Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera could make intergalactic history this fall. If she wins Tuesday’s primary in Florida she would be in position to become the first person elected to Congress who says she was once abducted by aliens.
That possibility has given immense pleasure to one of Washington D.C.’s most peculiar lobbying shops: the Paradigm Research Group, which advocates for discussing and unveiling “facts surrounding an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.”
“This is a milestone,” Stephen Bassett, executive director of the group, said of Aguilera’s candidacy. “If she were to win the election, she would be the first open contactee to serve in Congress.”
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Aguilera, a Republican, is running in Florida’s 27th Congressional District, a Miami-area seat being vacated by Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. She is not a fringe figure. The Miami Herald endorsed her candidacy recently. But even in doing so, they acknowledged she is a bit “unusual.”
That’s because Aguilera has asserted that as a child, she was taken aboard a UFO by aliens who looked like the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil. In a series of YouTube videos, Aguilera said the aliens told her “God is a universal energy, not a person,” that the center of the world’s energy is in Africa and that thousands of non-human skulls were discovered in a cave on Malta.
“I stick to my guns when I believe in something,” she told the Associated Press in a recent interview, also claiming that she has been communicating with the extra-terrestrials telepathically after the abduction.
Now a business consultant, Aguilera said she doesn’t want to be defined by the happenstances she said occurred when she was just seven years old. “It has nothing to do with what I have done,” she told the AP.
But for Bassett, this is not a topic from which to shy away. Instead, it represents a watershed moment and the culmination of the work done by his group, which was founded in 1996. He said that Aguilera is part of a larger story about the ultimate lifting of the “truth embargo,” during which time the government will reveal what it has hidden about extraterrestrials. The problem, for now at least, is that everyone is too preoccupied with the ongoing scandals of the White House to pay attention.
“The biggest story in human history is taking place right now, the ultimate end of the truth embargo,” Bassett said. “The Trump hurricane is simply sucking everything up.”
Despite the chance to achieve fuller enlightenment about the scope of our universe —or, at least, the occupants within it—Bassett is, for now, playing it cool. There are no plans to campaign with Aguilera, he said, lest it backfire.
“I don’t want to make anything more difficult for her,” he explained. “It’s one of those things in retrospect that will be seen as a big deal but in the current moment not a big deal"
