What happened
On the evening of 13 March 1997, people across a 300-mile corridor from the Nevada line through Phoenix to Tucson reported strange lights. Two separate things were seen. From about 8 pm, witnesses described a giant V or carpenter's-square shape studded with five lights gliding slowly and silently overhead; in the Prescott Valley area, Tim Ley and his family said it passed low over them before heading toward Phoenix. Around 10 pm, a row of brilliant amber lights appeared to hang motionless south-west of Phoenix before winking out one by one, and was filmed by many residents. Author Robert Sheaffer called it perhaps the most widely witnessed UFO event in history. That June, Governor Fife Symington mocked the furore by unveiling an aide in an alien costume. In 2007 he said he had seen the craft himself that night and called it otherworldly.
The official explanation
Investigators split the event in two. Sheaffer and astronomer James McGaha traced the 8 pm V-shape to a formation of A-10 Thunderbolt II jets from Operation Snowbird flying to Davis-Monthan AFB, and amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley said his telescope showed individual aircraft. The 10 pm lights were attributed to slow-falling illumination flares dropped by Maryland Air National Guard A-10s over the Goldwater Range; pilot Lt. Col. Ed Jones confirmed flying in that formation. Flares setting behind the Sierra Estrella mountains explain why they vanished in sequence.
The anomalous case
The governor of Arizona says he saw it. In 2007 Fife Symington told ABC News he had seen a geometric form with extremely bright lights on the leading edge and was certain it was a UFO, adding that his 1997 alien-costume stunt was meant to calm public hysteria. Many witnesses, including the Ley family, describe a single enormous solid object passing silently, by the Leys' estimate only 100 to 150 feet overhead, which does not sound like separate jets at altitude. The flare explanation covers the later lights but was not tied to the Maryland Guard publicly until months afterwards. Even some sceptics, such as geoscientist Ben McGee, have suggested a large experimental lighter-than-air craft might explain the V, and journalists have noted RAND and DoD studies of a V-shaped near-space airship. Either way, proponents argue, something big flew over Phoenix that was never officially identified.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- Phoenix Lights Wikipedia
- Former Arizona Governor's Close Encounter With UFO ABC News
Witness reports elsewhere
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