All of a sudden, one of the men looked up and said, ‘Look, over in the west!’ And there was a bright light in the sky. We all saw it. And then the light, it got closer and closer to us. And then it stopped, I don’t know how far away, but it stopped beyond the pine trees. And all of a sudden it changed color to blue, and then it changed to red, and then back to white. And we were trying to figure out what in the world it could be, and then it receded into the distance,” Earl remembered.

Earl and the men watched for about 10 minutes or so as the mysterious object, which Earl described as about the size of a full moon, flew about 30 degrees above the horizon.

Earl’s military training told him to run to his car, pull out his tape recorder, and dictate exactly what he had observed.

That day in Dublin Earl remembered the object as a very remarkable sight, but began to discount the sight as simply  “an electronic occurrence of some sort.”

It was on that day in Dublin when the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) wrote to Earl about the mysterious object that he saw back on Jan. 6, 1969. Four days later after he left Dublin, Earl filled out a form in his own handwriting detailing what he observed was a UFO in January 1969 and mailed it back to the NICAP.  

Later people tried to discount Earl’s sighting as the extraordinarily bright planet of Venus above the horizon. Earl retorted by stating that he was somewhat of an amateur astronomer and that what he saw was definitely not Venus nor any known heavenly object. Seven years after that January 1969 sighting,  only one person could be found who was present that night. And,  he told authorities it looked something like “a weather balloon.”

Earl and Eleanor had long moved out of their old haunted house for some 14 years. But the folks in town kept talking about the house. Today they still talk about the house, which Earl and Eleanor recently had preserved as one their county’s oldest and most historic houses. The house was known to have been haunted since the end of the Civil War. The sources of the apparitions are said to be Union soldiers who were killed while hiding in the house. Others in the town said the house was a stop on the Underground Railroad where escaped slaves came to find refuge.

“I never saw any ghosts – I don’t believe in them – but I heard something in the attic every night that sent shivers up my spine. Those eerie noises gave me goosebumps,” Eleanor said back then.

“One day while my son was playing he found two loose bricks in the attic fireplace. When he picked up the bricks, he discovered a room beneath the fireplace, four feet deep and six feet wide. There was nothing in the room but a chair,” Eleanor recalled.

Unlike Earl’s story about seeing a UFO, most folks in town tended to believe Eleanor’s story about their haunted house because some of them saw the secret rooms with their two seeing eyes and heard the mysterious noises with their very own listening ears.

Earl kept his promise to leave office. But,  he could not resist his yearning to get back into politics. After winning his next election, Earl continued to maintain that what he saw was not an astronomical object nor was it a weather balloon. After all, this observer was more than a peanut farmer from Southwest Georgia.  This man was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, who spent 10 years in the Navy –  part of the time as a nuclear engineer.

At the time of his visit to Dexter and Dublin, Earl was considered to be a highly credible witness. After all, he was the governor of the state of Georgia. A little more than three years later, James Earl Carter was elected as the 39th president of the United States.   Joining him in yet another very old house in Washington, D.C., said to be haunted by the commander in chief of the Union Army during the Civil War,  was his wife Eleanor Rosalyn Carter, a great-granddaughter of a Laurens County man, Drury Murray.

Oh, by the way, those dear friends of Carters in Dexter were Cecil Leon Passmore Jr. and Faye Passmore.

So now you now know the story of the day when the future president of the United States first publicly admitted, right here in Laurens County, to a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution that he really did see an unidentified flying object.