The Phoenix Lights

On the evening of Thursday, March 13, 1997, thousands of people across Arizona looked up at the sky and saw something they couldn’t explain.

It started around 7:30 p.m., when people in the northwest of the state, near the Nevada border, reported seeing a cluster of lights moving through the sky in a V-shaped formation. Over the next hour or so, the reports moved south along a path of more than two hundred miles — through Prescott, over the outskirts of Phoenix, and on toward Tucson. Witnesses called police, local airports, television stations and military bases.

What many of them described was not just a set of lights, but a single, enormous object: a dark, V-shaped or boomerang-shaped craft, gliding silently and slowly overhead, with lights on its edges, blocking out the stars as it passed. Some said it was a mile wide.

Then, around 10 p.m., a second set of lights appeared — a row of bright, glowing orbs hanging motionless in the sky south of Phoenix, which slowly faded out one by one. Many people captured these on video.

It became one of the most widely witnessed UFO sightings in history.

The Witnesses

The witnesses were a broad cross-section of the public: families sitting in their backyards, pilots, police officers, retirees, children. Many of them were not people who believed in UFOs. Many of them were shaken.

Some described the object as so big that it seemed to fill the sky. Some said it moved so slowly it seemed to hover, without making any sound. Some said they felt they could have thrown a rock and hit it. Some reported that it was black, with no visible structure, only the lights, and that they could tell it was solid only because the stars disappeared behind it.

The reports came in from many different places, over a period of more than an hour, and the descriptions were often similar.

The Flares

The second set of lights, the ones seen around 10 p.m., were the ones that most people captured on video. And they turned out to have the most straightforward explanation.

That night, Air National Guard A-10 attack jets from Maryland were taking part in a training exercise called Operation Snowbird, at the Barry M. Goldwater Range, a military training area south of Phoenix. As part of the exercise, the pilots dropped illumination flares — bright magnesium flares that float slowly down on small parachutes, used to light up the battlefield at night. The flares were released at high altitude over the range and burned for several minutes before going out.

Seen from Phoenix, dozens of miles away, the flares appeared to hang motionless in the sky, and then disappear one by one as they dropped behind the mountains south of the city. Video analysis by investigators matched the position of the lights with the mountains on the horizon. The Air Force eventually confirmed the flare drop.

The V-Shaped Craft

But the flares didn’t explain the earlier sightings — the giant, silent, V-shaped object reported by so many people across the state between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m.

Skeptics have offered an explanation for those too. They suggest that many of the witnesses may have seen a formation of small planes, flying together at night with their lights on, which looked like a single object to people on the ground. There were reports that a group of pilots flying small aircraft in formation was in the area that night. In the dark, the human brain naturally tends to “connect the dots” between lights moving together and perceive them as a single solid object, even blocking out the stars between them.

Many of the witnesses reject that explanation. They insist that what they saw was a single, solid, enormous object, and that it was not a group of planes.

The Governor

In the days after the sighting, the story became a national sensation, and the public demanded answers. Some state officials were pressed to investigate.

The governor of Arizona at the time, Fife Symington, responded by holding a news conference in June 1997, at which one of his aides walked in wearing an alien costume and handcuffs. The governor said he had found “the guilty party.” The press conference was meant as a joke, to lighten the mood. Many witnesses were furious.

Ten years later, in 2007, Symington, by then out of office, made a surprising admission. He said that he himself had seen the V-shaped object on the night of March 13, 1997. He described it as a massive, delta-shaped craft, silently navigating over the Squaw Peak area of Phoenix. He said it was otherworldly, and that he had been one of the witnesses all along. He said he’d made light of it at the time because he didn’t want to cause panic.

Still Unexplained

The Phoenix Lights remain one of the most famous and controversial UFO sightings in modern history. Every few years, there are documentaries and anniversary articles. Witnesses still gather to talk about what they saw.

The flares are well explained. The earlier sightings remain a matter of fierce debate. And for many of the people who stood in their yards in Arizona on that clear March night, staring up at something enormous passing silently overhead, no explanation will ever be enough.