Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers lit up the internet this week after appearing on a podcast and revealing that he and a couple of friends saw a big orange UFO in 2005. Steve Levy, who co-witnessed the close encounter with Aaron Rodgers and his brother Mark Levy, says that everything about Rodgers’ UFO story is true — except for one thing.
ESPN reported (along with hundreds of other outlets in the past few days) March 25 that Aaron Rodgers, while appearing on Pete Holmes’ podcast You Made It Weird, disclosed details of a UFO sighting he and the Levy brothers made in February 2005. According to Rodgers, the three had gone outside the Levy home in New Jersey, where he was visiting his former teammate from his University of California days, to try and determine the source of a strange noise they had heard. He said the trio saw what he described as large, orange, and moving from left to right in the sky.
“Because of the overcast nature of the night and the snow, you couldn’t make out. It was kind of behind the clouds we were seeing, but it was definitively large, moving from left to right. … It was me, Steve [Rodgers’ friend] and his brother that saw it. And it goes out of sight and we look at each other and go, ‘What in the f*** was that?’”
Rodgers told Holmes that the object then vanished. Seconds later, he said he heard fighter jets crossing overhead. And this is the point in Aaron Rodgers’ narrative where he gets surprisingly analytical, perhaps somewhat conspiratorial.
“If you know anything about UFO sightings or if you’ve done research, you know that a lot of times two things are connected to UFO sightings: One, is the presence of fighter jets to chase them down. Two, is there’s a lot of sightings around nuclear power plants. The alarm we heard was from 30 miles out. There was a nuclear power plant that had an alarm that went off.”
NJ.com spoke with Steve Levy via phone following Rodgers’ surprising UFO sighting disclosure. Corroborating the Green Bay All-Pro’s story, Levy said he and his brother saw the UFO at his side. But Rodgers’ story held an inaccuracy, he said.
Levy said that his family’s home is located in Cornwall, New York, not New Jersey, as Rodgers stated in his account. But everything else? Well, the Super Bowl winner nailed it.
As for his memory of the “absolutely wild” incident, Levy says he remembers it “very, very vividly.” It occurred in February 2005, just before that year’s NFL draft (wherein Aaron Rodgers would be chosen 24th overall by the Green Bay Packers, ostensibly as a back-up quarterback for the aging Brett Favre). The draft hopeful was visiting Steve Levy, his two brothers, and his parents for dinner. Then a strange noise erupted, sounding somewhat like a siren. (The Levys lived near a power plant, which could have been the source of the noise). Levy said the three young men all went outside. That’s when they “saw something.”
“We were like, ‘What the hell is that?’ We saw the reddish, orange, yellowish light that kept going side by side. It was quite large. And then it just disappeared. People were asking me what it looked like and I Googled warp speed and that’s the closest that it looked like, how it disintegrated. Like when you’re watching Star Trek and they go warp speed and all those lights just turn into lines. It just vanished.”
Levy said the next few minutes were pandemonium as he, Rodgers, and his brother Mark all ran back into the house. His parents and younger brother, Eric, also witnessed the UFO from the house. Just as with Rodgers’ account, Levy said that about a minute later, the house shook with the passage of what they figured were fighter jets pursuing the object. He said that he checked newspapers for weeks following the UFO sighting but nothing was ever mentioned concerning a sighting or the low-flying jets. (Levy noted that there was a nearby military base: the Stewart Air National Guard Base).
Levy told NJ.com that when Rodgers is in town with the Packers to play the Jets or the Giants, they get together and the subject of the UFO sighting is always a topic of discussion. Between the two, there are no doubts about what they saw that night in 2005.
“I stand behind Aaron. It had to be a UFO. There’s nothing else that it could be.”
UFO sightings have become quite commonplace. The Mutual UFO Network, which receives and compiles worldwide UFO sightings reports year-round, revealed last year that, for the year 2014, the number of UFO sightings in the United States had risen in 2014 by nearly 1,000 sightings when compared to 2013. And celebrities like Aaron Rodgers, no longer fearful of the stigma that was once attached to those who claimed to have made a UFO sighting, also have been speaking more freely about their own close encounters with UFOs.
So, although the jury might still be out on whether or not the human race is alone in the universe, believers in UFOs — like Aaron Rodgers and Steve Levy — are not alone in their collective contention that the unidentified flying objects they’ve witnessed — although perhaps not alien in origin — are very real.
[Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images]
