The Phoenix Lights UFO Incident

The Phoenix Lights UFO Incident

"The Phoenix Lights UFO Incident" refers to a series of events that occurred on the evening and night of March 13^th, 1997. In reality it was two separate events, hours apart. One remains unexplained. The other does not. Conflating them has been the official story’s most useful trick for nearly three decades.

On the night of March 13, 1997, thousands of people across a 300-mile corridor from Henderson, Nevada, through Prescott and Phoenix, and on toward Tucson reported lights in the sky. The earliest sighting occurred at approximately 7:55 p.m. MST on Thursday, March 13, 1997. The second began around 10 p.m. They looked different, behaved differently, and occurred in different places. Witnesses who saw the earlier formation—including commercial and military pilots, a sitting governor, police, and families watching from their yards—described a large, silent, structured object. The later lights, captured on multiple home videos, hung over the southwestern horizon and went out one by one. Those later lights match LUU-2 illumination flares dropped by Maryland Air National Guard A-10s training at the Barry M. Goldwater Range. The earlier formation does not.

That distinction is not a fringe talking point. It is the only way the data cohere. Collapse the two events into one “Phoenix Lights” mystery and skeptics can point to the flares and declare the night solved. Separate them and the 8 p.m.-8:45 p.m. MST overflight stands as one of the largest, best-documented mass sightings in American history—and one that received no serious official investigation.

The 8 p.m. Event: A Moving Object Across Hundreds of Miles

The earliest widely cited report came from Henderson, Nevada, just before 8 p.m. MST: a large V of lights heading southeast, silent. Minutes later, around 8:15–8:17 p.m. MST, witnesses in Paulden and the Prescott/Prescott Valley area reported reddish-orange or amber lights moving south. A former police officer in Paulden described a cluster disappearing over the southern horizon. In Prescott Valley, Tim Ley, his wife Bobbi, their son Hal, and grandson Damien Turnidge watched five lights approach from roughly 65 miles away. What first looked like an arc resolved, as it drew closer over ten to fifteen minutes, into a rigid shape Ley compared to a carpenter’s square set at 60 degrees—an equilateral triangle without the base, pointed at the leading tip, squared off at the trailing ends of each arm. Five lights were set into a dark mass: one at the tip, two on each arm. The structure itself was slightly darker than the night sky; they saw it because it occulted the stars. It passed low and slow—Ley estimated perhaps 100–150 feet and 30 mph—silent, covering a span so large they had to turn their heads to take it in. One arm alone he later estimated at hundreds of feet. Dogs did not bark. After it passed through a gap in the nearby peaks toward Piestewa Peak and Sky Harbor, they lost it in the city glow.

That description is not unique. Across the Phoenix metro area between roughly 8:30 and 8:45 p.m., residents reported a massive V, chevron, or boomerang of five to seven lights, often with a dark mass behind them that blocked stars. Sarah Gillian Bower, then at the base of South Mountain, said: “It was so f—king big that when I looked up, all I saw was the lights. I didn’t see any sky. I didn’t see any stars. It was f—king huge.”

Anthony Schmidt, pulled over on I-10, described something stretching across the width of the freeway with seven lights and “this inky blackness against the darkened sky.” Jon Vanderlin, a child swimming in a Glendale backyard, saw eight lights in a V that “looked like it actually blocked out the stars.” A Southwest Airlines pilot living on the west side pulled over with his wife after dinner. The lights passed directly overhead. They looked “like can lights, like recessed into (a surface).” No collision lights, no strobes. Too slow for a C-5. Another Air Force veteran who had flown F-15s said the same: it was not flares. Flares do not hold formation, move slowly, and disappear as a unit. You do not fly a V-shaped formation at night that way.

By about 8:45 p.m. the formation had left the populated corridor toward Tucson. The entire first event spanned roughly 200 miles in about half an hour to 45 minutes.

Pilots Who Saw It From the Air and the Ground

Licensed pilots are not a random sample of skywatchers. They know formation flying, navigation lights, and what a flare drop looks like.

Actor Kurt Russell, flying his stepson Oliver Hudson into Phoenix Sky Harbor that evening, saw six lights in a uniform V over the airport while on approach, perhaps half a mile out. Oliver asked, “Pa, what are those lights?” Russell radioed the tower. Controllers said they were not painting anything. Russell declared the objects unidentified. He landed, dropped his stepson, and flew back to Los Angeles. He said nothing publicly for years until he recognized the event on a television special and checked his logbooks.

Southwest Airlines pilot Greg Aguirre and his wife were driving home in north Phoenix when she asked what the lights were. He stopped the car. Five lights in a V passed over at an altitude he estimated between 3,000 and 6,000 feet.

An America West 757 crew north of Phoenix over Lake Pleasant also noted a V of five bright lights off their right, slightly above them at 17,000 feet. The co-pilot queried Albuquerque Center. A controller initially offered an identification that did not hold up under later scrutiny; the exchange itself shows professional aircrew treating the formation as anomalous in busy airspace.

These accounts share the same elements the ground witnesses reported: rigidity of formation, absence of standard aircraft lighting, silence or lack of expected engine noise, and—in many cases—an implied or explicit dark structure. They do not match a routine A-10 transit under visual flight rules.

Amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley in Scottsdale trained a 10-inch Dobsonian telescope on the lights and reported seeing distinct aircraft in formation. His observation is the strongest single piece of evidence for the conventional explanation of the 8 p.m. event. It has never been reconciled with the occultation reports, the size estimates from people who said the object passed nearly overhead, or the lack of any identified flight of A-10s (or any other aircraft) that matches the timing, route, and lighting configuration across the full chain of sightings from Nevada to Tucson. Making his report quite dubious.

The 10 p.m. Event: Flares Over the Range

Around 10 p.m., a different display appeared. From Phoenix it looked like a row of bright amber or white lights hanging over or just beyond the Sierra Estrella range to the southwest. They remained more or less stationary or drifted slowly, then extinguished one after another. Multiple residents videotaped them. This is the footage that aired on local and national news and the event that most people now picture when they hear, or refer to the “Phoenix Lights.”

In July 1997 the Maryland Air National Guard’s 104th Fighter Squadron confirmed that A-10s participating in Operation Snowbird, operating out of Davis-Monthan AFB, had dropped LUU-2B/B high-intensity illumination flares over the Barry M. Goldwater Range that night. The flares burn at enormous candlepower for about four to five minutes and descend under small parachutes. From 40-plus miles away, a stick of them produces exactly the appearance of a hanging, slowly descending, sequentially extinguishing line of lights. Lieutenant Colonel Ed Jones, who flew one of the aircraft, later confirmed the drop on the record. Geometry, timing, burn duration, and the way the lights wink out behind the ridgeline all fit. This event is explained.

It is also separated from the first event by roughly two hours. The 8 p.m. object was moving across the state. The 10 p.m. lights were not. Flares do not travel horizontally for hours over hundreds of miles. They do not pass low over neighborhoods in Prescott Valley or block stars over Glendale at 8:30. Treating the two as one phenomenon is how the official narrative absorbed the harder-to-explain case into the "weather balloon" (flare drop) case (oops! Freaudian slip I guess).

What the Government Did Instead of Investigate

No federal agency conducted a systematic investigation of the 8 p.m. formation. Luke Air Force Base and the FAA received calls. Sky Harbor tower personnel reportedly saw lights. Radar data that would settle the question of whether a large structured object or an unannounced formation of aircraft transited the corridor has never been produced in a form that closes the case. The Air Force’s later statements focused on the flares and, for the earlier lights, on a possible A-10 formation returning to Davis-Monthan—an explanation that does not identify specific aircraft, tail numbers, or a flight plan matching the full witness chain.

The only elected official who treated the volume of reports as a public question worth answering was Phoenix City Councilwoman and Vice Mayor Frances Emma Barwood. Her office received hundreds of calls—she has said 600 to 700 that she personally returned, with estimates of total contacts running higher. The callers, she said, described the same thing: something huge, silent, slow, and low. Active and retired military, police officers, firefighters, little-league coaches, joggers, shoppers. “Everybody but one told exactly the same story.”

In May 1997 she raised the matter at a city council meeting after a reporter asked whether the city would find out what had flown over Phoenix. Colleagues stared. Signs later appeared in City Hall hallways with her picture and the caption “Talk into the tinfoil and she will hear you.” She was told after the fact that others on the council had been instructed not to discuss it. She wrote Senator John McCain. The first letter went unanswered. A second was routed to the National Archives—“the national trash can,” in her words. When she contacted the military, the answer was flares. She pointed out the obvious: flares do not travel horizontally for two hours across hundreds of miles.

Barwood describes more than just ridicule. A telephone-company technician, speaking to her husband through a window and refusing to enter the house, said the tap on their line was from the federal government and left. A witness who had video and had arranged to deliver it after speaking with her office, was visited by two men in dark suits who said they were from her office. She never received the tape. Notes she placed with a friend for safekeeping were taken in a break-in (what a coincidence!). Whether every element of that sequence can be independently verified decades later is less important than the pattern she and other witnesses described: the only official who asked for an investigation was isolated, mocked, and, in her account, monitored. That is how institutions treat questions they do not want answered. (we all know this to be fact because it is a re-occuring theme within the UFO subject at large)

Then-Governor Fife Symington, a former Air Force officer and pilot, held a press conference in June 1997 that featured an aide in an alien costume. He later said the stunt was intended to calm public concern. In 2007 he reversed himself. He had slipped his security detail, joined people watching from Piestewa Peak, and seen “this great big delta-shaped thing” come out of the northwest. “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.” The object he described was the 8 p.m. formation, not the 10 p.m. lights over the Estrellas.

Why the Distinction Still Matters

The conventional explanations for the two events are not equally strong. The 10 p.m. lights have a named unit, a named flare type, a named range, a matching geometry, and a pilot who later confirmed the drop. The 8 p.m. MST formation has a plausible candidate—A-10s in a V under VFR, lights steady because military aircraft are not bound by the same lighting rules as civilian traffic—and one weak telescopic observation consistent with separate aircraft. What the 8 p.m. MST event does not have is: identified aircraft, radar tracks released to the public that match the reports, or an explanation for why so many independent witnesses, including pilots, described a single dark structure occulting stars and moving as a rigid unit at low apparent altitude (150-1000 feet) and uncharacteristicly slow speed (15-40 miles per hour) for any known plane or jet (helicopters and balloons were never considered in this case).

There are many theories about what the Phoenix Lights were, ranging from secret military aircraft to extraterrestrial spacecraft. Some witnesses have reported seeing a large, silent craft with lights that appeared to be hovering in the sky, while others have reported seeing a series of lights that moved in a V-shaped formation. The incident has been the subject of numerous investigations and documentaries, and it remains one of the most famous UFO sightings in history mainly because of the number of witnesses who reported the event.

Mass sightings produce variation. Memory is imperfect. Distance and angle distort size. Some people who saw the later flares believed they were seeing the same phenomenon that had crossed the Valley two hours earlier. None of that erases the consistency of the earlier reports or the two-hour gap. The useful move, for anyone who wanted the story to end, was to treat the videotaped flares as the whole event.

Barwood’s experience is the institutional coda. Thousands of citizens reported something unusual in the airspace over a major metropolitan area and a state capital (very reminiscent of the 1952 Washington D.C. UFO flap). The authority's response was a brief staff memo that the city had no air force and therefore no expertise, a downright ridiculous press conference, a flare explanation that addressed only the second (10:00 p.m. MST) event, and social punishment for the only official who asked for more. That is not how a government behaves when it is confident the answer is ordinary military training. It is how it behaves when it prefers the question not be asked at all.

Twenty-nine years later the videos of the 10 p.m. lights still circulate. The 8 p.m. object—the one that crossed from Nevada through Phoenix toward Tucson, the one pilots radioed and a governor later said he saw—still has no identified aircraft, no released radar that closes the case, and no investigation that treated the witness record as data rather than a public-relations problem. The two events were never the same event. Pretending they were is the cover-up that required no classified stamp, only ridicule and a convenient flare drop two hours later.

Resources: