Phoenix Lights

A drawing of the object created by witness Tim Ley appeared in USA Today.

The Phoenix Lights (sometimes called the "Lights over Phoenix") were a series of widely sighted unidentified flying objects observed in the skies over Arizona and Nevada in the United States, and Sonora, Mexico on Thursday, March 13, 1997.

Lights of varying descriptions were seen by thousands of people between 19:30 and 22:30 MST, in a space of about 300 miles (480 km), from the Nevada line, through Phoenix, to the edge of Tucson.

There were allegedly two distinct events involved in the incident: a triangular formation of lights seen to pass over the state, and a series of stationary lights seen in the Phoenix area. The United States Air Force identified the second group of lights as flares dropped by A-10 Warthog aircraft that were on training exercises at the Barry Goldwater Range in southwest Arizona.

Witnesses claim to have observed a huge carpenter's square-shaped UFO, containing five spherical lights or possibly light-emitting engines. Fife Symington, the governor at the time, was one witness to this incident; he later called the object "otherworldly."

The lights were reported to have reappeared in 2007 and 2008, but these events were quickly attributed to (respectively) military flares dropped by fighter aircraft at Luke Air Force Base and flares attached to helium balloons released by a civilian.

Timeline

Initial reports

At about 18:55 PST (19:55 MST), a man reported seeing a V-shaped object above Henderson, Nevada. He said it was about the "size of a (Boeing) 747", sounded like "rushing wind", and had six lights on its leading edge. The lights reportedly traversed northwest to the southeast.

An unidentified former police officer from Paulden, Arizona is claimed to have been the next person to report a sighting after leaving his house at about 20:15 MST. As he was driving north, he allegedly saw a cluster of reddish or orange lights in the sky, comprising four lights together and a fifth light trailing them. Each of the individual lights in the formation appeared to the witness to consist of two separate point sources of orange light. He returned home and through binoculars watched the lights until they disappeared south over the horizon.

Prescott and Prescott Valley

Lights were also reportedly seen in the areas of Prescott and Prescott Valley. At approximately 20:17 MST, callers began reporting the object was definitely solid, because it blocked out much of the starry sky as it passed over.

John Kaiser was standing outside with his wife and sons in Prescott Valley when they noticed a cluster of lights to the west-northwest of their position. The lights formed a triangular pattern, but all of them appeared to be red, except the light at the nose of the object, which was distinctly white. The object, or objects, which had been observed for approximately 2 to 3 minutes with binoculars, then passed directly overhead the observers, they were seen to "Bank to the right", and they then disappeared in the night sky to the southeast of Prescott Valley. The altitude could not be determined, however it was fairly low and made no sound whatsoever.

The National UFO Reporting Center received the following report from the Prescott area:

While doing astrophotography I observed five yellow-white lights in a "V" formation moving slowly from the northwest, across the sky to the northeast, then turn almost due south and continue until out of sight. The point of the "V" was in the direction of movement. The first three lights were in a fairly tight "V" while two of the lights were further back along the lines of the "V"'s legs. During the NW-NE transit one of the trailing lights moved up and joined the three and then dropped back to the trailing position. I estimated the three light "V" to cover about 0.5 degrees of sky and the whole group of five lights to cover about 1 degree of sky.

Dewey

At the town of Dewey, 10 miles (16 km) east of Prescott, Arizona, six people saw a large cluster of lights while driving northbound on Highway 69.

First sighting from Phoenix

Tim Ley and his wife Bobbi, his son Hal and his grandson Damien Turnidge first saw the lights when they were above Prescott Valley about 65 miles (100 km) away from them. At first they appeared to them as five separate and distinct lights in an arc-shape like they were on top of a balloon, but they soon realized the lights appeared to be moving towards them. Over the next ten or so minutes they appeared to be coming closer and the distance between the lights increased and they took on the shape of an upside down V. Eventually when the lights appeared to be a couple of miles away the witnesses could make out a shape that looked like a 60-degree carpenter's square with the five lights set into it, with one at the front and two on each side. Soon the object with the embedded lights appeared to be coming right down the street where they lived about 100 to 150 feet (30 to 45 meters) above them, traveling so slowly it appeared to hover and was silent. The object then seemed to pass over their heads and went through a V opening in the peaks of the mountain range towards Squaw Peak Mountain and toward the direction of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Witnesses in Glendale, a suburb northwest of Phoenix, saw the object pass overhead at an altitude high enough to become obscured by the thin clouds; this was at approximately between 20:30 and 20:45 MST.

Arriving in Phoenix

When the triangular formation entered the Phoenix area, Bill Greiner, a cement driver hauling a load down a mountain north of Phoenix, described the second group of lights: "I'll never be the same. Before this, if anybody had told me they saw a UFO, I would've said, 'Yeah and I believe in the Tooth Fairy.' Now I've got a whole new view and I may be just a dumb truck driver, but I've seen something that don't belong here." Greiner stated that the lights hovered over the area for more than two hours.

After Phoenix

A report came from a young man in the Kingman area who stopped his car at a payphone to report the incident. "[The] young man, en route to Los Angeles, called from a phone booth to report having seen a large and bizarre cluster of stars moving slowly in the northern sky".

Arizona Missing Persons

Four Phoenix Men were reported missing in the Estrella Mountains March 14, 1997. Glenn Lauder (28), Mitch Adams (29), Ryan Stone (27), and Jacob Reynolds (28) were reported missing after they were last seen off-roading at the base of the Estrella Mountain range, where the sightings took place.

Reappearance in 2007

A repeat of the lights occurred February 6, 2007, and was recorded by the local Fox News television station. According to military officials and the Federal Aviation Administration, these were flares dropped by F-16 aircraft training at Luke Air Force Base.

Reappearance in 2008

On April 21, 2008, lights were again reported over North Phoenix by local residents. According to witnesses, the lights formed a vertical line, then spread apart and made a diamond shape. The lights also formed a U-shape at one time. Tony Toporek video taped the lights. He was talking to neighbors at 8 p.m. when the lights appeared. He went and grabbed his camera to get the lights on video. A valley resident reported that shortly after the lights appeared, three jets were seen heading west in the direction of the lights. An official from Luke Air Force Base denied any United States Air Force activity in the area. On April 22, 2008, a resident of Phoenix told a newspaper that the lights were nothing more than his neighbor releasing helium balloons with flares attached. The following day a Phoenix resident who declined to be identified in news reports stated he had attached flares to helium balloons and released them from his back yard. However, no name or pictures of the reported hoaxter were ever released, nor was anyone cited, ticketed or charged from the supposed releasing of flares over a residential area that at the time was enduring a record drought.

Photographic documentation

Imagery of the Phoenix Lights falls into two categories: images of the triangular formation seen prior to 22:00 MST in Prescott and Dewey, and images of the 22:00 MST Phoenix event. Almost all known images are of the second event. All known images were produced using a variety of commercially available camcorders and cameras. There are no known images taken by equipment designed for scientific analysis, nor are there any known images taken using high powered optics or night vision equipment.

First event

There are few known images of the Prescott/Dewey lights. Television station KSAZ reported that an individual named Richard Curtis recorded a detailed video that purportedly showed the outline of a spacecraft, but that the video had been lost. The only other known video is of poor quality and shows a group of lights with no craft visible.

Second event

During the Phoenix event, numerous still photographs and videotapes were made, distinctly showing a series of lights appearing at a regular interval, remaining illuminated for several moments and then going out. These images have been repeatedly aired by documentary television channels such as the Discovery Channel and the History Channel as part of their UFO documentary programming.

The most frequently seen sequence shows what appears to be an arc of lights appearing one by one, then going out one by one. UFO advocates claim that these images show that the lights were some form of "running light" or other aircraft illumination along the leading edge of a large craft — estimated to be as large as a mile (1.6 km) in diameter — hovering over the city of Phoenix. Other similar sequences reportedly taken over a half hour period show differing numbers of lights in a V or arrowhead array. Thousands of witnesses throughout Arizona also reported a silent, mile wide V or boomerang shaped craft with varying numbers of huge orbs. A significant number of witnesses reported that the craft was silently gliding directly overhead at low altitude. The first-hand witnesses consistently reported that the lights appeared as "canisters of swimming light", while the underbelly of the craft was undulating "like looking through water". However, skeptics claim that the video is evidence that mountains not visible at night partially obstructed views from certain angles, thereby bolstering the claim that the lights were more distant than UFO advocates claim.

UFO advocate Jim Dilettoso claimed to have performed "spectral analysis" of photographs and video imagery that proved the lights could not have been produced by a man-made source. Dilettoso claimed to have used software called "Image Pro Plus" (exact version unknown) to determine the amount of red, green and blue in the various photographic and video images and construct histograms of the data, which were then compared to several photographs known to be of flares. Several sources have pointed out, however, that it is impossible to determine the spectral signature of a light source based solely on photographic or video imagery, as film and electronics inherently alter the spectral signature of a light source by shifting hue in the visible spectrum, and experts in spectroscopy have dismissed his claims as being scientifically invalid. Normal photographic equipment also eliminates light outside the visible spectrum — e.g., infrared and ultraviolet — that would be necessary for a complete spectral analysis. The maker of "Image Pro Plus", Media Cybernetic, has stated that its software is incapable of performing spectroscopic analysis.

Cognitech, an independent video laboratory, superimposed video imagery taken of the Phoenix Lights onto video imagery it shot during daytime from the same location. In the composite image, the lights are seen to extinguish at the moment they reach the Estrella mountain range, which is visible in the daytime, but invisible in the footage shot at night. A broadcast by local Fox Broadcasting Company affiliate KSAZ-TV claimed to have performed a similar test that showed the lights were in front of the mountain range and suggested that the Cognitech data might have been altered. Dr. Paul Scowen, visiting professor of Astronomy at Arizona State University, performed a third analysis using daytime imagery overlaid with video shot of the lights and his findings were consistent with Cognitech. The Phoenix New Times subsequently reported the television station had simply overlaid two video tracks on a video editing machine without using a computer to match the zoom and scale of the two images.

Wind direction data

Wind direction measured independently by several weather stations in the Phoenix area and archived by the National Climate Data Center is consistent with reports about the movement of the lights. During the events, wind direction (origin) was changing from roughly west (i.e. blowing towards the east) to north (i.e. blowing towards the south). This supports the hypothesis that the flying objects were wind driven and could simply have been balloons or flares.

Wind direction in Phoenix, AZ on March 13-14 1997. Wind is reported by the direction from which it originates. Data courtesy of NOAA National Climate Data Center.

Explanations

There is some controversy as to how best to classify the reports on the night in question. Some are of the opinion that the differing nature of the eyewitness reports indicates that several unidentified objects were in the area, each of which was its own separate "event". This is largely dismissed by skeptics as an over-extrapolation from the kind of deviation common in necessarily subjective eyewitness accounts. The media and most skeptical investigators have largely preferred to split the sightings into two distinct classes, a first and second event, for which two separate explanations are offered:

First event

The first event — the "V", which appeared over northern Arizona and gradually traveled south over nearly the entire length of the state, eventually passing south of Tucson — was the apparently "wedge-shaped" object reported by then-Governor Symington and many others. This event started at about 20:15 MST over the Prescott area, and was seen south of Tucson by about 20:45 MST.

Proponents of two separate events propose that the first event still has no provable explanation, but that some evidence exists that the lights were in fact airplanes. According to an article by reporter Janet Gonzales that appeared in the Phoenix New Times, videotape of the v shape shows the lights moving as separate entities, not as a single object; a phenomenon known as illusory contours can cause the human eye to see unconnected lines or dots as forming a single shape.

Mitch Stanley, an amateur astronomer, observed high altitude lights flying in formation using a Dobsonian telescope giving 43× magnification. After observing the lights, he told his mother, who was present at the time, that the lights were aircraft. According to Stanley, the lights were quite clearly individual airplanes; a companion who was with him recalled asking Stanley at the time what the lights were, and he said, "Planes". When Stanley first gave an account of his observation at the Discovery Channel Town Hall Meeting with all the witnesses there he was shouted down in his assertion that what he saw was what other witnesses saw. Some have claimed that Stanley was seeing the Maryland National Guard jets flying in formation during a routine training mission at the Barry M. Goldwater bombing range south of Phoenix. His account as to the nature of the lights that moved in formation that night is contradicted by several thousand Phoenix residents without high powered telescopes, however, and no military or civilian aircraft formations were known to have been flying in the area at that time.

Second event

The second event was the set of nine lights appearing to "hover" over the city of Phoenix at around 10 pm. The second event has been more thoroughly covered by the media, due in part to the numerous video images taken of the lights. This was also observed by numerous people who may have thought they were seeing the same lights as those reported earlier.

The U.S. Air Force explained the second event as slow-falling, long-burning LUU-2B/B illumination flares dropped by a flight of four A-10 Warthog aircraft on a training exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range at Luke Air Force Base. According to this explanation, the flares would have been visible in Phoenix and appeared to hover due to rising heat from the burning flares creating a "balloon" effect on their parachutes, which slowed the descent. The lights then appeared to wink out as they fell behind the Sierra Estrella, a mountain range to the southwest of Phoenix.

A Maryland Air National Guard pilot, Lt. Col. Ed Jones, responding to a March 2007 media query, confirmed that he had flown one of the aircraft in the formation that dropped flares on the night in question. The squadron to which he belonged was in fact at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona on a training exercise at the time and flew training sorties to the Barry Goldwater Range on the night in question, according to the Maryland Air National Guard. A history of the Maryland Air National Guard published in 2000 asserted that the squadron, the 104th Fighter Squadron, was responsible for the incident. The first reports that members of the Maryland Air National Guard were responsible for the incident were published in The Arizona Republic newspaper in July 1997.

Military flares such as these can be seen from hundreds of miles given ideal environmental conditions. Later comparisons with known military flare drops were reported on local television stations, showing similarities between the known military flare drops and the Phoenix Lights. An analysis of the luminosity of LUU-2B/B illumination flares, the type which would have been in use by A-10 aircraft at the time, determined that the luminosity of such flares at a range of approximately 50–70 miles would fall well within the range of the lights viewed from Phoenix.

Dr. Bruce Maccabee did an extensive triangulation of the four videotapes, determining that the objects were near or over the Goldwater Proving Grounds. Page 5 of Dr. Maccabee's analysis refers to Bill Hamilton and Tom King's sighting position at Steve Blonder's home. Blonder has worked with Dr. Maccabee to fully include his sighting position in the triangulation report. Maccabee has also refined three other sighting positions and lines of sight in 2012.

Public response

News media

There was minimal news coverage at the time of the incident. In Phoenix, a small number of local news outlets noted the event, but it received little attention beyond that. But on June 18, 1997, USA Today ran a front-page story that brought national attention to the case. This was followed by news coverage on the ABC and NBC television networks. The case quickly caught the popular imagination and has since become a staple of UFO-related documentary television, including specials produced by the History Channel and the Discovery Channel.

Governor

Shortly after the lights, Arizona Governor Fife Symington III held a press conference, stating that "they found who was responsible". He proceeded to make light of the situation by bringing his aide on stage dressed in an alien costume. (Dateline, NBC). But in March 2007, Symington said that he had witnessed one of the "crafts of unknown origin" during the 1997 event, although he did not go public with the information. In an interview with The Daily Courier in Prescott, Arizona, Symington said, "I'm a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I've ever seen. It remains a great mystery. Other people saw it, responsible people. I don't know why people would ridicule it". Symington had earlier said, "It was enormous and inexplicable. Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too. It was dramatic. And it couldn't have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape.

Symington also noted that he requested information from the commander of Luke Air Force Base, the general of the National Guard, and the head of the Department of Public Safety. But none of the officials he contacted had an answer for what had happened, and were also perplexed. Later, he responded to an Air Force explanation that the lights were flares: "As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man made object I'd ever seen. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don't fly in formation". In an episode of the television show UFO Hunters called "The Arizona Lights", Symington said that he contacted the military asking what the lights were. The response was "no comment". He pointed out that he was the governor of Arizona at the time, not just some ordinary civilian.

Frances Barwood, the 1997 Phoenix city councilwoman who launched an investigation into the event, said that of the over 700 witnesses she interviewed, "The government never interviewed even one".

Related films

• The Phoenix Lights...We Are Not Alone Documentary, Lynne D. Kitei, M.D., Executive Producer, in collaboration with Steve Lantz Productions. Based on the book, The Phoenix Lights...A Skeptic's Discovery That We Are Not Alone and featuring Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, former Governor Fife Symington, former Vice Mayor, investigators, military, pilots and witnesses.
• The Appearance of a Man, directed by Daniel Pace.
• Night Skies, a horror movie starring Jason Connery, A.J. Cook, and Ashley Peldon, features the lights. It premiered direct-to-DVD in the US on January 23, 2007.
• They Came from Outer Space (previous title: Phoenix Lights The Movie), a science fiction thriller starring Ossie Beck, Mackenzie Firgens, Yvette Rachelle, Matt Mercer, Terin Alba, Courtney Gains, Mark Arnold, Michael LeMelle, Aaron Mills, and Luke Amsden.
• Out of the Blue, a documentary on The UFO Phenomenon, where a big part of this documentary is about the investigation of the Phoenix Lights, with lots of interviews and animations.

See also

• Black project
• Black triangle (UFO)
• Hessdalen Lights
• Marfa Lights
• Tinley Park Lights
• List of UFO sightings

External links

• Thephoenixlights.net
• Flare Rebuttal by Eyewitness Steve Blonder
• Sign, Christopher (February 21, 2008). "Are Arizona firefighters trained for UFO, alien contact?". KNXV-TV.
• Davenport, Peter (March 13, 1997). "National UFO Reporting Center Special Report: Phoenix Lights - 2 Years Later". National UFO Reporting Center.
• Dickerson, John. "Unidentified", Times Publications, November 2006