{"it":{"id":"UFO-PHX","kind":"ufo","sub":"Mass sighting","name":"Phoenix Lights","place":"Phoenix, Arizona, USA","lat":33.448,"lon":-112.074,"date":"13 March 1997","rep":"Thousands reported lights: a V-shaped formation earlier, and a row of hovering lights around 10 p.m.","off":"In July 1997 the Maryland Air National Guard said its A-10s dropped illumination flares over the Barry M. Goldwater Range around 10 p.m.; Luke AFB said its aircraft were not involved. No official statement covered the earlier V.","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Phoenix Lights","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights"},{"t":"Los Angeles Times, 26 July 1997: Officials Say Mystery Lights May Be Flares (Maryland Air National Guard)","u":"https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-jul-26-mn-16516-story.html"},{"t":"New York Times, 27 July 1997: Flares Caused Old Sky Lights, Air Guard Says","u":"https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/27/us/flares-caused-old-sky-lights-air-guard-says.html"},{"t":"CNN 2007: Fife Symington, I saw a UFO in the Arizona sky","u":"https://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/11/09/simington.ufocommentary/index.html"},{"t":"Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 2016 (PDF)","u":"https://skepticalinquirer.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2016/07/SI-JA-16-16.pdf"}],"tags":["Mass sighting","USA"],"sum":"In 1997, Arizona's governor, Fife Symington, called a press conference about the lights over Phoenix, then brought out his chief of staff in an alien costume. Ten years later he said he had seen the lights himself, and that what he saw was \"otherworldly\".\n\nIt began on the evening of 13 March 1997. From about 7:30 to 10:30 p.m., over roughly 300 miles of Arizona, people reported lights; some described a huge, silent V-shaped craft passing overhead.\n\nThe trouble is that two events got tangled into one. Around 10 p.m., Maryland Air National Guard A-10 jets dropped illumination flares over the Barry M. Goldwater Range during an exercise called Operation Snowbird. The Guard later confirmed it, and investigators matched the most famous video of the night to those flares. The earlier V, seen moving across the state, is the harder case.\n\nLater writers identify the V as a formation of aircraft flying with their lights on, often as the same A-10s, though no document links them; the eye can read separate points as one solid shape. Many witnesses reject that, saying they saw a single object, vast and silent. Symington is now among them: he says he saw a craft, not flares.\n\nThe flares explain the lights on the video. Whether a formation of planes explains the V depends on how far you trust what people remember of a night sky.","qs":["Symington mocked the lights in 1997 and backed them in 2007. What does that reversal tell us about how officials handle sightings?","Can a formation of separate aircraft look like one huge, solid craft to people on the ground, or does the V need another answer?","Many people saw something, and the military says jets and flares. Whose explanation counts most when witnesses and officials disagree?"],"yt":"The flare explanation covers the 10 p.m. lights. What explains the earlier V? Separate the two events in every account you read.","rel":["GOV-NAVY"],"hook":"Arizona's governor mocked the Phoenix Lights in a press conference, then said he'd seen them himself","why":"It shows how a real explanation for part of an event can leave the rest of it open, and how a joke from the top can make people slower to speak."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"UFO-PHX","article":{"title":"The Phoenix Lights, 13 March 1997","dek":"Thousands of Arizonans saw lights over Phoenix on one March night in 1997. The military said aircraft and flares. A telescope saw planes. The state’s governor, who mocked the sightings at the time, later said he had seen the craft himself.","byline":"The Nommo","updated":"31 Oct 2026","sections":[{"h":"The governor in the alien costume","p":["In 1997, the governor of Arizona answered a wave of UFO reports by calling a press conference and producing a member of his staff dressed as an alien [1]. Ten years later, the same man wrote that he had seen the object himself that night [1].","Fife Symington, governor from 1991 to 1997, described the moment in a 2007 article for CNN [1]. He wrote that he saw “a massive delta-shaped, craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak,” a mountain range in Phoenix [1]. He said the joke had lessened panic but “upset many of my constituents” [1].","The sequence on 19 June 1997 was abrupt. That morning, Leslie Kean reported in 2007, he announced on television a full investigation: “We’re going to get to the bottom of this” [7]. That afternoon his chief of staff, Jay Heiler, was led in handcuffed, in a rubber mask and alien costume [7]. “This just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious,” the governor joked [7]. In 2007 he told Kean the state had been “on the brink of hysteria,” and added: “If I had to do it all over again I probably would have handled it differently” [7].","A former Air Force officer and a pilot, he was blunt: “this craft did not resemble any man-made object I’d ever seen” [1]. Few UFO cases have a sitting state governor as a named witness. This one does, though he spoke a decade after the event."]},{"h":"What happened that night","p":["On the evening of Thursday 13 March 1997, people across Arizona reported lights in the sky [5]. Sightings placed a group of lights north of Prescott at about 8.15 p.m. and south of Tucson by 8.45 p.m. [5]. That is about 200 miles in 30 minutes, an air speed of around 400 miles per hour [5].","Many people were already outside. Comet Hale-Bopp was near its closest approach to Earth and visible in the north-west, as bright a comet as had been seen in 20 years, the Phoenix New Times noted [9]. One witness, Bob Nelson, told ABC News the object “was moving real slow” [8]. Another, Thomas Chavez, said it was “definitely not an aircraft” [8].","Many witnesses described the lights as slow and low, perhaps 1,000 feet up [5]. Some described a single huge V or triangle with lights on its leading edge [6].","Later that evening, at about 10 p.m., a second display appeared: a row of bright, apparently stationary lights low over the horizon south-west of Phoenix [6]. That row was filmed by several people, and it is the footage most often shown as the Phoenix Lights [6].","The skeptical writer Robert Sheaffer, writing in Skeptical Inquirer, stresses that these were two unrelated incidents that are usually merged into one [6]."]},{"h":"The military explanation","p":["A first hint came from television. In June 1997, KPNX-TV reporter Blair Meeks filmed a military flare drop over the gunnery ranges south-west of Phoenix, and the hovering lights looked remarkably like the 10 p.m. lights of 13 March [9]. Within days the Tucson Weekly reported that Maryland Air National Guard A-10s had been over the range that night [9].","For four months, there was no official explanation. Then, on 25 July 1997, the Maryland Air National Guard said its aircraft had been flying over Arizona that night [2].","Its spokesman, Capt. Drew Sullins, said eight A-10 ground-attack jets were training over the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range, about 60 miles south-southwest of Phoenix [2]. They dropped high-intensity flares from 15,000 feet, which “fall slowly by parachute and illuminate a wide area,” he said [2]. Before returning to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, they jettisoned their remaining flares at high altitude [2]. One pilot called it “one hell of a light show” [2].","The aircraft were in Arizona for Operation Snowbird, which brought units from northern bases to the state’s winter flying weather [2]. The Maryland National Guard’s own 1997 annual report lists “Operation Snowbird” at Davis-Monthan among the year’s training for the 104th Fighter Squadron [4].","An Arizona National Guard information officer, Capt. Eileen Bienz, placed the drop at 10 p.m. over the North Tac range, 30 miles south-west of Phoenix, at an unusually high 15,000 feet [9]. That distance differs from the 60 miles given in the Associated Press report, a gap neither source explains [2][9]."]},{"h":"Why it took four months","p":["In a recorded interview on 5 August 1997, Sullins blamed a “simple miscommunication” [3]. He said Davis-Monthan kept separate logs for resident and visiting aircraft, and the first inquiries checked only the resident logs [3].","He said the unit was on the last mission of a 15-day deployment and had left for Maryland within a day or two [3]. Asked why flares that burn for minutes could explain lights seen longer, he said the jets “were over that range for over an hour,” dropping flares in turn [3]. He named the lead pilot as Lt. Col. Ron Henry [3]."]},{"h":"The man with the telescope","p":["The strongest witness for the aircraft explanation was a 21-year-old amateur astronomer in Scottsdale, Mitch Stanley [5]. He was in his back yard with a 10-inch telescope when the lights came from the north [5].","Through an eyepiece giving 60 times the resolving power of the naked eye, each light split into two [5]. They sat on the undersides of “squarish wings,” he told the Phoenix New Times in June 1997 [5]. “They were planes. There’s no way I could have mistaken that,” Stanley said [5].","The paper reported that the Phoenix city councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood, who had called for an investigation, had ignored his account [5]. He watched them for about a minute and turned back to the stars [5]."]},{"h":"The official case at full strength","p":["The conventional account explains both displays with a single unit. Later writers identify the earlier V of lights as a formation of aircraft, showing formation lights rather than blinking collision lights, and often as the same A-10s [6][10]. The 10 p.m. row was illumination flares over the Goldwater range, seen from Phoenix as hovering lights above distant mountains [6].","It has a named spokesman, a named unit, a named pilot, an annual report placing the unit at Davis-Monthan, a telescopic witness, and timings consistent with an aircraft [2][3][4][5]. Sheaffer adds that flares were dropped over the same range again at a later date and drew far less notice [6]. The astronomer and retired Air Force pilot James McGaha put the general point bluntly on ABC News in 2007: “There is simply no evidence that a spacecraft from another world has ever visited the Earth, none” [8].","The strongest test of the 10 p.m. lights came from video analysis. The Discovery Channel gave Mike Krzyston’s footage to Leonid Rudin of the image-processing firm Cognitech, with a daytime shot from the same yard showing the Sierra Estrella [9]. Matched frame by frame, the lights “blink out as they reach the top of the mountains, precisely as distant flares would” [9]. Paul Scowen, a visiting astronomy professor at Arizona State University, repeated the match for the New Times and found the lights “just above the Estrella ridgeline or right at it” [9]."]},{"h":"The alternative case at full strength","p":["Symington accepts there “might very well have been military flares in the sky that evening” [1]. His point is that what he saw was not them, because “flares don’t fly in formation” [1]. He describes a huge leading edge with “enormous lights,” passing silently overhead [1].","Symington wrote that the event was seen by “hundreds -- if not thousands -- of people,” and that his office “was besieged with phone calls” [1]. The Phoenix physician Lynne Kitei, the best-known witness to write about the case, rejects the flare explanation outright, according to Sheaffer, and claims her analysis of photographs shows the objects could not have been flares [6].","Kean’s 2007 report adds weight. Symington told her the object “couldn’t have been flares because it was too symmetrical,” with “a geometric outline, a constant shape” [7]. He said he called the commander at Luke Air Force Base, the general in charge of the National Guard and the head of the Department of Public Safety, and all were “perplexed” [7]. Kean reported that Barwood spoke with more than 700 witnesses, and that in 2000 the Department of Defense said a court-ordered search for a witnesses’ class action found no information on the triangular object [7]. Senator John McCain said in 2000: “That has never been fully explained,” while adding that he had no evidence of aliens [7].","Many witnesses reported the same: a solid shape, low and slow, blocking stars [5][10]. They say a formation of separate planes would sound like jets and would not look like one object. They also point to the four months of silence from the military as evidence the explanation was assembled after the fact [3].","On the 10 p.m. lights, Krzyston insisted to KSAZ-TV that they hovered below the Estrella ridgeline, and the station aired its own overlay supporting him [9]. Scowen questioned whether it had matched zoom and scale [9]. The Tempe analyst Jim Dilettoso claimed spectral analysis of the videos proved “These were not flares” [9]. The New Times found his method unsupported: a software vendor said it only graphs red, green and blue brightness, and “Spectroscopy is a different field” [9]."]},{"h":"What is genuinely unexplained","p":["Sullins’s account explains the flares well. It is weaker on the earlier V. The Air Guard statement was about flares on the range, and the published record does not include a flight log placing a formation over Phoenix at 8 p.m. [2][3]. Stanley’s planes and the Air Guard’s jets have been linked by later writers, not by any document [5][6]. The Guard’s own spokesman told the New Times in 1998 that the A-10s, which have squarish wings, never went north of Phoenix, so they could not have been the 8.30 p.m. formation [9]. If Stanley saw planes, whose were they? The paper asked that question itself, and it is still open [9].","There is also no public analysis in these sources that matches every piece of the filmed 10 p.m. footage to a specific flare drop by time and bearing in the sources used here, so the flare case rests on the unit’s statement and on the geometry rather than on a full published reconstruction [2][6]. The best partial test is the ridge match described in the official case [9].","Symington’s sighting is also hard to place. His 2007 account gives no time, and he was looking west for the lights when the object appeared [1]. Whether he saw the 8 p.m. formation, something else, or a merged memory of both cannot be settled from his words. No radar data from that night has been published in any source used here."]},{"h":"Related cases","p":["Phoenix is often compared with the Belgian wave of 1989 to 1990 (UFO-BEL1990), another case of large triangles with lights where military aircraft were involved. The government reporting offices that now collect such cases are GOV-AARO and GOV-ODNI. There is no connection to any ancient site."]},{"h":"Lights on the edge","p":["Both explanations put the key events over the Phoenix horizon. The jets flew a regular approach to a public air base; the flares fell over a range listed on every map [2]. The planes that Stanley saw were in plain sight to anyone with a telescope pointed the right way [5].","What remains is a governor who saw something, said nothing, and joked about it in public [1]. Whether a public figure’s silence counts as evidence of anything is a question his own account raises without answering."]}],"sources":[{"n":1,"text":"Fife Symington, “Symington: I saw a UFO in the Arizona sky,” CNN, 9 November 2007 (first-person account by the former governor).","url":"https://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/11/09/simington.ufocommentary/index.html"},{"n":2,"text":"Associated Press, “Military now says flares may be cause of mysterious Arizona lights,” Las Vegas Sun, 25 July 1997 (Maryland Air National Guard statement by Capt. Drew Sullins).","url":"https://lasvegassun.com/news/1997/jul/25/military-now-says-flares-may-be-cause-of-mysteriou/"},{"n":3,"text":"Interview of Capt. Drew Sullins, Maryland Air National Guard, by Kenny Young, 5 August 1997, transcript reproduced by The UFO Chronicles.","url":"https://www.theufochronicles.com/2008/05/phoenix-lights-project-snowbird-and.html"},{"n":4,"text":"Maryland National Guard / Maryland Military Department, 1997 Annual Report.","url":"https://military.maryland.gov/NG/Documents/annual_reports/1997_Annual_Report.pdf"},{"n":5,"text":"Tony Ortega, “The Great UFO Cover-up,” Phoenix New Times, 26 June 1997.","url":"https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/the-great-ufo-cover-up-6422930/"},{"n":6,"text":"Robert Sheaffer, “The ‘Phoenix Lights’ Become an ‘Incident’,” Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 2016.","url":"https://skepticalinquirer.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2016/07/SI-JA-16-16.pdf"},{"n":7,"text":"Leslie Kean, “Fife Symington decides to set record straight ten years after famed Phoenix Lights incident,” The Daily Courier (Prescott), 18 March 2007, reproduced by The UFO Chronicles.","url":"https://www.theufochronicles.com/2007/03/former-arizona-governor-now-admits.html"},{"n":8,"text":"ABC News, “Former Arizona Governor’s Close Encounter With UFO,” Good Morning America, 30 March 2007.","url":"https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2994569"},{"n":9,"text":"Tony Ortega, “The Hack and the Quack,” Phoenix New Times, 5 March 1998.","url":"https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/the-hack-and-the-quack-6445593/"},{"n":10,"text":"Wikipedia: Phoenix Lights (used last, for the formation-lights identification).","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights"}],"related":["UFO-BEL1990","GOV-AARO","GOV-ODNI"]}},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/UFO-PHX-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Phoenix Lights, Phoenix, Arizona, USA — iss073e0000370 (April 22, 2025) --- Phoenix, Arizona, with a population of over 1.6 million and surrounded by numerous…","by":"NASA Johnson Space Center","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_city_lights_of_Phoenix,_Arizona_(iss073e0000370).jpg","g":false,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"Thousands","h":"People who reported lights over Arizona and Nevada, including a V-shaped formation","s":[338]},{"v":"10 p.m.","h":"Military said the row of lights at this hour were illumination flares from A-10s","s":[338]},{"v":"13 March 1997","h":"Date","s":[338]},{"v":"Phoenix","h":"Location: Phoenix, Arizona, USA","s":[338]}],"hs":{"338":["Wikipedia: Phoenix Lights","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights"]}}