Aaron Rodgers saved his best story for last, saying that he saw a UFO just before he was drafted by the Green Bay Packers. Rodgers dropped the bombshell in the season finale of Hard Knocks.
Rodgers has been a focal point of the series, which focused on New York Jets training camp. Rodgers, of course, left the Packers for the Jets during the offseason.
During a training camp practice filmed by the HBO show, Rodgers flagged down the Jets’ VP of security and asked him to bring a man watching practice from the stands to the field after practice. Rodgers explained that it was Steve Levy, a former teammate at Cal. He then told the security officer, “We saw a UFO together.”
After practice, while talking to Levy, Rodgers again told the HBO cameras, “We saw a UFO together.”
Aaron Rodgers and the Close Encounter
Clearly, this was a topic that needed to be discussed in depth, so in a confessional interview, Rodgers said the event happened when he was in New York City, just prior to the 2005 NFL Draft, when he was chosen by the Packers in the first round. Levy, who was living in New Jersey, hosted Rodgers for dinner and let him spend the night. That’s when they had their late night visitation.
I was making my way to bed—I had a 5 AM wake-up, and as I was getting into bed, 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, walked 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, like, kind of explosion-type fire in the sky.
The three friends weren’t sure how to react to what they were seeing.
We just saw this incredibly large object and froze, as anybody would, because, you know, what the hell is going on? Eventually, it went out of sight, and nobody said a word. We just stood frozen, the three of us, on the front stoop of Steve’s house. About 30 seconds later, we heard the real recognizable sound of fighter jets going whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. They seemed to be chasing this object. Again we just stood there in disbelief for another few minutes. Nobody said a word. Then we all kind of looked at each other like, ‘Did we just see what we thought we just saw? What was that.’ Eventually, 20 minutes later, we kind of wound down a little bit and went back to bed, still not really sleeping, because we’d just witnessed this bizarre experience.”
Rodgers and Levy checked the news the next day but couldn’t find any other reports of anyone seeing a UFO. So Rodgers took it upon himself to get to the bottom of the story.
“That got me into researching more about UFOs,” he said. Rodgers discovered that there was a nuclear power plant about nine miles from Levy’s house, and that had likely been the source of the alarm that alerted him to the approaching UFO.
“And if you know anything about UFOs,” Rodgers said, “there are a lot of sightings around nuclear energy, around volcanoes, around power plants.”
Rodgers still doesn’t know what exactly happened that night, but there’s no question that he had an encounter with a UFO.
“Whatever the hell it was, I don’t know,” he said, “but it was definitely unidentified. It was definitely flying. It was definitely a large object.”
