Stephen Bassett is an American political activist and the executive director of Paradigm Research Group, the advocacy organization he founded to press the United States government to formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. Registered as a lobbyist on the issue since 1996, and described by Mother Jones in 2016 as the country's only one, he has spent three decades organizing petitions, mock hearings, conferences and media campaigns against what he calls a "truth embargo."

Bassett was born in 1946 into a Navy family that moved often, and he earned a physics degree in 1970 from what is now Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. He worked as an Environmental Protection Agency official, a tennis professional and a business consultant before reading John Mack's book Abduction in 1995. After briefly volunteering for Mack's Program for Extraordinary Experience Research, he concluded, as he later told Mother Jones, that the evidence was already sufficient and "the problem was political." He started Paradigm Research Group from his aunt's home in Bethesda, Maryland, filed lobbying registration papers in the fall of 1996 and formed the Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee in 1999.

He then took the issue into electoral politics. In 2002 he ran for Congress as an independent in Maryland's 8th District and received less than 1 percent of the vote. In 2011 a disclosure petition he promoted on the White House's We the People site drew enough signatures for an official answer, in which White House science adviser Phil Larson wrote that the government "has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet." In 2013 he staged the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure at the National Press Club, a mock congressional hearing in which six former members of Congress, including former Alaska senator Mike Gravel, heard witnesses over five days; Mother Jones reported that each former lawmaker was paid $20,000.

Washington has often received him skeptically. He met only three members of Congress in his first three years of lobbying, and Mother Jones quoted journalist Leslie Kean writing that "policy makers therefore cannot take his rhetoric seriously," while former Ministry of Defence official Nick Pope praised his persistence but said he "just doesn't really appreciate how government works." Since 2003 Bassett has repeatedly predicted that the government was on the verge of disclosure, and the presidential announcement he has forecast has not taken place.

Recent congressional hearings and the 2026 federal file releases gave his campaign fresh attention. In April he publicly sought a reporter at the New York Times, Washington Post or Wall Street Journal for a story on what he described as the Clintons' connection to UAP and disclosure issues from 1993 to 2016, saying he had "the receipts." After the May 2026 release of Pentagon UAP files, he called the Japanese chief cabinet secretary's public comments on footage from the release "very significant" and asked whether Tokyo was positioning itself ahead of a statement from the U.S. president. Bassett's mock hearing anticipated the hearing-and-legislation route the subject later took, and he remains one of the disclosure movement's most persistent public advocates.