Aaron Rodgers says he and two others witnessed a UFO sighting nearly 20 years ago.
The New York Jets quarterback recounted what happened in an episode of HBO's "Hard Knocks," saying he was at his college teammate Steve Levy's house in 2005 when they saw a UFO.
Rodgers remembers what happened moments before he saw a "large object" in the sky.
"I was getting down to bed," Rodgers says. "I heard this alarm in the distance going off. It just didn't seem like normal and I heard some rustling downstairs, so I got up, walk downstairs. It's a beautiful night. And Steve and his brother and I walked outside and up in the clouds we heard this sound and we saw this tremendously large object moving through the sky.
"It was like a scene out of 'Independence Day' when the ships are coming into the atmosphere and they're creating this kind of explosion type fire in the sky," he says. "We just saw this incredibly large object and froze, as anybody would."
Rodgers says what they saw eventually went away, but the three of them stayed in place and didn't utter a word. He said 30 seconds later, they heard what sounded like fighter jets.
"And again we just stood there in disbelief for another few minutes," he says. "Nobody said a word. And we all kind of looked at each other like, did we just see what we think we just saw? What was that?"
He says they tried to go to sleep maybe 20 minutes later.
"You're still not really sleeping," he says. "You just experienced this bizarre experience. We looked in the papers and online the next few days, and there was nothing about it."
TODAY.com spoke to Levy who said "every single thing that Aaron said about the encounter was 100% authentic," except for one thing: Rodgers said it happened at Levy's home in New Jersey when the home was in fact in New York.
Spottings of unidentified flying objects reported by military planes from 2004 to 2021 were at 144 cases, according to a 2021 report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Rodgers did not indicate whether what he saw was one of the 144 reported cases and the report does not disclose locations.
He says he researched UFOs on his own and thinks they are often around nuclear energy, volcanoes or power plants.
"The siren or alarm had been from a nuclear power plant, which was about 9 miles away," he says.
Rodgers says he can't confirm it was for sure a UFO, but "it was definitely flying."
"Steve and I, great friends, teammates and also witnessed whatever the hell it was. I don't know," he says. "It was definitely flying. It was definitely a large object."
