Disclosed encounters: why UFO buffs think Barack Obama is their best hope for the truth about ET.

• Author: Fromson, Daniel
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

It's a hell of a challenge," says Stephen Bassett as he saws through his chicken Caesar salad at a restaurant in the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington, Virginia. "But the reason we've made progress is because this isn't just any issue." After logging thirteen discouraging years as a lobbyist in Washington, Bassett is finally feeling optimistic. Compared to Barack Obama, Bill Clinton was "utterly unacceptable," and there were "huge problems" with George W. Bush. "They did what was necessary to contain the issue," he says.

"They had to do that because it wasn't a secret," he adds, leaning in, elbows on the table. "The ETs are all over the place. They've been flying around our skies for sixty-two years."

Bassett is Washington's only registered UFO lobbyist. He is in his early sixties but looks easily a decade younger: compactly built and straight-jawed, with slate-blue eyes set like marbles below a prominent brow, he still resembles the small-time tennis pro he once was. The director of the Bethesda-based Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee, Bassett works on behalf of what he calls "the exopolitical disclosure movement," a subculture of UFO fanatics and researchers toiling to end what they believe is a government cover-up of the extraterrestrial presence on our planet. Although Bassett arguably represents a larger constituency than most K Street denizens--a third of Americans believe that aliens have visited earth, according to a recent Scripps Howard poll--he has scraped by on only an estimated $75,000 in outside contributions since 1996, plus about $200,000 of his own money he says he has poured into the cause. "If the civil rights movement had had to operate under these conditions," he says, "there'd still be separate bathrooms."

Bassett's PAC doesn't make campaign contributions, and Bassett rarely meets with congressmen, who are, he says, "deathly afraid to speak about" his issue. Instead, he has deluged the Hill with "congressional alerts," issued hundreds of thousands of press releases to news outlets across the country, and given perhaps a thousand speeches worldwide. "At the moment, Stephen is very, very active," says Alfred Webre, a founder of the "political science" of human/ET interactions. In fact, Bassett's Web site lists ninety-one radio and conference appearances in 2009 alone.

Bassett thinks his tireless activism is finally paying off: he and others in the disclosure movement believe that Obama could be the...