20 years ago, Stephen Bassett realized UFO abductees needed a lobbyist. He had spent four months working for the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research ... when he had the epiphany: He could continue his research with John Mack, the leading authority on the alien abductions, for the rest of his life - but it would never make a difference. It occurred to me that it wasn't a scientific problem, but a political one," he said. So he quit his volunteer gig ... and drove off to Washington. "I get down there, and I file" the lobbyist papers, he recalled. Bassett ... has long had one goal: Get the government to admit that it has been covering up proof of alien visits. Yet getting appointments on Capitol Hill wasn't easy. Then came the tweet ... from [John] Podesta, the former top aide in Bill Clinton's White House, as he stepped down after 11 months as special adviser for President Obama. "My biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files. #thetruthisstilloutthere," he tweeted on Feb. 13. Podesta, in fact ... has called for greater transparency on UFO-related issues, and he wrote the foreword to a best-selling book titled "UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record." The fact that Podesta was moving on to chair the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign had folks like Bassett buzzing. The Clintons have been deep into the UFO issue since 1993, when billionaire Laurance Rockefeller ... began lobbying them to release all information about extraterrestrials they had.