As the House convened a subcommittee hearing this week on UFO sightings, Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera revealed he once had a close encounter of his own kind while inebriated during a trip to the Bahamas.
Rivera detailed his out-of-this-world experience during the Tuesday episode of Fox News’ “The Five,” where panelists discussed Congress’ move to hold the first hearing of its kind in five decades.
During the discussion, fellow pundit Jesse Waters asked Rivera if he felt Congress was the “appropriate body” to probe the unexplained sightings.
“I’ve sailed around the world, I’ve seen a lot of clear skies, I’ve seen satellites, which are kind of spooky, weather balloons, stray aircraft, others. The only time I ever saw a UFO, I was stoned on ecstasy,” Rivera said, drawing laughter from his colleagues, as first reported by Mediaite.
Watters nudged Rivera for more details on what he saw.
“It looked like a great big North Star, brighter than the North Star was, right on the horizon and I tried to avoid it, I steered around it and it kept following me and I want back the other way,” Rivera continued.
“The Five” panelist Emily Compagno expressed shock that Rivera had been “driving on ecstasy,” while Rivera pressed on with his story.
“In the Bahama Banks, it was right in front of me and it just tracked me everywhere I went,” Rivera said.
Rivera told the tale during a lighthearted discussion with his colleagues. Earlier, Compagno quipped that a top Naval intelligence official had “not ruled out alien influence” as responsible for the phenomena.
Multiple Pentagon officials testified during the House Intelligence subcommittee hearing. The hearing was live-streamed and lasted roughly 90 minutes.
Top military brass are probing dozens of unexplained sightings of strange aerial objects that have occurred in recent years.
Declassified videos discussed during the hearing included one short clip of a balloon-shaped object zooming past the cockpit of an F-18 fighter plane. Another video showed triangle-shaped objects that were triangle-shaped determined to be segments of light passing through night-vision goggles.
Rep. Rick Crawford, a Republican lawmaker from Arkansas said the hearing was an effort at “delivering dominant intelligence” regarding potential threats rather than an effort to uncover alien technology.
“The inability to understand objects in our sensitive operating areas is tantamount to intelligence failure that we certainly want to avoid,” Crawford said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
