THE PHOENIX LIGHTS

THE CLAIM

On the night of March 13, 1997, a craft of enormous size (described by witnesses as a silent, V-shaped object that blotted out the stars) crossed Arizona in view of thousands of people, and the official explanations were a brush-off.

THE THEORY, AS ITS PROPONENTS TELL IT

The theory holds that on the evening of 13 March 1997 a solid craft of enormous size, described by witnesses as a V or boomerang spanning perhaps a mile, passed slowly and silently over Arizona, was seen by thousands of people across a 300-mile track from Nevada to Tucson, and that the authorities knowingly substituted a false explanation for it.

Proponents distinguish sharply between the two events of that night, and this is the strongest part of their case. The 10 p.m. lights over the Phoenix valley were, they concede, most likely flares dropped on the Barry M. Goldwater Range, the Maryland Air National Guard later said so, and the flares' descent behind the Estrella mountains matches the footage. The 8:30 p.m. formation is the actual claim, and it is a different phenomenon: a triangular arrangement of lights that witnesses describe as occluding stars as it passed, moving too slowly for a fixed-wing aircraft and without audible sound.

The credibility argument rests on the witnesses. They include a former commercial pilot, police officers, and, most damagingly for the official account, the then Governor of Arizona, Fife Symington, who held a press conference at the time in which an aide was brought out in an alien costume, and who stated a decade later that he had personally seen the craft, that it was enormous, and that he had staged the mockery to prevent public panic. Proponents argue that a sitting governor ridiculing an event he had himself witnessed is precisely the mechanism of official debunking that this archive documents elsewhere.

WHAT IS KNOWN

File one event and you get a mystery; file two and you get a mess. The Phoenix Lights were two distinct events on the same evening. Around 8 pm, observers from the Nevada border down through Prescott, Phoenix, and on toward Tucson reported a V- or boomerang-shaped formation of lights moving southeast. Some saw distinct lights in formation; others insisted they saw a single vast, silent structure passing overhead. The Air Force's answer was prosaic: A-10 aircraft flying in formation at altitude. Many witnesses never accepted that description of what they saw, and this first event remains the genuinely argued-over core of the case.

The second event, around 10 pm, is the one in the famous videos: a string of bright lights hanging over the city's southwestern horizon, winking out one by one. That one is well-documented, the Maryland Air National Guard, flying A-10s in an exercise, dropped illumination flares over the Barry M. Goldwater Range. Slow-falling flares behind a distant mountain ridge reproduce the footage well, including the sequential disappearances as they sank below the ridgeline.

Then-Governor Fife Symington first defused the frenzy with a press-conference gag, an aide wheeled out in an alien costume. A decade later he reversed himself, saying he had personally witnessed the 8 pm object, that it was enormous and unlike any aircraft he knew, and that he regretted the joke.

EVIDENCE FOR (SOMETHING UNEXPLAINED)

• Thousands of independent witnesses along a 200-plus-mile corridor reported the early formation, many describing a single rigid object (dark mass between the lights, stars occluded) rather than separate aircraft.
• A former Air Force officer and sitting governor, Symington, later said on the record that what he saw was no formation of planes.
• No flight plan, unit, or after-action record has ever been publicly matched to the 8 pm formation with the specificity that the 10 pm flare drop received.

EVIDENCE AGAINST

• The 10 pm event, the footage that made the legend, is convincingly explained: flares over a military range, consistent with the videos' geometry and timing. Most retellings fuse the two events into one, borrowing the first event's drama for the second event's pictures.
• Lights in loose formation at night, with no visible airframe, are notoriously hard to judge: the eye supplies a connecting structure, and "it blocked out the stars" is a known perceptual artifact of dim lights against a dark sky.
• Witness estimates of the object's size and altitude varied wildly, from hundreds of feet to more than a mile wide, which is what mistaken distance perception produces, not what a single solid object produces.
• A craft of the described size crossing a metropolitan area should have appeared on civilian and military radar; no such radar record has surfaced in 29 years.

ASSESSMENT

Half this file is closed: the 10 pm lights were flares, and the case's most famous footage is a solved problem. The 8 pm event is weaker as evidence but stronger as a question, the A-10 formation answer is plausible and was never documented to the public with the rigor the flare drop was, which is how a solvable case stays open for three decades. The bureau's read: probably aircraft, inadequately proven. In this business, "probably, inadequately proven" earns a contested stamp and a standing request for the paperwork.

WHAT WOULD CHANGE THE GRADE

• The 10pm event is CONFIRMED and needs no further work: flares dropped by the Maryland Air National Guard over the Barry Goldwater range, matched to the timing and the position.
• To CONFIRMED for the 8:30 formation: radar data. Luke Air Force Base and the FAA retained none, which is the single reason the earlier event stays open rather than closing with the later one.
• The surviving video of the 8:30 sighting is consistent with an aircraft formation flying in loose echelon. Consistent is not the same as demonstrated, and the number of independent witnesses along a 300 mile track is the part that keeps it interesting.

FURTHER READING

• Fife Symington IIIazcentral.com, archived
• Wikipedia: Phoenix Lights
• Wikipedia: Fife Symington
• Contemporary coverage in The Arizona Republic and USA Today (June 1997), which made the story national
• Wikipedia: Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range