The Las Vegas Raiders’ defensive end, Maxx Crosby, claims he had a close encounter of the third kind as he insisted he saw an unidentified flying object whilst on a cross-country aeroplane.

Crosby, who is aiming to catapult his NFL career to alien heights, claims he saw the UFO during a flight back from Miami and a glance at his schedule would mean it happened either August 2022 or November 2023.

UFO sighted from Florida airport?Roberto Ortega

But whether you believe in his story or not, there is no doubt in his mind about what he saw and the subsequent existence of extra-terrestrials…

“There definitely is, that’s not even a question.” Crosby said to Jim Rome on the existence of aliens. “It’s real.

“Like we were literally on a flight back from Miami, and we’ve seen a UFO with our own eyes. And that sounds crazy, but you can ask the pilots, anybody that was there.

“It was wild. And I seen it, and they had no idea what it was. There was nothing on the radar, nothing. And it was like a big shining light going in and out.”

So far, the evidence of alien life is not yet verified and proven conclusively so nobody actually knows if they really do exist but given modern understanding of physics, it could take millions or billions of years for a human-sized object to travel across space and come into contact with alien life.

For example, at lightspeed it would take around 200,000 years to cross the Milky Way and that’s just Earth’s local galaxy. The size of the universe is thought to be some 93 billion years across its diameter.

What is a UFO and how common are they?

UFOs are not specifically alien spaceships looking to visit Earth, despite that being the go-to thought upon hearing the word. They’re actually any object in the sky, moving, that cannot be quickly identified and in the past, human aircraft such as aeroplanes and hot air balloons have also thought to have been UFOs.

Additionally, the USA experiences a high volume of UFO claims per year, with the National UFO Reporting Center claiming to receive thousands of reports and some 556 in February alone.