Hillary Clinton may have lost West Virginia, but she can find solace in having inspired what the New York Times calls "a passionate bloc of voters": UFO enthusiasts. If she becomes president, the Democratic front-runner says she would declassify files relating to Area 51, unless they pose a threat to national security, to "get to the bottom" of extraterrestrial rumors. Last month, she said she wasn't sure if she believed in UFOs, but she added "there's enough stories out there that I don't think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up." It's a somewhat surprising stance, considering that President Obama usually laughs off discussions of extraterrestrials, and has gained Clinton the title of the first "ET candidate," reports the Times.
The stance doesn't seem to be simply about votes, though a 2005 Gallup poll found 24% of Americans believed "extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth," per FiveThirtyEight. Clinton has apparently been interested in extraterrestrial life for some time. For example, she was spotted with a copy of Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life by Paul Davies back in 1995. But her campaign chair, John Podesta—who has long campaigned for the government to release UFO files—may have influenced her further. "The US government could do a much better job in answering the quite legitimate questions that people have about what's going on with unidentified aerial phenomena," he told CNN last month. (More Hillary Clinton stories.)
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