A group of astronauts were stunned when they spotted what appeared to be a long-lost X-15 rocket plane drifting inexplicably in orbit, raising urgent questions about how a 1960s experimental aircraft could have reached space and leaving the crew shaken as they confronted a mystery that challenges decades of recorded aerospace history.

Astronauts aboard the International Observation Platform (IOP-3), an orbital research outpost positioned 420 kilometers above Earth, reported an incident on November 12, 2025, that has stunned aerospace agencies and reignited debates about the forgotten edges of Cold War aviation.

What began as a routine monitoring shift turned into a historical shock when crew members detected an unidentified, winged object slipping silently across their external sensor feed.

According to flight engineer Lt.Mara Ellison, who was supervising the morning telemetry sweep, the anomaly first appeared as a “thin, dark streak slicing across the limb of Earth.

” At first, the crew suspected a small fragment of orbital debris or the tumbling remains of an old satellite.

But as the object drifted closer, its shape became impossible to ignore: a long fuselage, short stubby wings, and a pointed nose — unmistakably modeled for atmospheric flight, not orbital mechanics.

“I thought the camera was glitching,” Ellison recalled in the IOP-3 internal log.

“But then I zoomed in, and you could actually see the scorch marks.

Not fresh — old, worn, like something that had been through re-entry decades ago.”

Commander Richard Hale, a veteran of three orbital missions, took manual control of the station’s high-resolution optical array.

The grainy metallic outline sharpened, revealing something none of them expected: letters, partially worn but legible, stenciled along the side of the fuselage.

UNITED STATES AIR FORCE — X-15

For several seconds, no one on the station spoke.

“We just stared,” Hale later said in a communications briefing.

“The X-15 program ended in 1968.

None of those aircraft ever reached stable orbit.

They weren’t designed to.

Seeing one up here… that shouldn’t be possible.”

The X-15 — the legendary rocket plane built by North American Aviation — was one of the most radical aerospace experiments of the 20th century.

Operating from 1959 to 1968, the program produced 199 flights and helped define the physics that would later enable the Space Shuttle.

Pilots launched from the belly of a B-52, ignited their rocket engines, and shot toward the edge of space, routinely exceeding Mach 5 and reaching altitudes above 100 kilometers.

But none ever achieved orbit.

Their ballistic trajectories always ended in controlled glides back to dry lakebeds across the American Southwest.

So how could one be floating hundreds of kilometers above Earth in 2025?

NASA, the U.S.Air Force, and the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum — which houses the surviving X-15 aircraft — immediately initiated internal audits.

All three craft are accounted for.

No airframe has been missing, borrowed, or transferred.

No classified test of an X-15 derivative has been conducted since the 1970s.

And there is no known record of an X-15 flight exceeding its historical maximum altitude of 107.

8 km, achieved by pilot Joe Walker on August 22, 1963.

Yet the object seen by the IOP-3 crew bore the correct dimensions, surface paneling, and experimental markings.

Even the distinctive ablative coating — a charcoal-black heat shield unique to the X-15 — appeared intact, though worn.

Shortly after detection, the IOP-3 crew attempted to track the object using the station’s radar system.

Strangely, the craft produced no transponder signal, no identifiable plasma trail, and almost no radar signature, as if it were either hollow or constructed of materials inconsistent with 1960s engineering.

Within fourteen minutes of first sighting, the object drifted outside visual range.

It has not been seen again.

Astrophysicist Dr.Lena Morozov, a specialist in aerospace anomalies, described the sighting as “either the greatest aviation mystery in half a century or the most convincing case of misidentified orbital debris ever recorded.

” Yet she also notes that no known debris matches the X-15’s shape.

“You don’t accidentally get something with that exact aerodynamic profile,” she said.

“And you certainly don’t get that paintwork. ”

Some engineers have proposed that an undocumented test flight from the late 1960s may have pushed the X-15 farther than officially recorded — possibly high enough for the craft to enter a decaying suborbital loop and later reappear.

But such a scenario would require the vehicle to have survived nearly sixty years in vacuum without disintegration, a notion most experts consider impossible.

Others have raised more controversial possibilities: a Cold War mission hidden deep within now-forgotten classified archives, or a prototype variant never acknowledged publicly.

Historian Mark Ellwood, who has spent decades studying U.S.

test programs, suggests that “the X-15 was a playground for radical aerospace thinking.

It is not beyond imagination that at least one flight pushed beyond published limits.”

For now, the official explanation remains “under investigation.

” The IOP-3 crew has submitted all visual data to Earth-based analysis teams, who are enhancing the images frame by frame.

Hale, Ellison, and payload officer Dr.Yūsuke Tanaka stand by their account.

“We know what we saw,” Hale stated.

“And whatever it was, it didn’t belong there. ”

Until clearer evidence surfaces, one unsettling question lingers across the aerospace community:

Did something from the dawn of human spaceflight climb higher than history ever recorded — or is a ghost of the Cold War still drifting silently above our world?