The Phoenix Lights

Starting around 8 p.m. on 13 March 1997, people in northern and central Arizona began reporting a set of lights moving slowly in a V or boomerang shape. Reports came from the Prescott area and continued south toward Phoenix and beyond. Some witnesses described separate lights moving together. Others described a single dark, silent object so large that it blocked out the stars as it passed overhead.

Around 10 p.m., a different display appeared. A line of bright amber lights seemed to hang motionless low over the horizon southwest of Phoenix, one by one fading out. Because it lasted several minutes and was visible from a large metropolitan area, it was widely videotaped. Those recordings became the famous Phoenix Lights footage shown on national television.

The two events were quickly blended together in the media and in public memory. That confusion has shaped the debate ever since, because an explanation that fits one of them does not necessarily fit the other.

The evidence consists mainly of a very large number of eyewitness reports, many collected by the National UFO Reporting Center and local media, along with home video of the 10 p.m. lights. Video analyses that compared the position of the lights with the mountain skyline concluded that the lights were beyond or behind the Sierra Estrella range, not over the city.

There is little good imagery of the earlier V-shaped formation, which is the part of the evening most important to people who believe something extraordinary happened. Descriptions vary a great deal. Some witnesses reported distinct lights that shifted relative to each other, while others described a rigid, solid object. Reports that an amateur astronomer saw the lights resolve into separate aircraft through a telescope have circulated widely, but they cannot be independently checked.

City councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood called publicly for an investigation in 1997. Physician Lynne Kitei, who said she had seen and photographed lights over Phoenix, later wrote a book and produced a documentary arguing that the events were unexplained.

The U.S. Air Force said that the 10 p.m. lights were illumination flares dropped by A-10 attack aircraft from the Maryland Air National Guard. The planes were in Arizona for a training deployment known as Operation Snowbird and were flying over the Barry M. Goldwater Range. Parachute flares of this kind burn for several minutes while drifting down, which matches the video. As they sink behind the mountains they vanish one at a time.

No agency gave a detailed official explanation for the earlier formation. The most common sceptical view is that it was a group of aircraft flying in formation with their lights on, seen at a distance at night. Under those conditions the human eye often joins separate lights into a single imagined shape.

Many witnesses of the earlier event reject the aircraft explanation. They say the object was silent, moved too slowly, and was so large and solid that it could not have been a group of planes. They also argue that the flare explanation was applied too broadly, as if it resolved the whole evening, when it only accounts for the later display.

The case gained new attention in 2007 when Fife Symington, Arizona’s governor in 1997, said he had personally seen the formation that night and considered it unexplained. In June 1997 he had held a press conference at which an aide appeared in an alien costume, which many saw as mocking public concern. Symington later said he had wanted to calm the public, and believers see his change of position as significant. Sceptics note that his account is a personal recollection given ten years after the event.