Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick was the U.S. Representative for Michigan’s 13th congressional district from 1997 to 2011, when she lost out partially due to corruption scandals involving her family, in particular her son Kwame Kilpatrick, who was mayor of Detroit until 2008. Well, she reappeared in the news in 2013, as a participant in the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, a panel on alien visitations, together with luminaries like Mike Gravel. “Evidence has been mounting for the last 65 years,” said Stephen Bassett, who organized the event; “we’re going to be holding the hearing that Congress should be holding.”
Perhaps one may try to explain away Kilpatrick’s participation with the $20,000 payment, but it is hard not to notice the crazy in her own justification for being there. In particular, Kilpatrick said she doesn’t like that “this country makes jokes about (UFOs), but in other countries, it’s a spiritual kind of thing, so I’m really looking forward to seeing exactly what it is.” Apparently she always had an interest in UFOs as a member of the congressional Appropriations Committee and Armed Service Committee, and at the citizen hearing she wants “to hear the factual information and I’m taking it very seriously. I don’t want to be ambivalent. I don’t want it to be a joke. It’s too serious. If we bury our heads in the sand and say there's nothing there, we lose, our country loses.” Both Kilpatrick and Gravel called for a real congressional investigation into UFOs, and for the issue to be brought up again at the United Nations.
To top it off, Kilpatrick used the occasion to introduce Louis Farrakhan, whom she called “one of the leaders in our nation on this topic” (Farrakhan has publicly talked about his own UFO experiences), an attribution that on its own would earn Kilpatrick an entry in our Encyclopedia.
Diagnosis: Ok, so we should perhaps keep the possibility open that this is just a matter of getting paid. We choose to be charitable, though, and characterize her as a loon.