The Phoenix Lights

Background

March 1997 was a busy month for Arizona’s night sky. Comet Hale-Bopp was near its brightest and easily visible to the naked eye, so unusually many people were outdoors looking up on the clear evening of Thursday, March 13. The state was also a hub of military flying, with Luke Air Force Base west of Phoenix, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson and the vast Barry M. Goldwater Range to the southwest, where visiting Air National Guard units trained over the winter under a program called Operation Snowbird.

Arizona’s governor at the time, Fife Symington, a former Air Force officer, was facing a federal fraud indictment. He was convicted later that year; the conviction was later overturned, and President Bill Clinton pardoned him in 2001.

What was reported

There were two separate events that night. The first, between roughly 7:55 and 8:45 p.m., was a V or boomerang of five to seven lights that moved from the northwest over Prescott, across metropolitan Phoenix around 8:30 p.m. and on toward Tucson. The Phoenix New Times placed it north of Prescott at about 8:15 and south of Tucson by 8:45, roughly 200 miles in half an hour. Witnesses described it as silent, and some, including one of the paper’s own writers, felt the lights were joined by a dark shape; others saw separate points of light. Actor Kurt Russell later said he saw the formation while flying into Sky Harbor Airport and reported it to controllers.

The second event, later in the evening (accounts place it between about 9:30 and 10 p.m.), was a row of bright amber lights that seemed to hang over the southwest Valley before winking out one by one. This was the sequence caught most clearly on home video, which aired nationally in June 1997 and turned a local story into a national one. Bill Grava, a Sky Harbor air traffic controller, told the New Times that the earlier formation did not register on radar as it passed over, and Luke Air Force Base said the same, though both said that did not rule out planes flying without transponders.

Investigations and official findings

No federal agency formally investigated; the Air Force had stopped investigating UFO reports when Project Blue Book closed in 1969. Phoenix city councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood called for an inquiry after her office was swamped with calls. On June 19, 1997, Symington announced a state investigation, then held a press conference at which his chief of staff, Jay Heiler, appeared handcuffed in an alien costume. ‘This just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious,’ the governor told reporters.

In July 1997 the Maryland Air National Guard said eight of its A-10 jets had been training over the Goldwater Range that night and had dropped slow-falling parachute flares from about 15,000 feet before returning to Davis-Monthan. Barwood said the explanation was too convenient and called for a re-enactment.

Explanations and debate

Skeptics treat the two events separately. For the later lights, the flare explanation is widely accepted: the Maryland Air National Guard said its A-10s dropped them over the Goldwater Range that night, and the apparent ‘switching off’ matches flares sinking behind the Sierra Estrella mountains. For the earlier V, Scottsdale amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley told the New Times in June 1997 that through his 10-inch telescope each light resolved into a pair on the wings of a plane. ‘They were planes,’ he said. Retired Air Force pilot and astronomer James McGaha also attributed the formation to A-10s flying high.

Many witnesses reject this. They describe the V as low, silent and blotting out the stars, and some say it was far too large to be aircraft. Symington became the best-known dissenter: in 2007 he said he had seen the formation himself from Squaw Peak (now Piestewa Peak), calling it ‘enormous’ and saying it ‘just felt otherworldly.’ McGaha replied that the former governor was ‘not a trained observer.’

Why it still matters

The Phoenix Lights remain among the most widely witnessed UFO events in the United States and a fixture of Arizona lore, revisited every March. The case shows how two unrelated sets of lights can merge into one legend, and how official mockery can harden public suspicion. Symington’s turnabout gave the believers’ side an unusually prominent witness, while the flare and aircraft accounts remain the explanations favored by skeptics.