AUBURN - "Local hunter bags UFO!"
It sounds like a headline you would read on a supermarket tabloid. But in this case, it's true!
A man from Auburn recently had a close encounter with an Unidentified Flying Object.
Like many other UFO stories, he was alone in the wilderness, with no one else to witness the encounter. But in this case, the hunter had a camera.
In fact, so did the UFO!
PHOTOS: U.F.O. takes pictures of Auburn hunter
"It looked different than anything I've ever seen, without a doubt," Robert Pitzer said.
Pitzer was hunting alone outside Lovelock, NV when he looked up to see a strange-looking object descending slowly toward earth.
It touched down near Pitzer, the only human within miles.
"What in the world is this thing?" Pitzer wondered. "Had no idea," he said later at his home in Auburn. "I didn't know if it was a weather satellite."
The strange object scraped the ground and sometimes bounded back into the air. It seemed to take a special interest in Pitzer's pickup truck, as it hovered nearby.
Pitzer clutched his 12 gauge shotgun. If the UFO turned hostile, Pitzer was ready to say 'Welcome to Earth' with a couple of rounds of buckshot.
"I still didn't know quite what was going on," said Pitzer. "But I figured it's an experimental aircraft. That's when I noticed the JP Aerospace sticker on it."
Turns out, the flying object had been launched under helium balloons, two hours earlier, 50 miles away. The high altitude balloon platform was carrying science experiments to the edge of space. One of the two helium balloons burst, and the craft fell slowly back to earth.
Satisfied that it was not from another planet, Pitzer tied the UFO to a rock, called JP Aerospace and told them where to find their flying science platform.
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The high altitude balloon platform had an on-board camera, which captured it's encounter with Pitzer.
"Never seen anything quite like this come out of the sky," Pitzer said. "And probably never will again!"
But Pitzer loves to tease his friends with the cell phone photos he took during his close encounter.
"Check this out!" Pitzer says. "I encountered a UFO!"
News10/KXTV