Before Anna Paulina Luna was elected to Congress, she had a concerning conversation with an Air Force pilot.
Luna enlisted as an airfield manager at 19 years old, working with pilots on their flight plans and airfield inspections, and during her active duty in Portland, Oregon, one of them relayed to her an ominous account of an airspace incursion.
“He had basically implied it was a UAP,” Luna told me last week in a phone interview. “Couldn’t talk about it. He was really kind of spooked.”
Anna Paulina addresses a Turning Point USA crowd. The congresswoman joined the organization after Charlie Kirk saw one of the viral videos she made as an influencer.
The 37-year-old Florida Republican congresswoman has never personally seen a UFO, and prior to her political career, she largely put extraterrestrial issues out of her mind. But the incident remained formative—she has tied her thinking around the possibility of “interdimensional beings” to anancient religious text—and in her three years in her office, Luna has made releasing the government’s classified materials related to unidentified aerial phenomena, along with the files onJFK,MLK, RFK, andJeffrey Epstein, one of her calling cards as the leader of Congress’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. This month the Pentagon began releasing its UFO files at the direction of Donald Trump. So far, about 160 files, ranging from the 1940s to the near present and presented as raw material with no further context or analysis, include eyewitness statements, photos, and videos of distant objects—enough to stoke more intrigue, but nothing that has landed as a bombshell yet. In an increasingly familiar ritual in the age of the Epstein files, new materials will be released every few weeks, according to theWhite House.
“These are things that the US government cannot explain,” Luna said. “And it is not the job of the federal government to tell you as an individual American citizen what to believe. If you look at all the files, you’re free to make your own assumptions.”
The first batch of UFO files included what the Department of War describes as: “Actual site photo with FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay depicting corroborating eyewitness reports from September 2023 of an apparent ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky, 130-195 feet in length, and disappearing instantaneously.”
For Luna, the release of the UFO files represents a sort of culmination of her work in Congress after taking an uncommon path to politics. While serving in the military, Luna picked up some modeling work—Maximnamed her a “Hometown Hottie,” whileSports Illustratedlisted her as a “Lovely Lady of the Day”—and she started to grow her social media following. She had no political identity to speak of. But through her work with veteran nonprofits, she became fixated on the subject of human trafficking at the US-Mexico border, and one of the videos she recorded about the topic went viral.Charlie Kirk, who was then building his conservative youth movement, saw her potential in the online political ecosystem. In 2018, the day before Luna was set to leave for medical school, she says Kirk called her about joining Turning Point USA and its campus tours as national Hispanic outreach director. He thought that, along with another new protégé, Candace Owens, he had a star on his hands. For the first time, Luna began thinking of herself as a conservative.
The next year, Luna decided to make her first run for Congress. After one failed campaign to represent the district spanning Pinellas County on Florida’s Gulf Coast, she entered office in 2023. In the course of five years, her political awakening had led to her arriving in Washington as part of a new Trump-aligned MAGA caucus including Marjorie Taylor Greene and JD Vance. “I remember people started saying,” Luna told me last year, “you’re really the first influencer who came to Congress.”
Luna attended a closed-door deposition with Bill Clinton in February as part of her work around Jeffrey Epstein.
In office, Luna has carved out a distinctly Trump-era pop culture imprint, a path that she traced over several phone and Zoom interviews as I sought perspective on a variety of head-spinning developments in the celebrity-politics nexus. She has advocated for the pardon and release of Canadian rapperTory Lanez, who is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for shootingMegan Thee Stallion, after connecting his incarceration to her own backstory. (Luna has said that her late father struggled with drug addiction and was in and out of jail during her childhood—“I understand the pitfalls of the prison systems,” she told me.) She helped broker the president’s alliance withNicki Minaj, with whom she shares some overlapping social circles of hip-hop-adjacent personalities including Kanye West ex Amber Rose, and filed legislation to engrave Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore. (In endorsing Luna for reelection on his Truth Social platform last year, Trump described her as a “MAGA Warrior” and “WINNER.”) She has appeared onJoe Rogan’spodcast, where she discussed several of his pet fascinations, including her UAP work and her belief in the multiple-shooters theory of JFK’s assassination, during one of his signature marathon conversations. Right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool has described her as the“most based”—or coolest—member of Congress.
Luna’s other priorities in office have included tightening federal voting restrictions and cracking down on congressional stock trading, but leading the declassification task force has drawn the most public intrigue. The panel, established last year, is made up of seven Republicans, including representatives Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, and six Democrats, Representative Jasmine Crockett among them. It is focused on investigating and facilitating the release of sealed federal records related to American mysteries that have endured across decades. Luna notes that her inquiries into such mysteries are of particular interest to the younger, more online generations.
Luna and fellow declassification task force member Lauren Boebert applaud Donald Trump’s State of the Union.
“I just think that younger people are more—we have more tech that we’re able to access whereas historically the government did kind of try to silo this information and gaslight people,” she said. “And so I think right now the aspect of, ‘Hey, maybe we’re not the only thing out there’ is a very real question that many people ask themselves, and the stigma doesn’t seem to be as strong with the younger generation starting with Gen X onward.”
The president, in announcing the declassification of the UFO files, made a similar acknowledgement. “I thought I’d save it for this crowd,” Trump told theyoung conservativeaudience at a Turning Point USA event in April, “because you’re a little bit out-there.” Doubling down on his outreach, he recently posted anAI-generated memeof himself and Secret Service officers escorting an alien in handcuffs.
