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On March 13, 1997, thousands of people in Arizona and Nevada observed strange lights streaking across the sky. These mysterious and unexplainable phenomena have become part of local lore and secured a celebrated place in Ufologist circles as the Phoenix Lights.
“It was definitely not an airplane . . .
I think it was from another world . . .
It was enormous . . .”
Arizona Governor Fife Symington
The first sighting of what became known as the Phoenix Lights was reported in Henderson, Nevada. At 7:55pm, an anonymous man reported seeing a V-shaped object in the sky that he estimated to be around the same size as a Boeing 747. He described this object as having six lights along its edges. It was surprisingly quiet; he compared the sound it made to that of a “rushing wind.”11 The V-shaped craft was traveling in a southeasterly direction and disappeared at high speed over the horizon.
The next report came in at around 8:15pm from Dennis Monroe, a former police officer who lived in the small town of Paulden, Arizona, around 60 miles (97km) north of Phoenix. He was driving north when he spotted five reddish or orange lights in the sky, heading south. It appeared as though four of the lights were together, while the fifth appeared to be trailing them, or, in his own words, “standing back from the others.” The lights were in a V formation, and Monroe estimated that the entire formation covered a part of the sky around the size of his fist held out at arm’s length. Staring at the lights through binoculars, he noticed that each one looked as though it was actually made up of two light sources. The lights disappeared over the southern horizon at approximately the same speed as that of a helicopter. “As a police officer, I learned to control my emotions, but this got me pretty excited,” said Monroe.22
Just minutes later, calls started pouring into the National UFO Reporting Center from citizens of Prescott and Prescott Valley, 15 miles (24km) south of Paulden. A number of people reported seeing four or five bright lights pass overhead. They could tell that the lights were attached to a UFO because its solid shape had blocked out stars in the sky as it passed overhead. The callers all confirmed that the UFO appeared triangular in shape. One eyewitness, John Kaiser, said that he was outside with his wife and sons when he spotted lights in the sky that formed a triangular pattern. The lights were red, except for the front light, which was a bright white. Another observer said that the lights were definitely white, but that they appeared to change color.33 Each person who spotted the UFO asserted that it made no sound, as if it was gliding.
The next sighting came from Dewey, Arizona, around 10 miles (16km) south of Prescott. A group of five adults and one youth was driving along Highway 69 when they noticed a cluster of lights in the sky in a V shape. They pulled into a grocery store parking lot and clambered out to get a better look. The UFO was directly above them and appeared to hover for several minutes. The anonymous driver estimated that it could not have been more than 1,000 feet (305m) up; like the earlier witnesses, he noticed that it was eerily silent. This witness reported the sighting to both Prescott Airport and Luke Air Force Base and was told that they had already received numerous sightings of the unidentified object. However, Luke Air Force Base would subsequently claim that it had received no UFO reports from the public.
Reports then flooded in from other Arizona locations—Chino Valley, Wickenburg, Tempe, Glendale, Phoenix, Kingman, and Tucson. At 8:28pm, Terry Proctor in Scottsdale videoed the strange lights from 56th St. and Carefree Hwy. The tape lasted 42 seconds and showed five small lights in a V formation.
Arizona Governor Fife Symington—a former Air Force pilot—saw the lights around Phoenix and later described what he saw on the popular CNN television talk show Larry King Live : “I saw a craft . . . this large, sort of delta-shaped, wedge-shaped craft moving silently over the valley, over Squaw Peak, dramatically large, very distinctive leading edge with some enormous lights. And it just went on down to the Southeast Valley . . . It was definitely not an airplane . . . I think it was from another world . . . It was enormous . . . the lights over Phoenix was a very compelling, dramatic event seen by so many people that you can’t just blow that off and say everybody in Phoenix was hallucinating.”
At around 8:20pm, real-estate consultant Max Saracen and his wife, Shahla, saw a large, black, triangular object pass low overhead. They estimated that its wingspan was vast, about 10,000 feet (over 3,000m). “It was a solid mass of metal, but we saw no structure. It blocked the stars out. My wife saw some humanoid shapes at some of its windows. The movie Independence Day went through my mind. It was very spooky, this gigantic ship blocking out the stars and silently creeping across the sky. Without a doubt, we believe it was extraterrestrial, from another world.”
Shortly afterward, Tim Ley and his family observed what they described as a large, silent, slow- moving craft in northern Phoenix. Ley said that it was V-shaped and estimated that it had a wingspan of some 1,500ft (457m).44 Nearby, witnesses driving along Interstate 10 described the UFO as blue-gray in color and said that it took around two minutes to pass over their car.55
Truck driver Bill Greiner spotted bright lights while transporting a load of cement down a mountain just north of Phoenix. “Before this, if anybody’d told me they saw a UFO, I would’ve said, ‘Yeah, and I believe in the tooth fairy,’ ” he said. “I may be just a dumb truck driver but I’ve seen something that don’t belong here.”66 When Greiner spotted the lights, he was within a mile of Luke Air Force Base. He was adamant that, in addition to the lights, he saw three F-16s take off and veer toward the lights. However, when the aircraft came close to the lights, they shot straight up and disappeared “like a blink of an eye.”
Many witnesses of the Phoenix Lights preferred to remain anonymous, perhaps fearing ridicule or wishing to avoid publicity. An anonymous young man in Phoenix who referred to himself as an amateur astronomer spotted the lights as they passed to the west of his home. He described them as solid and unblinking and attached to a UFO. He also said that each light was in fact two smaller lights. Two normal aircraft were flying nearby, one of which turned away from the UFO toward the west, while the other turned away toward the east.
A woman in Phoenix described an object hovering above her house for around five minutes. The UFO then began to slowly move toward the south and appeared to fire a red beam of light from its bow before disappearing out of sight.
A Tucson resident informed the National UFO Reporting Center that he had watched a cluster of lights in the sky for 15 minutes from 8:45 to 9pm. He said that they had come from the northwest and hovered in the sky, before moving south in a “nose-to-tail” formation before disappearing behind a mountain.
A few miles away, Mitch Stanley saw the lights and aimed his 10-in (25.4cm) telescope at them. He discerned that each light was actually two lights on an aircraft with squared wings. “They were planes. There’s no way I could have mistaken that,” he later told the Arizona Republic newspaper. At around 10pm that night, lights were also spotted over the Gila River and then back over southern Phoenix. 20 minutes later, a retired airline pilot and several others watched as different circular objects flew over Scottsdale Road in Phoenix. According to one of these witnesses, a retired US marshal, the city’s lights reflected off the UFO’s underside as it flew overhead, blocking out the stars.
In fact, thousands of people saw the lights between 7:55 and 10:30pm as they passed over a 300-mile corridor from the Nevada state line through Phoenix, Arizona, to the northern edge of Tucson, before heading back toward Phoenix. The majority of the reports mentioned a triangular or V-shaped object with linear or diamond-shaped lights along its sides. Some eyewitnesses described two lights on each side with one trailing behind, whereas others described three lights on each side with one trailing behind. Witnesses were divided as to whether the lights were from some kind of large aircraft or independent entities. Those who believed that the lights were on some kind of large craft came to this conclusion because they noticed that its shape blotted out stars as it moved across the night sky. Others, however, said that stars could be seen twinkling between the lights. Most witnesses described the lights as being white, but others claimed they were either red, amber, or green; some said the lights where initially white or amber and then changed to red or green.
Differences of opinion in witnesses’ accounts led to speculation that people could have seen two completely different objects in the sky. Dr. Lynne D. Kitei, a witness to the Phoenix Lights, spent 12 years investigating the events of that night. In her 2004 book Phoenix Lights: A Skeptic’s Discovery That We Are Not Alone, she concluded that there could have been up to 10 different UFOs. “Whether it was one craft that could morph or a parade of different crafts, we may never know.”77
Four months after the sightings, the Arizona Air National Guard issued a statement claiming that the mysterious lights were simply flares dropped during a Maryland Air National Guard training exercise. It was standard procedure for military planes to release unused flares before landing. The Public Affairs Office at Luke Air Force Base also announced that they had investigated the Phoenix Lights and established that they were flares that had been launched from eight A-10 jets that had been flying over the Gila Bend Bombing Range, located around 60 miles (96.5km) southwest of Phoenix. They claimed that the jets had dropped high-intensity flares from 15,000 feet (4,572m) to illuminate the target area; the flares fell slowly on parachutes and illuminated a wide area. The statement read:
“[The aircraft] left Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson at 8:15pm and returned at 10:00pm. They were authorized to use the Goldwater range which is near Gila Bend. After their flare exercise they were returning when they realized they had more flares on board. Base regulations forbid planes from landing with flares so they were jettisoned as the planes approached the base.”
Even the biggest UFO skeptics found this explanation difficult to accept, and the Arizona Air National Guard’s statement prompted a slew of conspiracy theories. Phoenix City Councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood—who had not seen the lights herself—announced that her office wanted to know more about the sightings. She promptly received more than 700 reports. In addition, she believed that many more who had seen the lights that night did not come forward for fear of being ridiculed. “[The National Guard statement] was an insult to the intelligence of the witnesses,” she said. “The message to Arizona citizens was that reporting this was stupid.”
When officers at Luke Air Force Base were questioned in the immediate aftermath, they refuted witness reports that jets had been scrambled to intercept the lights. They did confirm that F-16s had been sent from the base that night, but said that it was for routine night training. According to Public Affairs Spokesman Senior Airman Petosky, “I can tell you flat out that there was no intercept that night of any lights formation.”88
For many people, this official statement raised more questions than it answered: Why had the Public Affairs Office not mentioned the dropping of flares in connection with the F-16s? Why had the Arizona Air National Guard waited four months before dismissing the lights as flares? Why, after seeing the furor the lights had created, hadn’t the F-16 pilots themselves come forward? Official responses also didn’t explain why numerous people had seen the lights in locations other than the Phoenix area, nor did they offer any clarity to those who claimed to have seen an object silently hover overhead. Furthermore, flares drift downward on parachutes, yet none of the witnesses described the lights as traveling in a downward trajectory. In 2007, Arizona Governor Fife Symington said that what he observed that night “couldn’t have been flares because it was so symmetrical . . .”44
However, not everyone was prepared to dismiss the authorities’ explanation of the Phoenix Lights. Robert Sheaffer of Skeptical Inquirer magazine asserted that the Phoenix Lights resulted from two separate incidents, both connected to a program named Operation Snowbird. This was a pilot-training program operated by the Air National Guard out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. Firstly, he claimed that those who believed they had seen a single V-shaped object were mistaken: They had actually seen five A-10 jets flying in formation. These aircraft were part of Operation Snowbird, and they had flown from Tucson to Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas several days earlier. Shaeffer suggested that on the night that the lights were seen in the sky, the A-10 jets were returning from Las Vegas to Tucson and were flying under visual flight rules, meaning that they did not need to check in with airports along the route. He claimed that, because the A-10 jets were flying in formation, they were employing unblinking formation lights instead of their usual blinking collision lights.
Secondly, Shaeffer reiterated what the Maryland Air National Guard and the Public Affairs Office at Luke Air Force Base had previously announced: The lights seen in the Phoenix area around 10pm were flare drops from a set of different A-10 jets from the Maryland Air National Guard that were also operating out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.44
Shaeffer’s attempt to explain away the Phoenix Lights event met with much criticism. All of the eyewitnesses had stated that the lights were completely silent (unlike a jet fighter), and many had described the lights as hovering, as opposed to flying. Moreover, the lights moved at a much higher speed than any conventional aircraft and were unlike those of any known aircraft. “The object apparently covered the distance between Paulden and Prescott, AZ—not less than 30 miles [48km]—in approximately 1–2 minutes . . . and the lights seen on it were not consistent with any type of strobe lights or navigational lights on any type of known aircraft, either private or commercial,” observed Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center.99 Furthermore, Sky Harbor Air Traffic Control stated that they had spotted the lights in the sky but that no aircraft had showed up on their radar. On March 8, 2000, three Air National Guard pilots tried to reenact the Phoenix Lights using flares, but could not replicate the formation. In addition, the flares gave off smoke, but no witnesses reported seeing smoke.
Some commentators wondered whether the Phoenix Lights were some sort of secret military exercise. If so, that would explain why no aircraft showed up on Sky Harbor Air Traffic Control’s radar screens. According to Mutual UFO Network field investigator Richard Motzer, “The event might have been a military exercise creating holographic images, which would explain why the description varies so much on the object seen that night.”77 Phoenix City councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood attempted to pry the truth from the government but was rebuffed. “Well, if it was a secret military maneuver, flying over the sixth-largest city in the nation was not a particularly bright idea,” she said. “If the lights were anything else, from an Iraqi invasion to an extraterrestrial visitor, the government needs to let us know if for no other reason than to prevent our imaginations from running rampant.”1010
In the immediate aftermath of the incident, there was speculation that the lights seen in the sky may have been the Hale-Bopp comet. It was a warm, clear evening and many people—like Mutual UFO Network field investigator Alan Morey—were outside, hoping to observe the comet. However, this theory was refuted because a comet appears virtually stationary, while the lights were seen moving rapidly. In fact, a number of people reported seeing both the comet and strange lights in the sky at the same time. James and Fawn Clements were in Kingman, Arizona, when they saw bright lights to the right of the Hale-Bopp comet at around 8pm. They wondered if another comet had materialized, and through binoculars they discerned five orbs flying southeast in a V-shaped formation.
Alan Morey, who on that night was hoping to view the Hale-Bopp comet, recalled in 2010: “We were on my patio facing due north at 8:30pm. We had binoculars and had been watching planes land. We saw a cluster of lights coming from the direction of the [Hale-Bopp] comet and moving independently. Extremely bright lights, pale orange in color. Through the binoculars we could see five independent objects. We knew they were separate because we could see stars between them. They were in a delta wing configuration headed south. The whole array went over my home. We could hear nothing as they disappeared over South Mountain. My personal view is that it was a military stealth exercise from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada or Holloman Air Force Base in California.”
Perhaps coincidentally, the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, a V-shaped stealth bomber with a wingspan of more than 170ft (52m), came into service with the US Air Force in 1997. The question remains whether the military would risk a training exercise so close to Phoenix’s three busy airports—Deer Valley, Goodyear, and Sky Harbor—unless it was to test the stealth bomber’s ability to evade traditional radar detection.
One of the most prevalent explanations for the Phoenix Lights, in Ufologist circles at least, is that they were a UFO invading US airspace. Some believe that a single UFO was involved; others are adamant that there were multiple UFOs, accounting for the variety of craft and light descriptions. In addition—a recurring meme of reported UFO sightings—some Ufologists maintain that the event was covered up by the authorities.
Accusations of a cover-up stem from the mixed messages that emanated from Luke Air Force Base at the time of the sightings. The National UFO Reporting Center subsequently received a phone call from an unidentified young man who claimed to be an airman stationed at Luke Air Force Base. He reported that two USAF F-15C fighters had been scrambled to intercept a large triangular object flying at 18,000 feet (5,486m) over Phoenix. He claimed that they had photographed the UFO with gun cameras before returning to Luke Air Force Base. Two days later, the airman called back to say that his commander had informed him that he was being transferred to an assignment in Greenland, and the Center never heard from him again. The National UFO Reporting Center added that despite the extensive knowledge the caller seemingly had, they were unable to corroborate his claims and were never able to identify him.
Then in January 2009, a witness who identified himself only as “AL” posted on the AboveTopSecret online forum. AL claimed to have firsthand knowledge of how the United States Air Force had responded to the Phoenix Lights incident. He wrote, “USAF personnel stationed at both Luke AFB in Glendale and Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson were a bit scared, as something was occurring over the skies of central and southern Arizona that night, and the on-duty personnel at both bases had no idea what it was.” He claimed that Luke Air Force Base scrambled two F-16Cs from the 56th Fighter Wing and sent them in the direction of Tucson, armed with two AIM-9M Sidewinder Missiles and 2-mm Vulcan Cannons. Around ten minutes later, another set of F-16Cs were scrambled, with two additional AIM-7M Sparrow missiles. The anonymous writer claimed that pilots from the first group reported on radio that “something odd” was going on and that they had picked up a radar contact a few thousand feet below and several miles ahead of their position. Their radar showed “clutter,” indicative of long-distance, stand-off jamming. He claimed that they then managed to regain radar contact and picked up something large and low “that was beginning to accelerate rapidly.” They then lost radar contact with the UFO around 7 miles (11km) south of Tucson and were ordered to proceed close to the state border and attempt to regain contact. After losing contact, the second group of jets was ordered back to Luke Air Force Base, and around ten minutes later the first jets were ordered back as well.
AL claimed that all of this unfolded while the lights were being spotted in the sky southwest of Phoenix and put forward the theory that the Air Force had dropped flares as a “deception measure” to distract potential observers from focusing on unexplainable phenomena. “Flares were never used that far north of the Goldwater training range . . . If they were, there would be weekly Phoenix Lights incidents,” he wrote.1111 This distraction theory had already been widely circulated. On the night of the Phoenix Lights, an America West 757 airliner heading to Las Vegas noticed strange lights just north of Phoenix. The three pilots asked the regional air-traffic control center in Albuquerque what the lights were. A controller radioed back to say that the lights were a flight of CT-144s at 19,000 feet (5,791m). Overhearing this exchange, a pilot claiming to be part of the formation radioed back: “We’re Canadian Snowbirds flying tutors. We’re headed to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.” The America West crew was perplexed—why were they flying in show formation at night with their landing lights on and pointed downward? The 757 pilots said it appeared as though the Canadian Snowbirds were trying to draw attention to themselves for some reason.
The Phoenix Lights event remains the largest-ever mass UFO sighting, cementing Arizona’s place in UFO folklore. According to UFO paranormal researcher and author Tom Dongo, “The result of the Phoenix Lights was that it opened a lot of people’s minds to the possibility of UFOs.”
In 2007, 2008, and 2011, the Phoenix Lights allegedly reappeared, placing Phoenix in the top rank of cities with the most recorded UFO sightings.1212 In 2007, the USAF declared, once again, that the lights seen were flares dropped during F-16 training at Luke Air Force Base; and in 2008, the lights were allegedly caused by a man attaching flares to helium balloons. The 2011 sighting has been attributed to a team of nighttime skydivers named the Arizona Skyhawks performing at an event named the Halloween Balloon Spooktacular by jumping out of their plane while carrying flares.
Despite the fact that numerous books, documentaries, radio shows, and even movies have tried to explain the Phoenix Lights, they remain an enigma—and one that had unexpected, tragic consequences. Just 13 days after the reported sightings, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult committed suicide. They were convinced that trailing the Hale-Bopp comet was a UFO that would carry them all to a better world.