There would be. To know what I know now, I would be aggrieved if I had never known about Jesus Christ, because I have tried to apply, in a faltering way, the teachings of Jesus Christ. It's been an inspiration to me, it's been a guide to me, it's been a stabilizing factor in my life. It has permeated my consciousness.

This will sound like the same question, but if you had been raised by atheists, do you think you would have had an inner feeling of faith

I think so.

Wouldn't it be hard without the guidance of others

I believe that when I approached adulthood, I would have been exploring the authenticity or the veracity or the applicability of the Christian faith. If I had been raised as an atheist and I had gone into the outside world and all of a sudden I realized that I was living in a nation where the majority of people profess faith in Christ, I would have wanted to explore the beliefs of others to see if it was applicable to me.

It seems difficult to imagine someone coming into the vast realm of religious offerings and having any idea where to begin. With so many options, they could very well all be wrong.

I accept the fact that some of my beliefs could be wrong. There may be some fallibilities in my own personal beliefs, sure. I can't change my mind just because I think I might be wrong. My present beliefs have been evolved over seventyfive years of thought and study, analysis, teaching.

One of the other aspects of your life that struck me as a conflict between your experience and your scientific training was that you saw a UFO.

I saw an unidentified flying object. I've never believed that it came from Mars. I know enough physics to know that you can't have vehicles that are tangible in nature flying from Mars, looking around, and then flying back. But I saw an object one night when I was preparing to give a speech to a Lions Club. There were about twentyfive of us men standing around. It was almost time for the Lions Club supper to start, which I would eat and then I would give a speech. I was in charge of fiftysix Lions Clubs in southwest Georgia back in the late '60s. And 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, 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. I had a tape recorder—because as I met with members of Lions Clubs, I would dictate their names on the tapes so I could remember them—and I dictated my observations. And when I got home, I wrote them down. So that's an accurate description of what I saw. It was a flying object that was unidentified. But I have never thought that it was from outer space.

One of the promises you made in 1976 was that if you were elected, you would look into the reports from Roswell and see if there had been any coverups. Did you look into that

Well, in a way. I became more aware of what our intelligence services were doing. There was only one instance that I'll talk about now. We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic—a twinengine plane, small plane. And we couldn't find it. And so we oriented satellites that were going around the earth every ninety minutes to fly over that spot where we thought it might be and take photographs. We couldn't find it. So the director of the CIA came and told me that he had contacted a woman in California that claimed to have supernatural capabilities. And she went in a trance, and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and we sent our satellite over that latitude and longitude, and there was the plane.