Andrew D. Basiago

Early life and education

Andrew Daniel Basiago was born on September 18, 1961, in Morristown, New Jersey. He describes an unusually eventful childhood: from roughly age seven to twelve (1968–1972), he says, he was quietly recruited by government scientists into a classified research effort that would later come to be known — in his retelling — as Project Pegasus. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in History from UCLA in 1984 and later a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. He is a member of Mensa. After UCLA, Basiago worked briefly as a journalist and describes himself as a protégé of Norman Cousins at the Saturday Review, the venerable literary and current-affairs magazine Cousins had long edited. This period gave him a foothold in publishing that he would later use to promote his own claims, editing works with titles like Exopolitics: Politics, Government, and Law in the Universe (2005) and The Fátima Trilogy (2007), both aimed at readers already receptive to extraterrestrial-contact and government-secrecy narratives.

Legal career

Basiago is, by conventional measures, a credentialed professional. He was admitted to the Washington State Bar in 1996 and has practiced law for roughly three decades, maintaining a private practice in Vancouver, Washington, handling family law, civil rights, insurance, and personal-injury matters. This ordinary, unremarkable legal career is frequently invoked — by both Basiago and his supporters — as evidence that he is not a fringe eccentric but a sober, litigation-tested professional willing to put his name and livelihood behind extraordinary testimony. Critics counter that a law license attests to competence in legal procedure, not to the truth of a person's autobiographical claims, and that Basiago has never produced a single verifiable government document, photograph, or piece of physical evidence to substantiate what he says happened to him as a child.

Project Pegasus: the "time soldier" claims (1968–1972)

Basiago began speaking publicly about his claims around 2004, initially through internet forums and later through conferences, radio, and television. According to his account, he was one of a small number of children secretly recruited into a program funded by the CIA and what would become the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), code-named Project Pegasus. He says the program's purpose was to develop working teleportation and time-displacement technology, and that its scientific basis derived from technical papers belonging to Nikola Tesla recovered by U.S. authorities after the inventor's death in 1943, supplemented by research seized from Nazi Germany and material obtained from Soviet sources during the Cold War.

Basiago describes eight distinct time-travel "methodologies" used on him and other child participants, including a device he calls a "chronovisor" — a term borrowed from an older, unrelated Catholic legend about a supposed time-viewing machine — which he says allowed both viewing of and physical travel to past events. Under this program, he claims to have been teleported to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863, where he says he stood in the crowd and was photographed during Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address — a claim he has tried to support by pointing to an unidentified boy visible at the edge of a famous photograph of the event, an interpretation not accepted by historians or photograph archivists. He refers to himself and his fellow child recruits as "time soldiers," language that situates his story within a broader esoteric tradition of secret-program whistleblowing that echoes (without formal connection to) contemporaneous claims like the Montauk Project mythology.

The Mars Jump Room (1980–1984)

The more widely circulated — and more widely mocked — strand of Basiago's story concerns his alleged participation in a Mars Jump Room program. Basiago says that starting around 1980, while a history student at UCLA, he was selected for a CIA-run initiative based in El Segundo, California, that used a functioning teleportation portal — a "jump room" — to send trainees directly to an already-established U.S. military base on Mars. He claims to have made approximately twenty such trips between 1981 and 1984, during which he says he encountered towering, hostile humanoid creatures he calls "scorpion men," free-roaming dinosaurs, and other anomalous life forms on the Martian surface. In his telling, the Mars base long predates NASA's public robotic missions, implying decades of undisclosed U.S. off-world activity conducted entirely outside civilian oversight.

Basiago has said the program was intended to acclimate a cohort of young Americans to eventual permanent settlement of Mars, and that participants were selected partly for family connections to the intelligence and defense establishment. He has never produced photographs, biological samples, or any other physical corroboration from these alleged missions, a point skeptics return to repeatedly.

Corroborating witnesses and the Obama connection

What distinguishes Basiago from many solitary claimants is that he is not the only named source for the story. A man using the name William B. Stillings has stated publicly that he trained alongside Basiago in a "Mars training class" held at California's College of the Siskiyous in the summer of 1980, and has specifically corroborated Basiago's most politically explosive claim: that a young Barack Obama, then going by "Barry Soetoro," was a fellow trainee in the program alongside future DARPA director Regina Dugan. A third figure, Bernard Mendez, later came forward through outlets like UFO Digest to affirm the existence of the 1980–83 CIA jump-room program and the involvement of Basiago, Obama, and Stillings.

The Obama claim in particular propelled Basiago's story into mainstream visibility that few other individual UFO/exopolitics claims achieve. It was covered — invariably as a curiosity rather than credible news — by outlets including NBC News, Universe Today, and Inverse, and was mocked on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report in 2012. The Obama White House never engaged with the claim substantively beyond general denials of its accuracy through spokespeople, and no independent documentation — yearbooks, enrollment records, travel logs — has ever surfaced placing Obama at the College of the Siskiyous in 1980; conventional biographical accounts place him at Occidental College in Los Angeles during that period, which he attended from 1979 to 1981 before transferring to Columbia University.

Presidential campaigns as a disclosure platform

Basiago has twice sought the U.S. presidency as a write-in candidate, running in 2016 and again in 2020, explicitly using the candidacies as vehicles to publicize his Project Pegasus and Mars Jump Room claims rather than as conventional political bids. Unable to fund a fifty-state ballot campaign (he has cited a roughly $5 million cost estimate), he pursued write-in status instead. His 2016 platform, released as a "100 Point Plan," proposed that his first act in office would be to declassify all U.S. government technology related to quantum teleportation and time travel, and organized his broader agenda around three declared themes: truth, reform, and innovation. He has stated on multiple occasions, including in interviews cited by Gizmodo and Motherboard/Vice, that he already knows — through his own alleged time travel — that he is destined to become president, a claim treated by essentially all outside observers as self-evidently unfalsifiable and promotional rather than evidentiary.

Reception and criticism

Within exopolitics and disclosure-advocacy circles, where researchers such as Michael Salla have written extensively and sympathetically about the Mars Jump Room narrative, Basiago is treated as a serious, if extraordinary, whistleblower whose consistency across two decades of retellings and willingness to name fellow participants sets him apart from anonymous claimants. Supporters emphasize that he has staked a functioning legal career and public reputation on testimony that invites ridicule, arguing that this is not the behavior of someone seeking easy fame.

Outside those circles, reception ranges from bemused to openly dismissive. Mainstream science offers no mechanism by which the described technologies — teleportation of human bodies across tens of millions of miles, or travel backward through time to a specific afternoon in 1863 — could function, and no branch of the U.S. government has acknowledged Project Pegasus or a Mars Jump Room program in any released document, including material surfaced through Freedom of Information Act requests by independent researchers. Skeptics note the absence of any physical evidence — a single photograph, artifact, or corroborating official record — despite Basiago's claim of roughly twenty separate trips to another planet. They also point to the self-serving structure of the claims: Basiago says he foreknew his own presidential victory, a claim structured so that any electoral loss can be waved away as still-unrealized future knowledge. His journalistic background and legal training are cited by critics as reasons he would be unusually well-equipped to construct a durable, internally consistent narrative, rather than as evidence the narrative is true.

Legacy

Whatever one makes of the underlying claims, Basiago occupies a distinct niche in UFO and disclosure culture as the most prominent public exponent of alleged secret time-travel and teleportation programs, a subgenre distinct from — but occasionally overlapping with — extraterrestrial-contact and crash-retrieval narratives. His Mars Jump Room story, by virtue of naming a sitting U.S. president as a participant, achieved a level of mainstream media pickup rare for individual exopolitics claims, and it continues to circulate in podcasts, YouTube documentaries, and disclosure-community retrospectives years after it first surfaced. He remains active in the disclosure advocacy space and continues to describe his political ambitions as ultimately aimed at forcing the U.S. government to release the technologies he says he experienced firsthand as a child.