A friend of mind has parents with alien abduction experiences. My friend had experienced the same thing but identified it as sleep paralysis. They said they definitely understood why people thought of it as being contacted by aliens. They described an inability to move, a sort of confused lack of awareness about where she was (sort of halfway between dreaming and awake) and a strong feeling they were being watched.
But beyond repressed abuse (thanks @davide405) and sleep paralysis, childhood memories are so unreliable that it could have been a movie she watched, a book she read or a dream she had. It could be that a friend told her that it happened to them and that she remembers it as something that happened to her.
I would be inclined against voting for someone who was sufficiently unaware of how memory/perception works to think a real alien encounter was more likely than a false memory/perception. But my preference for someone who thinks critically about their own experiences is really sort of like me saying, “I’d elect someone like me!” I’m not sure this is of significant interest to the people who voted for her, who are presumably interested in electing people like themselves. Honestly, if someone was the sort of person I would vote for and had a similar belief, I’m not sure it would stop me from voting for them.
Now if they think they got abducted by aliens in the last few weeks, that would probably stop me.
