Astronaut Leroy Chiao was on his last spacewalk mission after six and a half months as the commander of the International Space Station. He was accompanied by cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov and were on a mission to install a few navigation antennas. As the pair floated 230 miles above the Earth Chiao spotted five bright lights in a check-mark pattern gliding above Earth.

“I saw some lights that seemed to be in a line and it was almost like an upside-down check mark, and I saw them fly by and thought it was awfully strange,” Chiao told The Huffington Post.

You can catch Dr. Chiao’s story on the Science Channel’s week-long “Are we alone?” series.

Chiao’s fellow spacewalker, Sharipov, hadn’t seen the lights because he was facing the opposite direction.

This experience, recreated in the above video (and still image below), launches “NASA’s Unexplained Files,” one of several programs presented as part of Science Channel’s week-long “Are We Alone?” series, beginning March 2.

A down-to-Earth explanation is offered for Chiao’s sighting: the bright lights of a fishing boat hundreds of miles below him. But is that the only possible interpretation of what the astronaut saw?

It’s easy for many to have no doubt that he witnessed an intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. But Chiao doesn’t believe there’s ever been any tangible evidence that someone else is visiting Earth or has done so in the past.

“I’m skeptical of claims that we’ve been visited by aliens from another planet or other dimension, but I don’t rule it out 100 percent. I have an open mind and I do believe there’s other life in the universe.

“If there is life out there that’s so much more advanced than we are and they know either how to travel great distances in short amounts of time, or they’re able to come from a parallel universe into ours, why don’t they just come and show themselves?”

“NASA’s Unexplained Files” episodes highlight possible out-of-this world UFOs either seen or photographed by astronauts over many years.
–source: HuffingtonPost