California’s 26th Congressional District northwest of Los Angeles looks like a fairly safe bet to stay blue in 2020. Democrat Julia Brownley has been there since 2013, and her constituency has gone for Dems over the past three presidential election cycles. But if an Air Force veteran gets lucky, the 26th could be ground zero for injecting UFOs into the 2020 campaign.

Only, the challenge might not be confined to whether or not UFOs make decent political fodder. We already know a growing number of taxpayers and at least a few lawmakers are ready to raise hard questions about the military secrecy surrounding The Great Taboo. Maybe the question here would be: Are California voters willing to get behind a candidate who claims to have actually been abducted by aliens?

Just how many elected officials have been beamed up is anyone’s guess; heretofore, you’d want to keep stuff like that closeted away with the usual pedestrian skeletons. De Void knows of just one other aspiring Rep who has ‘fessed up to it – Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera. And that was nine years before she decided to run for an open Congressional seat in Miami in 2018.

In 2008, Bob Salas and Bill “The Science Guy” Nye got into a nationally televised verbal tussle over the Malmstrom UFO incident on CNN’s “Larry King”/CREDIT: military.com

Despite her account of being whisked aboard an ET spaceship as a child – “There were some round seats that were there, and some quartz rocks that control the ship,” she told a Spanish language YouTube production – Aguilera earned an endorsement from the Miami Herald. But she finished sixth in a field of nine in the Republican primary.

Two years later, three time zones away and sensing an accelerating public appetite for candor, former USAF captain Bob Salas is climbing into the ring as a political novice. But as a launch control missileer on duty in 1967 when a UFO allegedly took 10 nukes offline at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Salas has been a public figure in subculture circles for years. In 2005, he co-authored his account of that event, Faded Giant. Five years later, he spoke out at a Washington, D.C., press conference livestreamed by CNN. He made his case again at the National Press Club during the Citizen’s Hearing on Disclosure in 2013, the same year he wrote another book called Unidentified – The UFO Phenomenon.

Salas also owned up to something in 2013 that didn’t make the book – a 1985 abduction experience at his home in Huntington Beach. He offered a graphic description, which included details about how the ethereal body snatchers injected an extremely long needle into his testicles (ouch) to withdraw semen.

While this sort of biographical arc doesn’t have enough data to gauge its effectiveness in political theater, we do live in weird-ass times, and Salas isn’t running from it. In fact, he says from his home in Ojai, anyone who believes the phenomenon is limited to machinery is naïve.

“It’s not a simple matter of UFOs shutting down missiles, or UFOs being able to fly so fast, and the technology of their energy. It’s also about taking people, doing experiments on them, the taking of DNA, telekinesis – it involves a lot of things,” he says. “It’s not as simple as, ‘There are aliens, here they come.’”

Salas began contemplating a run for office after the NY Times’ 2017 story about the Defense Department’s secret UFO research program. Although a military angle was impossible to avoid in order to procure Pentagon funding, what Salas finds counterproductive is the premise that the unknowns pose a threat to national security.

“The shutting down of our missiles was, to me, a message – that’s all. They did no damage to those missiles, by the way, they simply upset the inertial guidance system,” he says. “All they had to do was go out there and reorient the missiles properly so that if they launched, they would be accurate on target. It was strictly an orientation thing.”

While Salas’ website touts liberal positions on conventional talking points like immigration, education and climate change, he maintains the entire system is up for reform when it comes to excessive government secrecy. And he sees the new Space Force agency as “opening the door to greater and greater funding for space weaponry that would create another arms war. It also implies taking our nuclear weapons into space.”

As an Air Force Academy alum with advanced degrees in aerospace engineering plus 21 years with the Federal Aviation Administration, Salas says he’s uniquely qualified to assist congressional oversight into the classified world. “We’ve gotten to a point where we need more people in Congress who understand technical matters,” he says. “We’ve got way too many lawyers.”

California’s primaries are bipartisan, which means the top two vote-getters will square off against each other in November, regardless of party affiliation. Salas is banking on the hope that voter backlash in his district against the GOP could clear a path for a more unorthodox challenge to Brownley. In other words, if he can claw his way into second place in the March 3 primary, well …

“I don’t know where this is gonna go,” he says. “But if I don’t get laughed out of the place for this UFO stuff, if I can get the UFO community behind me even more in terms of donations, then hopefully I’ll have enough to compete, and stimulate more interest in this subject.”

In June, the London-based data analytics company YouGov found that 54 percent of Americans believed it was very or at least somewhat likely the feds are hiding information on UFOs; just 27 percent begged to differ, with 19 percent no opinion. That top-end number sounds a little conservative to De Void, but whatever. If somebody can figure out how to convert all that skepticism into cold hard campaign cash, maybe give a shout-out to Captain Salas. You can’t win a Congressional seat for under a million bucks anymore.