(Bloomberg) -- To land the single biggest donation of his re-election bid, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis didn’t even have to ask for the money.

The $10 million contribution came on July 7, after Robert Bigelow, the Budget Suites of America hotel tycoon, contacted DeSantis’s office for a meeting, according to two people involved in the governor’s fundraising efforts. In the past, Bigelow had given small amounts of money to Democrats and Republicans, and sometimes they advanced his well-known passions: researching UFOs, aliens, and whether the human soul can outlive the body after death. 

Now Bigelow wanted to give money to DeSantis, who’s widely believed to be mulling a presidential run in 2024. So, the governor’s campaign staff went about vetting Bigelow like they would any high-profile donor. Once cleared, DeSantis made the trip to Bigelow’s hometown of Las Vegas for a sitdown, said the people, who weren’t authorized to be quoted speaking about specific donors. Bigelow rewarded DeSantis with the donation, joining scores of wealthy, out-of-state contributors. 

DeSantis has raised $164 million since January 2021, a record for any governor, and more than 60% of the donors gave $50,000 or more. It’s not known whether the two men discussed UFOs or Bigelow’s other passions. DeSantis didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Bigelow declined to comment.

The Bigelow contribution is a sign of DeSantis’s nationwide success raising money as speculation builds that the governor may run for president. Almost half of the donations he’s received have come from outside Florida.

Wealthy donors like Bigelow have allowed DeSantis to raise more money than any other Republican since January 2021, topping even the $161 million that former President Donald Trump amassed. There are 10 billionaires among DeSantis’s 500 top donors, and almost half the money came from outside Florida -- stoking speculation that the governor is eying a presidential run in 2024. But DeSantis’s reliance on a relatively small number of donors make it harder to gauge grassroots support for a presidential bid: DeSantis raised 3.5% of his money from people who gave less than $200, compared with 52% for Trump. 

“It’s not that he can’t raise from smaller donors. He has an impressive operation,” said Brian Ballard, a Tallahassee lobbyist and longtime fundraiser for DeSantis. “It’s nice that you can go out and raise money in large amounts, and he does it well.”

The fundraising juggernaut DeSantis has built reminds Dan Eberhart, a major Republican donor and chief executive officer of oilfield services company Canary Drilling Services, of the pre-presidential fundraising of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Ahead of the 2016 presidential primaries, Bush amassed more than $100 million before formally announcing his candidacy. But Eberhart sees one key difference: Jeb Bush was trounced by Donald Trump. 

“DeSantis can be the Jeb Bush of 2016 in terms of fundraising and the Donald Trump of 2016 in terms of momentum,” he said.

Bigelow wanted to donate to DeSantis because he liked the governor’s hallmark policies, especially the decision to reopen Florida schools and businesses earlier than most states during the pandemic, the two people familiar with the donation say. 

Ideology Bond

Ideology is what binds many of DeSantis’s donors, especially outside Florida, his fundraisers said. “A lot of people started giving this cycle who haven’t in the past because of the direction the country is going,” said Nick Iarossi, a Tallahassee-based lobbyist and longtime DeSantis fundraiser. “They are philosophical donors.”

That scale of political giving is a shift change for Bigelow. Erik Seedhouse, who worked for an aerospace company Bigelow founded developing astronaut training materials and later wrote a book about the company, said Bigelow was more focused on business and his search for alien life than politics. 

In an 2013 interview with Bloomberg Pursuits magazine, Bigelow said he’s been fascinated with UFOs since childhood, after his grandparents told him they’d seen a giant glowing red oval object in the sky. It bore down on them, then suddenly turned and flew off, he said.

Bigelow made his fortune building the Budget Suites of America motel chain. But he also started Bigelow Aerospace, which developed an inflatable habitat that was sent to the International Space Station. He also founded the National Institute for Discovery Science to research alien encounters, where he liked to fly investigators to UFO incident sites on his private jet. “Yes. I’ve had many anomalous experiences,” Bigelow told Bloomberg. 

Senate Ally

In the early 2000s, Bigelow found an ally in Senator Harry Reid, the late Senate majority leader who also had an interest in UFOs. After Reid, a Democrat, earmarked funding for Pentagon research on UFOs, a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace was the sole bidder for $22 million worth of contracts to work on the project. 

By mid-2009, Bigelow Aerospace’s experts had written 26 research reports on phenomena such as “invisibility wormholes in space time,” “antimatter energy,” and “signature reduction warp drives,” according to Defense Intelligence Agency documents. 

In 2010, the Federal Aviation Administration directed air traffic controllers and pilots to report unidentified aerial phenomena to Bigelow Aerospace, making the company the government’s go-to depository for UFO sightings.  

In the last two years, Bigelow ramped up political donations, and he didn’t stop at $10 million for DeSantis, campaign finance disclosures show. 

He’s poured $12.3 million into the Republican Governors Association, which in turn helps finance DeSantis, and another $13.4 million to a pair of Nevada PACs that support GOP candidates running in that state, including gubernatorial candidate Joe Lombardo.

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