University of Nebraska Press

Potomac Books

Chapter Title: Time Travel Candidate

Chapter Author(s): Andrew Basiago

Book Title: The Presidential Fringe

Book Subtitle: Questing and Jesting for the Oval Office
Book Author(s): MARK STEIN
Published by: University of Nebraska Press, Potomac Books. (2020)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvt7x6f9.37

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 Andrew Basiago
Time Travel Candidate

“Self-­p roclaimed 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 posit-
ing his belief in an alien civilization on Mars, Basiago’s fringe can-
didacy 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 reputa-
tion 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 (Albuquer-
que 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 Exam-
iner 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 visita-

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 Andrew Basiago

tion program,” code-­named Project Pegasus. Among the other

young people in the program, Basiago asserted, was Bill Richard-
son, 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 can-
didacy 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 ver-
sion of the Huffington Post report subsequently appeared in news-
papers 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 aus-
pices 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

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 part 4

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 Peg-
asus 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 enthusi-
asts 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 inter-
net, 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, Jan-
uary 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 fed-
eral government was hiding such revelations. Likewise his era
was the first in which the federal government created a perma-

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 Andrew Basiago

nent 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 indi-
vidual’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 syph-
ilis on uninformed African Americans, secret testing of lsd by
the army on uninformed soldiers, and testing of radiation expo-
sure from atomic blasts on underinformed soldiers lend cre-
dence 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 extraor-
dinary 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 under-
lying 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.

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