“Self-proclaimed time traveler Andrew D. Basiago claims he has seen the future and it includes his election to the White House,” an online news outlet reported in 2016.1 Also positing his belief in an alien civilization on Mars, Basiago’s fringe candidacy received limited notice. Still, its resemblance to the 1960 campaign of the Universal Flying Saucer Party candidate Gabriel Green is such that it invites comparison.
To a greater extent than Green, Basiago had received attention prior to announcing his run for the White House. Nearly two dozen articles about him or mentioning him appeared between 2009 and 2015 in his hometown Seattle Examiner. But his reputation was not confined to Seattle. Separate reports of his views on time travel also appeared during these years in Illinois (Chicago Examiner), Michigan (Detroit Examiner), New Mexico (Albuquerque Examiner), North Carolina (Winston-Salem Examiner) South Carolina (Charleston Examiner), Florida (Panama City Examiner), and even Hawaii (Honolulu Examiner).2
Likely you’ve spotted a pattern. These local editions of the Examiner were part of a larger entity, Examiner.com. Expanding upon the post-1968 election trend of increasing access to candidates, this internet site did likewise for those seeking to be journalists by publishing articles from self-proclaimed reporters whose facts, the executive editor of Examiner.com stated, “don’t get edited.”3 Consequently Examiner reports on Basiago included headlines such as “Head on Mars: Photo Shows Odd Artifact Resembling Barack Obama?”
In that particular report Basiago “confirmed” that he and Obama, when they were teenagers, participated in “the CIA’s Mars visitation program,” code-named Project Pegasus. Among the other young people in the program, Basiago asserted, was Bill Richardson, later to become the governor of New Mexico, U.S. secretary of energy, and ambassador to the United Nations. Need there be more proof than the titles alone that these youngsters were being groomed, or grooved, for Earth leadership—especially now that Basiago was about to be elected president (as he claimed to know from time travel)?4
There were, need I say, skeptics. Foremost among them were journalists who wrote for outlets other than Examiner.com. A column in the Santa Fe New Mexican titled “Beam Me Up, Xoe!” ridiculed Basiago’s claims. In that same state’s Alamogordo Daily News, a column titled “Governor’s Past Is Beyond Belief” pointed out that the name “Pegasus Project” had already been revealed—in Marvel Comics.5
The most widespread attention Basiago received prior to his candidacy resulted from an article in the Huffington Post in which he was quoted saying he had teleported to the past and future eight times as part of the CIA’s secret project, including a trip to Ford’s Theater the night Lincoln was assassinated.6 An encapsulated version of the Huffington Post report subsequently appeared in newspapers nationwide under the heading “Things People Believe.”7
Unlike Green, public attention to Basiago was not limited to his cosmic views. Neither a street-corner crazy nor living in his parents’ basement, he was a practicing attorney who had studied at Cambridge University and held an additional degree in urban planning. Indeed Basiago had published numerous articles on urban environmental sustainability in scholarly journals, putting forth views that were subsequently cited by others in that field.8
These articles had drawn to a close by 2008, the year he authored “The Discovery of Life on Mars,” an article published under the auspices of the Mars Anomaly Research Society (or, yes, MARS)—of which he was the president.9 Nevertheless these views too attracted some number of followers. Respectful references to Basiago’s claims appeared in enough books (several being self-published) that their number is more significant than their quality. Similarly, in Mysterious Magazine Makia Freeman, a senior researcher at ToolsforFreedom.com, wrote, “The idea of a flat earth has attracted and converted some high-profile names, such as Andrew Basiago, the man who claims he teleported to Mars as part of Project Pegasus in the 1960s and 1970s.” In this 2015 article Freeman scored a scoop when he reported, “Basiago, by the way, revealed . . . that he intends to join the 2016 presidential race.”10
And then the attention all but ended. Possibly Basiago’s enthusiasts clammed up from concern that failure to win the election—a victory he said he had already witnessed—would dismantle all his claims. In addition, just as his campaign commenced, his main source of attention, Examimer.com, was closing down, having been bought by another media conglomerate. In the traditional media his candidacy went virtually unmentioned. Other than a piece in the online edition of Esquire, which linked his candidacy to his time travel statements in the Huffington Post, coverage was limited to his being among those listed in a few newspapers in Florida, the one state where he’d managed to qualify as a certified write-in candidate.11 Internet blogs paid a bit more attention, though even on the internet the campaign never went viral.
All told, Basiago’s presidential candidacy was similar but not identical to Green’s. Its two main differences were that Basiago also earned a reputation among scholars and the rise of the internet, which provided him with greater access to the public. Yet in that newer medium we spot their greatest similarity. Among the online news reports about or mentioning Basiago were the headlines “UFO Sighting: NASA Cover-up?” (Chicago Examiner, November 11, 2014), “Second Whistleblower Emerges to Confirm Reality of Time Travel” (Seattle Examiner, December 31, 2009), and “White House Press Association, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs Block ET, UFO Press Questions to Obama” (Seattle Examiner, January 23, 2010). Both Green and Basiago campaigned on platforms devoted to revealing purported government cover-ups of recent astonishing events.
While Green was not the first fringe candidate to amplify a belief in cosmic revelations, he was the first to suggest the federal government was hiding such revelations. Likewise his era was the first in which the federal government created a permanent secretive information-gathering agency, the CIA. In addition Green’s era was the first in which the federal government’s efforts to combat communism entailed warnings of secret communist cells operating throughout the United States. By 2016 government secrecy had further expanded with the creations of the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and Department of Homeland Security.
Secrecy, however, creates its own blank to be filled, one an individual’s fears and needs will participate in filling. Moreover in the years between the candidacies of Green and Basiago, revelations of secret government-sponsored medical testing of untreated syphilis on uninformed African Americans, secret testing of LSD by the army on uninformed soldiers, and testing of radiation exposure from atomic blasts on underinformed soldiers lend credence to rumors of other cover-ups and conspiracies in the federal government.12
But not unbounded credence. The limited degree of attention that Basiago’s fringe candidacy received provides a measure of the degree to which Americans in 2016 were willing to consider extraordinary claims of government cover-ups. On the other hand, the similarities between Basiago’s 2016 candidacy and the 1952 Green candidacy (and, in turn, the similarities between the fears underlying Green’s candidacy and those underlying that of Live Forever Jones) reveal that end-of-the-world anxiety, countered in each instance by some form of miraculous rescue, has continued for centuries in the United States—indeed throughout recorded time.