Former NASA Astronaut Puzzled by Metallic Orbs He Encountered While Flying

Former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao says he had a baffling encounter when he was flying his private four-seat airplane in 2023.

At an altitude of 9,000 feet over Houston, Texas, the former Space Shuttle commander had two "perfectly smooth" and "shiny" spheres, each roughly three feet in diameter, rip by him a mere 20 feet away. He first detailed the unusual encounter in an interview with NewsNation in December, and recently elaborated on the sighting in a follow-up with the New York Post — claims from a highly accomplished pilot and space traveler that add fuel to the fire of debates over unidentified objects in the skies.

"There was nothing around me other than the panhandle of Texas at nine thousand feet on this instrument flight plan and just suddenly these things appeared," he told the publication.

"They came right at me," he added.

Intriguingly, the Pentagon released a declassified video of a UFO soaring over a military base in the Middle East in April 2023, roughly four months before Chiao's encounter. (Some experts have since suggested it could've simply been an ordinary party balloon.)

As the New York Post points out, the object visible in the footage roughly aligns with Chiao's own description.

"That’s what it made me think of," he told the publication. "I wonder, 'Gosh, I wonder if this is the same thing.'"

Officials from the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office also revealed in 2023 that "metallic orbs" are the most prevalent type of UFOs in the sightings the office was studying. However, the panel stressed at the time that there was no evidence that they represented encounters with extraterrestrial technology.

A crash with the objects could've ended in disaster, Chiao claimed.

"Obviously if I collided with them it would have been really bad," he said. "No one would’ve known what happened to me."

Chiao could only guess as to what may have been behind the two mysterious orbs, suggesting it could've been "some secret military program."

It's hard to make of Chiao's account, especially without any hard evidence. His claims that the two orbs didn't even disturb the "air around my airplane" as they zipped by in complete silence, and that they showed "no visible means of propulsion," are particularly eyebrow-raising.

It's certainly not the first account of its kind. A number of former military pilots have come forward over the years, claiming to have made similar sightings. Claims by David Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former member of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, catapulted the topic into the mainstream in mid-2023, sparking sensational claims of an alleged government cover-up of the recovery of alien spacecraft.

As a NASA veteran, though, Chiao is keeping it real.

"I firmly believe there is other intelligence in the universe," he told the Post. "I think it’s the height of arrogance to think that we’re the only intelligent life in this entire universe."

But the "flip side of that is that we’ll never find each other because the universe is so vast," he added. "So I have trouble believing that aliens have visited us."