Former NASA astronaut tells of UFO encounter and reveals the truth

Most sightings of "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (also known as UFOs) in the Earth's skies are probably just a trick of the eye and have nothing to do with extraterrestrial technology or alien life.

This belief was expressed by retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who is also an ambassador for the UNITED24 fundraising platform and has been helping Ukraine during the war. The astronaut also spoke about his own experience with UFOs.

Kelly notes that it is usually the case that our eyes are playing tricks on us.

"I remember one time I was flying in a warning area near the Virginia Beach military operating zone, and my RIO - the guy sitting in the back of the (F-14) Tomcat - was convinced we flew past a UFO," Kelly said.

He said that he didn't personally notice anything, but decided to turn the plane around and check what they had actually flown past.

"We turned around. We decided to look at it. It turned out to be Bart Simpson, a balloon," the retired astronaut said.

Kelly, who in 2016 set the record for the longest continuous stay on the ISS, "stuck" in Earth orbit for 340 days in a row (the record was later surpassed by Mark Vande Hei - 353 days), also spoke about his own experience of observing in space.

"Often in space, I saw things and thought: "this really doesn't behave the way it should". And every time I looked at it long enough, I realised it was atmospheric lensing," he said.

According to Business Insider, atmospheric lensing is a fairly common phenomenon that can create optical illusions, such as making the Sun appear higher in the sky than it actually is. Such optical illusions result from the way particles in the Earth's atmosphere distort and manipulate light, which can cause us to see distorted versions of reality. As in the case of the ships hovering in the sky above the sea.

"The thing was, what I was looking at was really flying through the atmosphere, and because of the variations in the atmosphere, the trajectory looked like it wasn't flying in a straight line," Kelly said.

The former astronaut was a participant in a panel discussion organised by NASA and the Pentagon, during which experts said that most reports of UFO sightings eventually turn out to be observations of natural objects or phenomena. There are also observations that experts are unable to explain, but only because the data on UFO sightings is not of sufficient quality.

Earlier, OBOZREVATEL reported on a report by Ukrainian astronomers who said that since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, a significant number of unidentified flying objects have been recorded, flying much higher than existing drones. No aircraft have flown over Ukraine since February 2022.

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