Barry Goldwater

Barry Morris Goldwater was born January 1, 1909, in Phoenix, Arizona, into a prominent merchant family that owned Goldwater's department store. He served as president of the family business from 1937 to 1953 before entering politics, becoming an Arizona city councilman in 1949 and winning his first U.S. Senate election in 1952. Goldwater served two non-consecutive terms in the Senate (1953–1964, 1969–1987) and became the defining figure of American conservative politics, earning the nickname "Mr. Conservative" and authoring the influential The Conscience of a Conservative. He was the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, famously defeated by Lyndon B. Johnson in a landslide.

In parallel with his political career, Goldwater served as a Major-General in the U.S. Air Force Reserve—a credential that gave him both military credibility and a personal security clearance. This military background placed him in a unique position to pursue classified information regarding UFO incidents. Around 1975, during his second Senate term, Goldwater made explicit efforts to investigate what he believed were classified UFO materials stored at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. In a written statement, he declared: "The subject of UFOs has interested me for some long time. About ten or twelve years ago I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the information has been stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret."

Goldwater's most famous encounter with classification secrecy came when he asked his longtime friend, General Curtis LeMay (then Chief of Staff of the Air Force), for access to Area 51 in Nevada. LeMay's alleged response—"Not only can't you get into it but don't you ever mention it to me again"—became a defining anecdote in UFO disclosure history, illustrating the barriers even high-ranking government officials faced when pursuing classified information. Goldwater later stated that his conversations with LeMay and knowledge of facts surrounding the 1947 Roswell crash convinced him that "it did happen and is a major secret regarding UFOs and aliens of our time. Perhaps of all times."

In 1994, Goldwater appeared on CNN's Larry King Live to discuss his UFO and Roswell interests, making his decades-long advocacy a matter of public record. He framed the secrecy surrounding these subjects not as necessary national security but as problematic concealment from the American public. His position was unusual for a mainstream political figure of his era—most senators avoided the topic entirely or treated it with skepticism. Goldwater treated it as a legitimate matter of government transparency and democratic accountability.

Goldwater's health declined sharply in late 1996 when he suffered a massive stroke that ended his public appearances. Family members then revealed he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. He died on May 29, 1998, at age 89 at his long-time home in Paradise Valley, Arizona, from complications related to the stroke. His papers and correspondence were preserved, and a collection of 143 pages of Goldwater's UFO-related letters has been publicly archived, offering a window into his sustained, serious engagement with the subject over decades.