Aaron Rodgers says his interest in UFOs developed after an eye-witness encounter in 2005.
The eccentric NFL quarterback detailed his experience with “tremendously large” unknown aircraft during the season finale of ESPN’s “Hard Knocks,” this season the sports program chronicled Rodgers’ first summer with the New York Jets.
Rodgers ― an occasional ayahuasca user, darkness retreat enthusiast and vaccine skeptic ― said he saw what may have been a spacecraft while staying with his former teammate Steve Levy in New Jersey ahead of the 2005 NFL draft.
After being woken up by an alarm, the athlete said he walked outside to see something that looked like it was pulled from the 1996 Will Smith alien movie “Independence Day.”
“Up in the clouds, we heard this sound, and we saw this tremendously large object moving through the sky,” Rodgers said. “And it was like a scene out of ‘Independence Day,’ when the ships are coming into the atmosphere, and they’re creating this kind of like explosion-type fire in the sky.”
The 2011 Super Bowl champion remembered being “frozen” with fear and thinking, “What the hell was going on?” before things got stranger.
“About 30 seconds later, we heard the real, recognizable sound of fighter jets going zoom, zoom, zoom,” Rodgers said. “They seemed to be chasing this object. … We just stood there in disbelief for another few minutes. Nobody said a word. Then we all looked at each other like, ‘Did we just see what we thought we just saw?’”
Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
After a night of restless sleep, the football player and friends checked the local papers for any UFO sightings and found nothing.
Upon doing his own research, Rodgers said he discovered the alarm was from a local nuclear power plant, a magnet for UFO action, according to the sports star.
“And if you know anything about UFOs, there are a lot of sightings around nuclear energy, around volcanoes, around power plants,” he explained.
Rodgers, who first told his UFO story on the “You Made It Weird” podcast in 2016, said while he wasn’t sure “whatever the hell” he saw, “it was definitely unidentified, it was definitely flying, and it was definitely a large object.”
The MVP’s teammates revealed Rodgers has always been game to talk conspiracy theories during a 2021 segment for ESPN’s “NFL Countdown.”
His former Green Bay Packers teammate Joe Callahan remembered how Rodgers “could go from talking about football to talking about conspiracies about who built the pyramids. It wasn’t just one subject that we talked about.”
Seneca Wallace added, “He’s always thinking the crazy conspiracies. So he’s like, ‘Hey, what do you think all that stuff is flying behind that jet stream? Do you think it has anything to do with maybe why everybody’s getting cancer?’ That’s just kind of his attitude. That’s the way he’s, you know, wired.”
In February, Rodgers spuriously suggested that sightings of massive high-altitude weather balloons were a ploy to distract people from a Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy.
“It’s interesting timing on everything,” Rodgers said. “There’s a lot of other things going on in the world.”