A pioneering astronaut who helped launch the private manned space program has revealed a chilling encounter that unfolded not in orbit, but in his own bedroom – in a bombshell new documentary. Former Navy commander and fearless military jet pilot Brian Binnie flew SpaceShipOne, the first commercial craft in space, and became the second ever commercial astronaut in 2004.
But in December 2003, days after a test flight crash, Binnie said he had a close encounter that turned his world upside-down. Lying in bed at 4am at his home in Rosamond, California, he was woken by flashes of light, he told Amazon and Apple TV-distributed documentary, Beyond Blue Sky: The Untold Story of the First Private Astronauts.
'As I'm lying there, it seems to be that somebody's turned the television on and the changing scenes are causing these flashes of light,' Binnie said. 'So I open my eyes, and the TV's not on. These lights are coming from the bedroom window. I'm thinking, there must be half a dozen cop cars right at the corner of my house. So I open the window blinds to see what's going on. There are no police cars. There's something I've never witnessed before or since.'
He described the scene: 'It's as though daytime has manifested itself in my backyard. It's dark everywhere else I can see. And within the daylight, there are these other objects. Some of them looked like ball-sized soap bubbles. There must have been half a dozen of them slowly rolling around the perimeter. Others are volleyball-sized entities that are brighter, but they're animated and sort of free to wander.'
Binnie said two of the lights came towards his window and flew at his body. 'Whether they were probing me, or checking me out and finding nothing of interest, the whole thing slowly dissolves away,' he said.
Executive producer Kevin Curran says the wild story of Binnie's close encounter should be taken seriously given the daring aviator's impeccable credentials. The former Navy Commander was a military jet pilot who flew 33 missions in the Gulf War during his two-decade service.
A Princeton-educated aeronautical engineer and winner of the Harvard Book Prize, he was also the first to break the sound barrier in a privately-funded vehicle. Binnie won the $10 million Ansari X Prize along with co-pilot Mike Melvill in 2004 for reaching space twice in two weeks with commercial plane SpaceShipOne.
He finally decided to speak out about his UFO experience after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. He died on September 15, 2022, aged 69.
Binnie said his encounter came six days after a dramatic crash on SpaceShipOne's maiden flight which happened on December 17, 2003, the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first powered flight. He manned the hybrid rocket-propelled plane at Mach 1.2, shutting off the engines when he reached 70,000 feet and flipping it upside down for an astronaut's view of Earth. Returning to the Mojave Air and Space Port in California 20 minutes later he suffered a hard landing that crunched the left landing gear and sent the test craft skidding off the runway on its side at over 100 mph.
'When it finally came to rest in the desert sand, a new reality lay in front for Brian,' the documentary's pitch deck said. 'This might be the last time he ever sat in the cockpit of SpaceShipOne.'
But in his interview, Binnie and his wife Valerie credited the out-of-this-world experience he had a week later while recovering from the crash, with giving him the courage to continue the commercial space flight project. 'I think they were entities that we do not understand,' Valerie told the documentarians. 'Because there are a lot of unanswered things out there. I believe they may have been guides coming to check Brian out to see if he's ready for what is going to happen.'
Ten months later, on October 4, 2004, he successfully piloted SpaceShipOne's second competition flight, winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize and becoming the 436th person in space – and only the second aboard a privately operated commercial spacecraft. The voyage took him to a peak of almost 70 miles above sea level, letting him experience four minutes of weightlessness, and setting a record for suborbital winged aircraft flight still held to this day.
The 93-minute documentary, Beyond Blue Sky: The Untold Story of the First Private Astronauts, is released on Apple TV and Amazon Prime on May 5, after a five-year production process.
