Manu Ginobili was a part of the legendary era for the San Antonio Spurs, winning 3 NBA championships with the Texas franchise. Ginobili was known as a selfless superstar, someone who did whatever he needed to do to make sure the team won. That didn’t take away from his game though, he was one of the most dynamic and exciting players to watch on the court, able to score in every way on the court.
His unpredictability on the court was opposite to how reliable he was off it but Manu did have his moments outside the NBA as well. One of the more hard-to-believe ones was when the Spurs star thought he saw an Unidentified Flying Object, more commonly called a UFO. In December of 2010, Ginobili saw something in the sky in Los Angeles that he couldn’t quite understand. His recollection of the encounter and its aftermath was shared by Epoch Times (via Bleacher Report).
“I’m not sure,” Ginobili said. “There’s an Air Force base northwest of where we were. It was supposed to be some space shuttle landing. The good thing is, I’m not the only one who saw it. That’s what got me [saying], ‘OK, I’m not crazy.'”
“It was a pretty strange flight pattern. I thought it was falling, not landing. That’s it, it’s not a big deal. It’s not [like I said], ‘It’s a extra-terrestrial life in Santa Monica.’ I didn’t care. I saw something weird.”
Ginobili clarified the situation further on his Facebook page after a few days, claiming that the UFO could have been a ‘kind of spacecraft’ called X-37B that he said was supposed to be landing in the area around the time he saw it. While it’s clear that Manu recognized that he hadn’t found alien life, this still remains one of the more bizarre stories involving an NBA player in the history of the league.
