If there’s one person you’d trust when it comes to what should and should not be in our skies, it’s a trained pilot.

And regarding the space above our atmosphere? An astronaut, for sure.

So when Dr Leroy Chiao, a pilot and former NASA astronaut, explained to the New York Post that he’d encountered two mysterious metal orbs whilst flying his plane recently, it’s no wonder that the news got people talking.

With over forty years of flying under his belt, Chiao – who has been flying since 1984 and piloted NASA’s Expedition 10 – has encountered almost everything there is to encounter whilst in charge of an aircraft.

Which is why he was so stumped by the large metallic balls that he came across, as he explained in the interview:

“There was nothing around me other than the panhandle of Texas at nine thousand feet on this instrument flight plan and just suddenly these things appeared. They came right at me.

They were moving about the same speed as I was in the opposite direction. About 100-150 mph. I didn’t see any visible means of propulsion, so I don’t know what it would be. You gotta have a jet engine or a propeller or something.”

Later on in the interview Chiao explaiend that the metal balls – which were ten feet to the left, and ten feet below his plane, seemed to be moving of their own accord, and were like nothing he’d ever seen before.

And what made the metal balls even more unusual was the lack of sound or disturbance from the orbs as they passed him by:

“If an airplane flew by me that fast, I’d feel its wake, it would have disturbed the air around my airplane.

Obviously if I collided with them it would have been really bad. No one would’ve known what happened to me.”

While there are plenty of explanations that have been posed for the metal orbs, Chiao has ruled out most, putting the orbs’ absence from public domain flight radar down to one explanation in particular: some kind of top-secret US military exercise.

Despite all the suggestions to the contrary, Chiao has ruled out some kind of extra-terrestrial source, despite believing wholeheartedly in life on other planets:

“I firmly believe there is other intelligence in the universe. I think it’s the height of arrogance to think that we’re the only intelligent life in this entire universe. The flip side of that is that we’ll never find each other because the universe is so vast. So I have trouble believing that aliens have visited us.

And if you’re going to take it from anyone, take it from him, one of the few people on our planet who has actually been to space.

But if they weren’t UFOs, what exactly were these mysterious objects that could have taken an ex-NASA astronaut out of the sky?

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?