Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) was the most prominent broadcast journalist of his era. Born in St. Joseph, Missouri, he covered World War II as a United Press correspondent, then joined CBS, where he anchored the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. A 1970s opinion poll led to the description of him as 'the most trusted man in America,' and he closed broadcasts with 'And that's the way it is.' He is best known for Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate and Apollo-era coverage, and CBS's Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 reporting earned the network its best ratings of those missions.

Cronkite is not a ufologist. He never wrote a book on the subject and never claimed to have seen an extraterrestrial craft. But his name appears repeatedly in the history of how the mainstream press treated UFOs, because his reputation gave any subject he handled a kind of official legitimacy.

The 1966 CBS Reports special

On May 10, 1966, CBS aired UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy? as part of its CBS Reports documentary series, with Cronkite as host. CBS's own retrospective, published in its 'From The Vault' archive, describes the broadcast as a joint effort with IBM, and frames its question around the three options in the title. The timing mattered: it aired a few months before the Air Force contracted the University of Colorado study that became the Condon Report. A national broadcast hosted by the most trusted anchor in the country was, in effect, a public referendum on whether the question deserved serious attention. Its exact panelists and conclusions are not fully documented in the sources consulted for this entry, and readers should watch the broadcast (available through CBS's archive) rather than rely on secondhand summaries.

The Gordon Cooper interview

A later and more concrete trace of Cronkite's engagement is an audio interview from November 1962 in which he asked NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper about UFOs. Cooper, who had flown Mercury-Atlas 9 in 1963 (and remains the last American to fly a solo orbital mission), answered that 'a large number of exceptionally well-qualified people have seen objects' that had no logical explanation, and speculated that other planets with Earth-like atmospheres might harbor life. The clip was among the material released in the Pentagon's third batch of declassified UAP files in June 2026. It is a useful window into how astronauts and journalists discussed the subject in the early Space Age, long before it became a government program.

The interview is significant less for what Cooper said than for what it shows: a working reporter treating UFO sightings as a legitimate question to put to a serving astronaut, in the same breath as the space program he covered.

Cultural and historical significance

Cronkite matters to ufology because of his role as a gatekeeper of credibility. Journalists of his stature rarely chose the subject, and when they did, they framed it cautiously. That caution is itself a historical marker: a public institution treating the question as serious enough to examine, without endorsing extraterrestrial explanations. Later UFO documentaries, including the 2023 National Geographic series, have used his 1966 footage as archival material, which is a signal of how the broadcast became part of the visual record of the phenomenon.

He also appears in fringe literature, where unverified claims about sightings by him circulate on podcasts and video channels. Those claims lack primary sourcing and should be treated with skepticism. The documented record is narrower and more interesting: a respected anchor who put UFOs on the national news in 1966 and asked a Mercury astronaut about them in 1962.

Current status

Cronkite died on July 17, 2009, in New York City, aged 92. His UFO-related material is now mostly archival: the 1966 special is available from CBS's archive, and the Cooper clip is one of the declassified records the Pentagon released in 2026. His legacy in this field is that of a trusted voice who allowed the question to be asked on air, not one who answered it.