The least bad candidate: Andrew Basiago

Kaleigh Rogers (VICE.com, 4/25/16); Pfc. Sandoval, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Kaleigh Rogers (VICE)

Andrew D. Basiago is a practicing lawyer, an advocate for single-payer health care, and says the U.S. government has been hiding secret time travel technology from the public for decades.

Basiago told me he's used to people thinking he's crazy. The 54-year-old Washington state attorney first started bracing for public ridicule in 2008, when he began sharing stories about experiences he claims he had as a child working for a secret military project that enabled him to teleport, time travel, and visit Mars with a young Barack Obama [at that time calling himself Barry Soetoro]. Now, he's running for president.

• Basiago involved in Project Pegasus Time Travel Program

Candidate Andrew D. Basiago (FB)

This year's [2016] presidential race has been, in many ways, so bizarre and entertaining in its own right that we've largely overlooked the "fringe" candidates that have historically provided a welcome reprieve from the boring status quo race.

This is unfortunate for Basiago, who told me he couldn't afford the $4 million he estimated it would cost to campaign enough to get on the ballot.

Instead, he's relying on his thousands of supporters (with his Facebook group's 16,550 members) to write-in their candidate of choice.

His platform consists of 100 proposals that range from forcing the government to disclose secret time travel technologies and putting Sasquatch on the endangered species list, to pardoning Edward Snowden, and investing $100 billion in infrastructure and programming for Native Americans.

Motherboard got Basiago, who is still a practicing lawyer, on the phone to talk about his campaign, time travel, the future, and the Don Trump ideas he thinks are truly crazy.

Motherboard: So why did you decide to run for president?

Andrew Basiago: I entered public life as a whistleblower, describing my experiences in DARPA's Project Pegasus in the early 70s, which was the U.S. time-space program at the time of the emergence of time travel.

That truth campaign was motivated by a moral duty that I felt I had to describe what happened so that millions of dollars aren't wasted reinventing the wheel in terms of time travel.

...In the process, I thought, well why don't I go for the top job? If I'm talking about this stuff and if my ideas and my information would be truly transformative, why not just run for president and try to have a larger impact? At least if I don't win, I'll have a wider audience.

What are some of the truths you'd like to expose?

United States Space Force [is very old]

I want the Tesla teleportation technology that Project Pegasus developed to be introduced socially because if we replace forms of transport that rely on the internal combustion engine — planes, trains, trucks, automobiles, motorcycles — we're going to be able to prevent 60 percent of the greenhouse gases that human industry contributes to the global emissions each year.

...I went away for a month and wrote 100 distilled statements of things I care about and things I think the country should address over the next four years. Some people might think some of the proposals are laughable. More