Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images (White House); Shutterstock (UFO) Regardless of what one thinks about extraterrestrial life and politics, UFO motorcades would do wonders for D.C. traffic.

Former Obama aide and well-known X-Files obsessive John Podesta tweeted this month that his “biggest failure of 2014” was “Once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files.”

Many assume that Podesta will soon sign up for the still-hypothetical Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, which means that the UFO lobby might just endorse Clinton for a second time if decides to run.

Stephen Bassett, head of the Paradigm Research Group (which runs a blog about presidential UFO news and hosted an off-brand hearing for ex-members of Congress on government transparency in matters extraterrestrial), told the Huffington Post in 2007 that Hillary Clinton “knows this issue is not trivial.” Nearly eight years later, Bassett is still trying to access any government documents on UFOs, and still hoping that Clinton will reach out to constituents like him.

Roll Call published a story about Bassett’s efforts on Monday morning, which ended with the lobbyist’s thoughts on the 2016 election. He doesn’t see a path to victory for Hillary Clinton that does not involve discussing the potential of celestial circumnavigation.

“As far as I’m concerned … Hillary Clinton is not going to become the president of the United States without going through the extraterrestrial issue,” Bassett told Roll Call. “Period.”

Clinton could always outsource discussions of aliens to another high-profile space expert on her team. Bill Clinton recently disclosed that he did not find any evidence of extraterrestrial life at Roswell or Area 51 during his presidency.

Bassett also suggested that Republican candidates should also support a pro-transparency UFO agenda, before Russian President Vladimir Putin beats them to it. “If Bassett wants to reach out to the GOP, 2016 hopeful and noted Putin hater Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who heads the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, might be a good person to start with. ”

Life beyond Earth has been a reliable recurring feature of presidential coverage. In 2012, Newt Gingrich, who had an uncredited appearance as an alien in Men in Black, vowed to build a permanent base on the moon. During a 2008 presidential debate, Dennis Kucinich discussed his UFO sighting, and Sen. Barack Obama said that he did not know if there was life out there. During a 1992 presidential debate, Independent candidate Ross Perot managed to bring extraterrestrial life into a discussion about gridlock. “It’s not the Republicans’ fault, of course, and it’s not the Democrats’ fault. Somewhere out there there’s an extraterrestrial that’s doing this to us, I guess.”

In 1997, CNN found that 80 percent of Americans thought the government was hiding information about aliens. Ninety-three percent of respondents had never been abducted by aliens or known someone who had been kidnapped and taken to another universe.