A Florida woman running as a Republican for an open U.S. Congressional seat claimed in a 2009 TV interview that she rode in an alien spaceship after being abducted.

The Miami Herald reports Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera is running to replace the retiring Ilena Ros-Lehtinen's U.S. Congress seat. Rodriguez Aguilera's son-in-law is Jarrod Agen, who is Vice President Mike Pence's deputy chief of staff.

In the 2009 America TeVe interview, Rodriguez Aguilera said she had her first extraterrestrial "direct" experience when she was 7 years old.

"I went in. There were some round seats that were there, and some quartz rocks that controlled the ship -- not like airplanes," she said in the interview, according to the newspaper.

She has raised around $10,000 after declaring her candidacy for the U.S. Congress seat in August of this year.

Some other highlights of the Republican Congressional candidate's interview are that the Earth's energy center is in Africa, there are 30,000 "different from human" skulls in a Mediterranean island's cave and that a limestone tourist attraction in South Miami-Dade is an actual Egyptian pyramid.

The TV interview is in Spanish, but can have its subtitles auto-translated to some success in English by first turning the Spanish subtitles on and then re-opening the settings to turn the English auto-translate on:

--

The Miami Herald reached out to Rodriguez Aguilera, 59, about the eight-year-old interview, to which she said many presidents and scientists had described extraterrestrial encounters.

"For years, people including presidents like Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and astronauts have publicly claimed to have seen unidentified flying objects and scientists like Stephen Hawking and institutions like the Vatican have stated that there are billions of galaxies in the universe and we are probably not alone," she said in a statement, according to the newspaper.

"I personally am a Christian and have a strong belief in God, I join the majority of Americans who believe that there must be intelligent life in the billions of planets and galaxies in the universe."

According to Ballotpedia, Rodriguez Aguilera is former Doral, Florida city councilmember who survived a 2013 recall attempt. She also served as the vice mayor and economic developer in Doral.

On her website, the Congressional candidate says she is an entrepreneur, educator and community leader with 30 years of private and public service.