Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera is running to replace retiring Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., in 2018. (Photo: Roberto Koltun/El Nuevo Herald/TNS via Getty)

When I was 7, I was positive that Bigfoot not only existed but also lived in the very woods behind my childhood home (and that I would be the one to befriend him). So who am I to judge Republican House candidate Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera, who believes she was abducted by aliens at that same age?

Over the weekend, Rodriguez Aguilera won an important endorsement from a major newspaper, the Miami Herald, to replace Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in Congress, representing the 27th District of Florida. With that endorsement, the news of her intergalactic journey spread.

The Miami Herald wrote, “We realize that Rodriguez Aguilera is an unusual candidate. Last year, she told the Miami Herald — and several Spanish-language media outlets — that she believes in extra-terrestrials. She says when she was 7, she was taken aboard a spaceship and, throughout her life, she has communicated telepathically with the beings, which remind her of the concrete Christ in Brazil. There you have it.”

Perhaps we have our first possible leader of President Trump’s proposed space force? She apparently already has allies.

According to Rodriguez Aguilera, three large, blond aliens visited her when she was 7. In a 2009 interview on the Spanish-language station América TeVé, the congressional candidate said, “I went in [to the spaceship]. There were some round seats that were there, and some quartz rocks that controlled the ship — not like airplanes.”

Rodriguez Aguilera, who did not immediately respond to Yahoo Lifestyle’s requests for comment, claimed the extraterrestrials also told her that the Coral Castle, a large structure made of limestone in Miami-Dade County, is an ancient Egyptian pyramid.

Coral Castle was built by reclusive Edward Leedskalnin, who, using only hand tools, moved more than 1,100 tons of coral several miles and then sculpted them into a series of stone tributes to his wife. (Photo: Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images)

“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 told the Herald. “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.”

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Man, 2018 is a weird time, right? Makes you miss 2010, when a Republican senatorial candidate had to create an ad campaign that explained she wasn’t a witch.

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