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 metal spherical spheres” whizzing past his plane while flying over Texas in August.

Leroy Chiao, who commanded Expedition 10 to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2004 and 2005, was at an altitude of 3,000 meters when objects ‘zipped’ on the left side of his aircraft.

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

“It’s just bad luck that they didn’t hit me,” Chiao said.

The former NASA astronaut estimates that the orbs were only “about twenty feet away.”

“It could have been a bad result if they had actually hit me,” Chiao said. “It happened so fast there wasn’t even a chance to get scared.”

The NASA veteran, now technical consultant and entrepreneur, told NewsNation that the strange metal spheres appeared to evade detection.

“It wasn’t on the radar,” he noted, “Air traffic control certainly didn’t warn me.

‘[And] it was not on my display showing other aircraft participating in the [Federal Aviation Administration] FAA-required transponders.”

“I don’t know what it was,” the bewildered former astronaut admitted.

Chiao revealed the details of his strange UFO encounter at the end of the summer on 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 had just refueled my small plane in the Texas panhandle,” Chiao recalled.

“I flew back to Houston on an instrument flight plan,” he said, referring to a more formal set of flight rules that are coordinated with FAA air traffic control along known and pre-established flight corridors.

But in retrospect, the former astronaut believes that these orb UFOs are still not only “mysterious” — but that the government’s lack of transparency about these and other mysterious drones over sensitive U.S. locations has “terrifying” implications.

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

Citizens, police and politicians have all put forward theories about who or what is behind this recent wave of drone reports mass hysteria to foreign spies to space aliens — Chiao said he’s leaning toward it being a test of top-secret American technology.

“My first suspicion is that it is some kind of military program, some kind of drone,” he said NewsNation“but you know it’s hard to tell, right?”

“To be honest, I don’t think whoever was operating the drone knew I was there.”

Chao, who Saw dealt with an interesting, but ultimately mundane, ‘UFO’ case while living aboard the ISS, said he is personally concerned about some of the possible worst-case scenarios for the US mystery drone wave in late 2024.

“It’s quite mysterious,” he said. “It’s hard to believe that our government doesn’t really know what’s going on.”

“At first glance it looks like some kind of military program to me, our military,” he continued, “and if it isn’t, it gets a little scarier.”

Chiao said the drone sightings over the past month over New Jersey and nearby states, as well as those over U.S. military bases at home and abroad, “appear far too widespread and organized to be a prank.”

He added that he thinks the Pentagon and the rest of the federal government “can be a little more transparent.”

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

“More than 500 mayors were invited to an unprecedented mayors-only briefing on such an important topic,” Mayor Melham told the local network WABC last week.

“Many mayors from northern New Jersey traveled nearly three hours each way on short notice to be there,” he explained, “just to hear what could easily have been said on a Zoom call.” Many ran away.’

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

“The mayors are furious,” Shellenberger told Fox News. “One of them came over there and said, ‘There were two car-sized drones hovering over my house.’

Metal-sphere UFOs are 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 this [‘metallic orbs’] around the world,” Dr. Kirkpatrick told NASA’s UFO Advisory Group last year, “and we’re seeing these make very interesting apparent maneuvers.”

After mysterious bright lights, according to AARO’s most recent annual reportspherical or spherical UFOs were still the most reported this year, accounting for 22 percent of all U.S. military sightings.