A season of Hard Knocks with Jets new QB Aaron Rodgers as the star wouldn’t have been complete without an off-the-rails story from the quarterback, and we finally got one in the season finale.
The show gives Rodgers the floor to talk about… UFOs. Rodgers claims he, along with some friends, once witnessed a UFO flying overhead in the middle of the night after hearing an alarm going off in the distance.
“Up in the clouds, we heard this sound and saw this tremendously large object moving through the sky,” Rodgers said. “We just saw this incredibly large object and froze, as anybody would.”
"Did we just see what we think we just saw?"
— NFL (@NFL) September 6, 2023
Aaron Rodgers details a UFO sighting 🛸
Stream the #HardKnocks finale now on @StreamOnMax pic.twitter.com/reQgankPod
Rodgers also claims he heard fighter jets flying by, seemingly in pursuit of the object. When the event wasn’t covered in the media, Rodgers says he became interested in researching UFOs. That only seems to have emboldened his belief in what he saw, tying the siren to a nuclear power plant nine miles from the house he was staying at.
MORE: SI’s NFL Experts Make Predictions for 2023 Season, Super Bowl Champs
“If you know anything about UFOs, there’s a lot of sightings around nuclear energy, around volcanoes, around power plants,” Rodgers says. “Whatever the hell it was, I don’t know, but it was definitely unidentified, it was definitely flying, it was definitely a large object.”
It’s perhaps not surprising that Rodgers would have theories on UFOs, given how open he has been in the past about some of his rather anti-establishment views. That didn’t stop fans from having fun at his expense for the video, though.
Aaron Rodgers is rich. Aaron Rodgers is famous. Aaron Rodgers is successful. I wouldn't want to be Aaron Rodgers. https://t.co/RzAoxrUKGT
— Aragorn Elessar (@wludford) September 6, 2023
I’m sorry, we are really ending #HardKnocks with A-Rod’s UFO sighting?!?! https://t.co/htwmckOryS
— Vanessa Franko (@vanessafranko) September 6, 2023
Y’all still can’t tell when Aaron is trolling.
— Brian Werszner (@brian_werszner) September 6, 2023
Look at that little smirk he gets when he knows you all bought into his story. He didn’t want to do Hard Knocks. Now he’s trolling with UFOs. He could sell the media sand in the desert. https://t.co/Ki1n3wiapg
I’d pay to hear a conversation between him and Bill Walton. https://t.co/Vn2brHqf7Q
— Justin Spears (@JustinESports) September 6, 2023
Look, I’m not one to claim that Hard Knocks is “journalism” but giving this 🤡 a platform to just spout random musings unchecked is a waste of our time. https://t.co/ATH2OGQVr6
— OSHA Violator (@JayDSarkar) September 6, 2023
Psychadelics are working just fine. 😂😂😂 https://t.co/9GX7SESplz
— p-value less than 0.05 (@PThalaivaaa) September 6, 2023
Classic Aaron.
