The Phoenix Lights

Thursday, 13 March 1997. Between about 7:30 and 10:30 pm, reports came in along a corridor of some 300 miles, "from the Nevada line, through Phoenix, to the edge of Tucson." Many people were already outside, watching for the Hale-Bopp comet. What they saw is now remembered as two separate events. A V of lights in the early evening. A row of lights around 10 pm.

The first report came from Henderson, Nevada, at 7:55 pm Arizona time. At 8:15 pm the lights were over Paulden. Then Prescott. Then Phoenix.

In Prescott Valley, Tim Ley was outside with wife Bobbi, son Hal and grandson Damien Turnidge. They saw "five separate and distinct lights in an arc shape." Over ten or so minutes the lights seemed to come closer. The arc became "an upside-down V." It passed about 100 to 150 feet above them, traveling so slowly that it gave the appearance of a silent hovering object. "It was so big and so strange," Ley recalled. "You couldn't actually see the object. All you could see was the outline."

In Phoenix, Mike Fortson watched it cross in front of the Moon and saw "horizontal 'waves' as it passed." Size estimates ran from a 747 to multiple football fields, and up to a mile long.

Fife Symington III was Governor of Arizona. And a pilot. "I saw a huge craft come right over Squaw Peak. It was just breathtaking." At the time, the governor told only one person: Symington's wife. Years later came the rest. "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."

On 19 June 1997, with the story now national, Symington called a press conference. Chief of staff Jay Heiler was led in wearing an alien costume and unmasked. "This just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious."

Around 10 pm, the second display began. A slanting line of bright lights appeared one by one in the sky beyond Phoenix. From a yard in Moon Valley, Mike Krzyston filmed them hovering for minutes, then vanishing in a different order. Weeks later, Phoenix Vice Mayor Frances Emma Barwood raised the lights at a City Council meeting. "I was met by a whole bunch of stares." Barwood's office went on to collect over 700 witness reports.

In July 1997 the Arizona Air National Guard said Maryland Air National Guard A-10s on Operation Snowbird had dropped flares over a range southwest of Phoenix. In 2007, Lt Col Ed Jones confirmed flying in the formation that dropped flares near Gila Bend. Dr Leonid Rudin of Cognitech lined up the night video with a daytime shot of the Sierra Estrella. The lights winked out exactly at the ridgeline. Behind the mountains. Not over the city.

For the V, skeptics point to aircraft in formation. From Scottsdale, amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley watched through a 10-inch telescope. "Planes… There's no way I could have mistaken that." Astronomer James McGaha called it "clearly aircraft in formation, flying at two different times and then dropping flares." Symington was unmoved. Flares may have been in the sky that night, but the craft over Squaw Peak had nothing to do with them.

Dr Lynne Kitei, a Phoenix physician, photographed lights that night and took about seven years to come forward. "I have no idea what they were." A book and a documentary followed, then feature films such as Phoenix Forgotten. The flares have an answer. For many who stood under the V, the first event still does not.