That Time Aaron Rodgers Saw a UFO in New Jersey

Once upon a time, long before he was a Super Bowl champion and two-time NFL MVP, Aaron Rodgers was nearly abducted by aliens.

At least, that’s kind of what he told Pete Holmes while on the You Made It Weird podcast earlier this week. As the story goes, Rodgers was in New York City for an appearance on ESPN’s Cold Pizza (which later became First Take) before the 2005 NFL Draft, when he hitched a ride to his former college teammate’s place in New Jersey for a night of quality bro time and a traditional Italian dinner with his family.

That’s when shit got super weird.

On a snowy night in February, Rodgers and his two friends heard a loud siren around midnight and went outside check it out like the curious 20-year-olds they were. That’s when they saw a UFO in the sky, which Rodgers can only describe as something that came straight out of Independence Day.

“It looks like commercial jets kinda flying – or maybe it’s a military jet – and they’re trying to figure out what’s coming through the clouds and you see like a fiery movement of cloud, I guess, coming through the sky,” Rodgers described. “Then the plane eventually runs into the spaceship, which is coming into orbit. It was like…a large, orange, left-to-right moving object.”

Rodgers figured out what they were looking at with when four fighter jets darted past them 30 seconds later. Then, an alarm went off at a nuclear power plant 30 miles away, which was the tell-all sign that they were dealing with a UFO. (That, or the fact that there were no mentions of it in the news the following day – dun, dun, dunnnnnnnn.)

Now, that could have been all the pasta talking, but Rodgers’ story is pretty detailed. And if he is lying, there’s no doubt he’ll make one hell of a science fiction author once his playing days are over with.