In what may not even be the strangest political story of 2017, a former city council member in Florida who's now running for Congress has long claimed that she was brought aboard a spaceship after being kidnapped by tall, blond aliens as a child. The Washington Post reports that Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera has given at least two televised, Spanish-language interviews since 2009 about her extraterrestrial encounters as a 7-year-old.
In them, she claimed that aliens taught her that the world's "energy center" is in Africa and that there are 30,000 skulls "different from humans' [skulls]" in a cave on the island of Malta. "For years, people--including presidents like Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and astronauts--have publicly claimed to have seen unidentified flying objects," Aguilera, who's running as a Republican, told The Miami Herald in a statement about her beliefs. "I join the majority of Americans who believe that there must be intelligent life in the billions of planets and galaxies in the universe."