John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, has declared that he has convinced the former secretary of state to explore declassifying any government documents that may relate to unidentified flying objects.

“I’ve talked to Hillary about that,” Podesta told KLAS-TV Politics NOW in Las Vegas. “There are still classified files that could be declassified.

“I think I’ve convinced her that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and declassify as much as we can, so that people have their legitimate questions answered. More attention and more discussion about unexplained aerial phenomena can happen without people – who are in public life, who are serious about this – being ridiculed.”

As reported in the Huffington Post, Podesta, a former chief of staff in the Clinton White House who has been a longtime advocate on the issue, told the station that “the UFO question has been discussed” with the former first lady.

It’s not the first time that aliens and their spacecraft have made an appearance – rhetorically, at least – on the Clinton campaign trail. In January, Clinton told a New Hampshire newspaper that she would “get to the bottom” of questions about how much the federal government may know about extraterrestrials.

In 2005, former president Bill Clinton told a Hong Kong audience that he has been attempting to crack any “X-files” the government might possess:

I did attempt to find out if there were any secret government documents that reveal things, and if there were, they were concealed from me, too. I wouldn’t be the first president that underlings have lied to or that career bureaucrats have waited out. But there may be some career person sitting around somewhere hiding these dark secrets, even from elected presidents. But, if so, they successfully eluded me, and I’m almost embarrassed to tell you I did try to find out.

Podesta, who also served as a senior advisor to Barack Obama, has cited his inability to determine the truth about UFOs as one of his “biggest failures” while serving in government.

“I come in for my fair share of people raising questions about whether I’m off my rocker, but I’ve been a longtime advocate of declassification of records,” Podesta told KLAS. “People really want to know what the government knows.”

