Florida of the Day: Congressional candidate says she’s been on an alien spaceship

In any sane time and place, it would be political suicide for a candidate to ever claim that they’ve had an encounter with aliens. But hey, this is the age of Orange Julius Caesar and we’re in Florida!

And so Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera, a Republican (why am I not surprised?) is running for Congress to replace outgoing Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) despite having said in a TV interview that she was brought aboard an alien spaceship.

In that interview, she reported that the aliens told her many things, including:

• There are 30,000 skulls — “different from humans” — in a cave in the Mediterranean island of Malta.
• The world’s “energy center” is in Africa.
• The Coral Castle, a limestone tourist attraction South Miami-Dade, is actually an ancient Egyptian pyramid.
• “God is a universal energy.”

Here’s the TV interview, which is in Spanish:

The Miami Herald asked her about her reported alien experiences, and her answer — which includes one of the more out-of-place invocations of being a God-fearing Christian I’ve heard — might just be enough for Floridian voters to give her a chance:

“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. “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.”

Here’s a Washington Post video summary of Ms. Rodriguez Aguilera’s story:

Oddly enough, the video ends with an eerie still of the Post’s new slogan superimposed over the candidate: