NASCAR legend Mark Martin recently recalled the time he claims to have seen a UFO while flying home after a race.
Martin was flying his plane to Florida from a race on the East Coast in the late 1990s when the incident occurred.
Martin was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2017 and is often described as the greatest race car driver never to win a championship. And now perhaps the best racing driver to have had a UFO sighting.
“We came home, just me and my pilot in my jet. We were coming back from one of the northeastern races…We’re flying at 45,000 feet, but if you go over Jacksonville and go home to Daytona where I lived, they would take you up to 60,000 feet,” Martin said. Garage Guy Chase.
‘We were going down. For some reason, after the race, I would often get in the back and let my… was a single-pilot plane, so I let my pilot fly me home and I’d sit back there and repeat the race or something or something just relax . But this time, and I did it every now and then, I wanted to fly… and there are no stars to be seen.”
‘So it’s black. Everything except the lights in Daytona, Orlando, and you know, Miami. Even in Miami you can see the lights go out. And I see a light that is a solid white light, that looks solid, light that is not blinking, and that could just be a landing light. The only thing that would make sense would be a spotlight that looks so bright, and it would have to be so far away because I couldn’t see the green and red tip lights. Because they have a green and a red one and the red one is on the right side. That way you know if a plane is coming towards you or leaving… I didn’t see anything like that.’
NASCAR legend Mark Martin recalled the time he claimed to have seen a UFO in the late 1990s

Martin is often described as the best racing driver never to win a season championship
“So I keep it in my eyes, I keep checking there and looking there and it’s getting closer, I haven’t said anything to (pilot) Jason (Simpson), I’m just flying along. Finally I just start, I fixate on it. The plane is on autopilot… and so I’m fixated on it and it’s getting closer and closer and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to hit that!'”
“And I grabbed the yolk and kicked it off autopilot and got ready to turn the plane to the right and Jason said, ‘What?’ And I said, “Look!” And when he looked, he pulled out a camera, he had a camera with him, and he pulled out a camera and put it right there in the windshield and tried to take a picture because he saw it! We both saw this and we almost thought we were going to hit it. Then it starts to go away, slowly go away, slowly go away.”
Martin also said that when air traffic control was contacted about the sighting, they told Martin he was flying the only aircraft in that general airspace.
Martin certainly wouldn’t have made up his adventure to talk about it so publicly. His story is not the first to see a UFO over the years.