NASA astronaut spots ‘two metallic spherical orbs’ flying by his airplane over Texas

A former NASA astronaut has come forward to reveal that he personally witnessed ‘two metallic spherical orbs‘ whizz by his plane this August while flying above Texas.

Leroy Chiao, who served as the commander of Expedition 10 to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2004 and 2005, was 9,000 feet in the air when objects ‘zipped’ on the left side of his airplane.

He said one flew on top of the other and each was about three feet in diameter. 

‘It’s just kinda dumb luck that they didn’t hit me,’ said Chiao.

The former NASA astronaut estimates that the orbs were only ‘about 20 feet away.’ 

‘It could’ve been a bad result, if they had actually hit me,’ Chiao said. ‘It happened so quick, there wasn’t even a chance to get scared.’

The NASA veteran, now an engineering consultant and entrepreneur, told NewsNation that the strange metallic orbs appeared to evade detection. 

‘It wasn’t on radar,’ he noted, ‘Air traffic control certainly didn’t alert me. 

‘[And] it wasn’t on my display that shows other airplanes that are participating with the [Federal Aviation Administration] FAA-required transponders.’ 

‘I don’t know what it was,’ the baffled former astronaut confessed.

Chiao unpacked the details of his odd late-summer UFO encounter to The Hill on NewsNation, stating that he ‘got a good look at them’ but ‘only for a second.’

‘I was flying back from Colorado and I had just refueled in the panhandle of Texas in my small airplane,’ Chiao recalled. 

‘I was flying back to Houston on an instrument flight plan,’ he said, referencing a more formal set of flight rules that are coordinated with FAA air traffic control along known and pre-established flight corridors.

But with the benefit of hindsight, the former astronaut believes that these orb UFOs are still not only ‘mysterious’ — but that the government’s lack of transparency on these and other mystery drones over sensitive US sites has ‘scary’ implications.

‘They could tell us what they know,’ Chiao opined, ‘and if they really don’t know, that’s a little more disconcerting.’

Citizens, police and politicians have all put forward theories on who or what is behind this recent wave of drone reports — from mass hysteria to foreign spies to space aliens — Chiao said that he leans toward it being a test of top secret US tech.

‘My first guess is that it’s some kind of military program, a drone of some kind,’ he told NewsNation, ‘but you know it’s hard to say, right?’

‘Frankly, I think whoever was operating the drone wasn’t aware that I was there.’ 

Chao, who saw dealt with an interesting, but ultimately terrestrial ‘UFO’ case when he lived on board the ISS, said that he is personally concerned about some of the possible worst-case scenarios for America’s late 2024 mystery drone wave.

‘It is pretty mysterious,’ he weighed in. ‘It’s hard to believe that our government doesn’t really know what’s going on.’

‘At first blush, to me, it seems like some kind of a military program, our military,’ he continued, ‘and if it’s not that, then it gets a little more scary.’

Chiao said that the past month of drone sightings over New Jersey and nearby states, as well as those over US military bases at home and abroad, seem ‘way too widespread and organized to be some kind of a prank.’

He added that he feels the Pentagon and the rest of the federal government ‘could be a little more transparent.’ 

In New Jersey, Belleville Mayor Michael Melham has also become a vocal critic of the federal government’s lack of candor on the drone mystery, calling their response ‘disappointing, to say the least.’

‘Over 500 mayors were invited to an unprecedented ‘mayors-only’ briefing on such an important topic,’ Mayor Melham told local network WABC last week.

‘Many northern NJ mayors traveled nearly three hours round trip, on short notice, to be there,’ he explained, ‘only to learn what could have easily been said over a Zoom call. Many walked out.’

Journalist and author Michael Shellenberger, who testified to Congress last month on his reports of a hidden UFO data collection program, obtained a recording of the meeting, in which one NJ mayor complained of SUV-sized drones.

‘The mayors are livid,’ Shellenberger told Fox News. ‘One of them got up there and said, ‘I had two automobile-sized drones hovering over my house.” 

Metallic orb UFOs have been the most common type of case reported by US military witnesses according to the first director of the Pentagon’s UFO-hunting All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), ex-CIA physicist Dr Sean Kirkpatrick. 

‘We see these [‘metallic orbs’] all over the world,’ Dr Kirkpatrick told NASA’s UFO advisory group last year, ‘and we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers.’

After mysterious bright lights, according to AARO’s most recent annual report, orb or spherical UFOs were still the most commonly reported this year at 22 percent of all US military sightings.