More than a decade after leaving the Clinton White House, former Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Gibbons still gets dyspeptic over the mention of that annoying UFO business in the 1990s. Or at least, his office does.

It’s a cautionary tale about how a persistent zillionaire thought he could use his connections to uncover hidden government UFO stash. The online paper trail details how, for three futile years, Laurance Rockefeller’s lobbying efforts with the executive branch laid goose eggs. It titillates us with President Clinton’s coy public pass at the issue in 1995, and with the ex post facto admission by former deputy attorney general Webster Hubbell that he went on a fishing expedition for evidence of a UFO coverup for his boss and came up empty. And throughout the ordeal, OSTP’s Gibbons was doing his best to placate Rocky while masking his irritability over having to field non-specific charges that ET dynamite was ticking away in the classified cellars and attics.

Fifteen years later, the Obama administration will no doubt plead ignorance about the contentious UFO subculture asterisk known as the “Rockefeller Initiative.” But that won’t stop lobbyist Steve Bassett from pressing the point with his impending “We The People” petition to the White House.

Still smarting from its rejection of his petition claim that the feds are concealing knowledge of an “extraterrestrial presence” (the OSTP replied it had “no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye” or “that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race”), Bassett is about to squeeze another trigger. On Dec. 1, his latest petition will “demand” a “full congressional investigation of UFO/ET Disclosure efforts by the Clinton OSTP – the Rockefeller Initiative.”

“Read the NARCAP files and the pilot database files about the thousands of encounters they’ve had and then come back and tell me there’s no credible evidence of interactions with extraterrestrial intelligence or nonhuman intelligence or whatever label you want to put on it,” Bassett tells De Void. “Come on. This is a rigged game.”

Bassett’s protestations won’t matter one way or the other unless, over the ensuing 30 days, he can collect 25,000 signatures required for eliciting a formal response. But what if, he wonders, with another election year looming, a congressional Republican were to see some political advantage in asking pointed questions?

“Look, we know Bill and Hillary met with Rockefeller in 1995 and we know what Rockefeller’s agenda was,” Bassett says. “This is the same Hillary Clinton who had a couple of sessions with Jeanne Dixon or whatever to do some role-playing with Eleanor Roosevelt — and the press goes nuts over it back then. Now she’s our Secretary of State and nobody’s curious? I guarantee you that if she gets one informed question about what happened, by a reasonably well known TV journalist, she’ll look like a deer in the headlights.”

Bassett claims House Republicans wanting to learn more about the Rockefeller Initiative could probably call upon “50-some people” from the Clinton White House to testify, including some Obama operatives.

“Nineteen months after Clinton leaves office, his former chief of staff (John Podesta) makes a public appeal to declassify UFO files, but he’s nowhere to be seen on this thing now. Why is that?” he says of Obama’s election-transition coordinator. “These Clinton people didn’t just go away. Leon Panetta’s now the Secretary of Defense. I’d like to hear him answer a few questions. I’d like to know exactly who Webster Hubbell talked to about UFOs. There’s a lot of things that need an accounting. This is no trivial matter.”

Actually, it might stand a better chance on the Hill if it were. This is the most contemptible and repugnant congressional session in the history of U.S. polling. De Void didn’t think Congress could top itself in 2007 when it chose to alleviate our dependence on foreign oil by extending Daylight Savings Time by four weeks. But when the House voted this year to reaffirm “In God We Trust” as the national motto and thought it’d be a great idea for the Treasury to mint a Commemorative Baseball Coin, it reminds us not to give up hope, that anything is possible, even a first-class hearing on UFOs.