The Phoenix Lights

Overview

On the evening of March 13, 1997, something crossed Arizona that nobody has been able to fully explain. Over the course of roughly two hours, thousands of people across a 300-mile corridor — from the Nevada border through Prescott, Dewey, Scottsdale, Phoenix, and south toward Tucson — reported seeing a massive V-shaped formation of lights gliding silently overhead. Some described individual orbs in a boomerang pattern. Others swore they saw a solid object, a craft so enormous it blotted out the stars as it passed, something they estimated at more than a mile across. Pilots, police officers, military veterans, doctors, schoolteachers, and a sitting governor all saw it. Nobody heard a sound.

Then, around 10:00 PM, a second set of lights appeared — stationary this time, hovering in a line over the Sierra Estrella mountain range southwest of Phoenix. These lights were widely photographed and videotaped. They flickered, drifted slowly, and eventually winked out one by one.

The military eventually explained the second event: A-10 Warthogs from the Maryland Air National Guard had dropped high-intensity LUU-2B/B illumination flares during a training exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range. Case closed — for that part, at least. The first event, the one that actually traversed the state, the one that thousands of people watched pass silently overhead for nearly two hours? The U.S. government has never offered an explanation. Not a bad one, not a speculative one, not any one at all.

The Phoenix Lights incident stands as one of the most witnessed, most documented, and most stubbornly unexplained UFO events in American history. Nearly three decades later, it remains classified as unresolved — a status that owes less to any lack of investigation than to the sheer impossibility of reconciling what thousands of credible witnesses reported with anything in the known inventory of human aviation.

The Night of March 13, 1997

Event One: The Traversal

The first reports came in around 8:15 PM Mountain Standard Time. A man in Henderson, Nevada, just south of Las Vegas, called the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) to describe a V-shaped object with six lights on its leading edge moving southeast. The object, he said, was enormous — so large that his fist held at arm’s length couldn’t cover it. It made no sound.

Over the next ninety minutes, the same formation — or something that matched its description with eerie consistency — was reported along a path that reads like a road trip through central Arizona. Witnesses in Paulden, thirty miles north of Prescott, saw it around 8:17 PM. In Prescott, a cluster of witnesses including Tim Ley and his family watched the lights approach from the northwest at roughly 8:20 PM. Ley would later tell investigators that the lights were attached to a single massive structure — not individual aircraft flying in formation — and that as it passed directly overhead, it blocked out the stars in a distinct triangular shape.

By 8:30 PM, the formation was over Dewey, ten miles southeast of Prescott. From there it continued southeast toward the Phoenix metropolitan area, where it was seen by the greatest concentration of witnesses. In north Scottsdale, in Tempe, in Glendale, people stepped outside or looked up from their backyards and saw a procession of amber or yellowish-white lights drifting south in absolute silence. Some described five lights. Others counted six or seven. The V-shape was consistent across nearly every account.

What made the eyewitness testimony so compelling wasn’t just the number of people who reported it — it was the demographic range. These weren’t amateur skywatchers or UFO enthusiasts hunting for anomalies. The witnesses included off-duty police officers, commercial airline pilots, military veterans with firsthand familiarity with military aircraft, and residents who had never given a moment’s thought to UFOs before that evening. Their accounts were remarkably consistent on the key points: the formation was massive, it was silent, it moved slowly, and it maintained a rigid shape that suggested a single object rather than a group of separate aircraft.

Mike Krzyston, a cement truck driver living in north Phoenix, captured some of the most studied video footage of the traversal event. His video, shot as the lights passed over the Camelback Mountain area, shows a distinct V-pattern of lights moving steadily southward. Krzyston told reporters he had initially thought the lights were helicopters until he realized there was no sound whatsoever — even though the formation appeared to be at relatively low altitude.

The formation continued south through the Phoenix metro area and was last reported near the northern edge of Tucson sometime around 10:00 PM. It had crossed approximately 300 miles of Arizona in roughly an hour and forty-five minutes, maintaining its shape and silence the entire way. Attempts to estimate its speed — based on witness timestamps and geographic positions — put it at somewhere between 100 and 200 miles per hour. Slow, by any aviation standard. Glacial, for something that left no radar signature and carried no FAA transponder.

Event Two: The Flares

Almost immediately after the traversal concluded — or perhaps overlapping with its final leg — a second phenomenon appeared. Around 10:00 PM, witnesses across the southern Phoenix metro area saw a series of bright lights appear over the Sierra Estrella mountain range, roughly twenty miles southwest of downtown Phoenix. Unlike the first event’s moving formation, these lights were stationary. They appeared one by one in a roughly horizontal line, hung in the sky for several minutes, and then extinguished one by one from left to right.

This second event was captured on video by multiple witnesses and became the footage most commonly associated with the Phoenix Lights in media coverage. The images are genuinely striking — a row of brilliant amber orbs hanging motionless above the dark mountain silhouette, looking for all the world like something out of a science fiction film.

The second event had an explanation, and it came relatively quickly — though “quickly” in government communication terms. The Maryland Air National Guard’s 104th Fighter Squadron, temporarily deployed to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson for Operation Snowbird training exercises, confirmed that A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft had dropped LUU-2B/B illumination flares over the Barry Goldwater Range at approximately 10:00 PM on March 13. The flares, which burn for several minutes while descending on parachutes, were dropped at an altitude of roughly 15,000 feet and would have been visible from the Phoenix metro area given the clear skies and the geometry of the sightline over the Sierra Estrella.

This explanation is widely accepted — even by many UFO researchers — as accounting for the second event. The behavior of the lights (appearing sequentially, remaining stationary, extinguishing one by one as they burned out or dropped below the mountain ridgeline) is consistent with parachute-deployed illumination flares. The timing matches. The location matches. Multiple independent analyses, including one by defense journalist James McGaha, confirmed the flare explanation.

The problem, as skeptics and believers alike have pointed out, is that the flare explanation became a blanket dismissal applied to the entire evening — including the first event, which bore essentially no resemblance to the second.

The Governor, the Alien Suit, and the Confession

Arizona Governor Fife Symington III became an unlikely central figure in the Phoenix Lights story, though it took him a decade to fully earn the role.

In the weeks following March 13, public demand for answers intensified. Thousands of Arizonans had seen something they couldn’t explain, and the official response — a mix of silence from federal agencies and the flare explanation that didn’t fit the first event — was fueling frustration. City Councilwoman Frances Barwood became one of the few elected officials to take the reports seriously, personally collecting more than 700 witness accounts and publicly calling for an investigation. For her efforts, she was largely ridiculed by colleagues and media.

On June 19, 1997, Governor Symington held a press conference that he billed as a serious attempt to address the public’s concerns. He announced that his staff had identified the source of the Phoenix Lights and brought out his chief of staff, Jay Heiler, dressed in a rubber alien costume complete with an oversized gray head and bulging eyes. The room erupted in laughter. Symington told the assembled press to “get over it” and suggested the whole affair was being blown out of proportion.

It was a masterclass in political deflection. It was also, as Symington would eventually admit, a lie.

Ten years later, in March 2007, Symington appeared on CNN and dropped a confession that sent shockwaves through the UFO research community and made national headlines all over again. He told interviewer Anderson Cooper that he had personally witnessed the lights on the night of March 13, 1997. Curious after hearing early reports, Symington said he drove to a location where he could get a clear view of the sky and saw a massive, delta-shaped craft glide overhead — silent, enormous, and utterly unlike anything in his experience. Symington, it’s worth noting, wasn’t just a politician; he was a licensed pilot with a genuine understanding of aviation.

“It was enormous and inexplicable,” Symington told reporters. “As a pilot and a former Air Force officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I’d ever seen. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares.”

When asked why he had staged the alien costume press conference rather than admitting what he’d seen, Symington’s answer was disarmingly honest: he was the governor of a major American state in the middle of a serious political career, people were panicking, and he felt his job was to calm the public down, not add fuel to the fire. The alien suit, he said, was a “tongue-in-cheek” attempt to defuse tension. In retrospect, he acknowledged, it was the wrong call.

Symington’s reversal matters for a simple reason: it’s extremely rare for a sitting or former governor of a U.S. state to publicly claim they witnessed an unidentified craft and describe it as “otherworldly.” Politicians have nothing to gain and everything to lose by making such statements. Symington had already left office; he had no campaign to run, no constituency to please, no book deal to promote. His admission lent a weight to the Phoenix Lights case that few UFO incidents have ever enjoyed.

The Investigation — or Lack Thereof

One of the more frustrating aspects of the Phoenix Lights case is the near-total absence of any serious official investigation.

The Federal Aviation Administration logged some of the calls that came in on the night of March 13 but conducted no formal inquiry. Luke Air Force Base, located in the western Phoenix metro area, denied any involvement and stated that none of its aircraft were flying that evening. The Air National Guard confirmed the flares — for the second event — and that was the extent of federal engagement.

No radar data from the evening has ever been publicly released. This is particularly notable because Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, one of the busiest airports in the Southwest, was fully operational on the night of March 13, 1997. If a solid object of the size witnesses described had actually traversed the Phoenix metro area at low to moderate altitude, it should have appeared on radar. The absence of any released radar data has been interpreted both ways: skeptics argue it means there was no solid object, while UFO researchers argue that the data either exists and has been classified or was deliberately not preserved.

NUFORC director Peter Davenport received hundreds of reports about the evening’s events and became one of the most prominent voices calling for a formal investigation. None materialized at the federal level.

The most thorough investigation of the Phoenix Lights was conducted not by any government agency but by a private researcher: Dr. Lynne Kitei, a Phoenix physician who had been documenting anomalous lights in the Phoenix sky since 1995 — two full years before the March 13 event. Kitei photographed and videotaped lights from her Paradise Valley home on multiple occasions and published her findings in the book The Phoenix Lights: A Skeptic’s Discovery That We Are Not Alone (2004). Kitei argued that the March 13 event was not an isolated incident but the most visible manifestation of an ongoing phenomenon in the Phoenix area.

Kitei’s work is polarizing. She’s a credentialed professional with no history of fringe claims, and her photographic documentation is extensive. But her conclusions — that the lights represent a non-human intelligence making deliberate contact — go well beyond what the photographic evidence alone can support.

What Was It? The Competing Explanations

Military Flares (Partially Confirmed)

The flare explanation is rock-solid for Event Two. LUU-2B/B illumination flares dropped at 15,000 feet over the Barry Goldwater Range at 10:00 PM would have been visible from the Phoenix area, would have appeared to hover (they descend slowly on parachutes), and would have extinguished one by one as they burned out or dropped below the mountain ridgeline. This is not in serious dispute.

Where the flare theory collapses is in its application to Event One. Parachute flares don’t traverse 300 miles of airspace in a rigid V-formation over the course of two hours. They drop. That’s their entire job. The conflation of the two events — a conflation that much of the initial media coverage and the military’s own public statements encouraged — has been one of the most persistent sources of confusion in the Phoenix Lights case.

Conventional Aircraft in Formation

The most common skeptical explanation for Event One is that witnesses saw a formation of conventional aircraft — possibly military jets — flying in a V-pattern with their lights visible. This theory has the advantage of simplicity and doesn’t require invoking unknown technology.

The problems are significant. No military branch has ever claimed credit for flying a V-formation over central Arizona on the evening of March 13. The absolute silence reported by hundreds of witnesses is difficult to reconcile with any known fixed-wing military aircraft; even at high altitude, a formation of jets or heavy transports produces audible noise, particularly in the desert’s still evening air. And the witness descriptions of a solid structure blocking out stars are hard to square with individual aircraft flying in formation — you’d see stars between them.

High-Altitude Balloons or Flare Clusters

Some researchers have suggested that the first event could have been a series of high-altitude illuminated balloons drifting on upper-level winds along a roughly north-to-south trajectory. The hypothesis accounts for the silence and the slow speed but struggles with the rigid V-formation maintained over hundreds of miles. Upper-level winds are not constant in speed or direction across a 300-mile swath of Arizona geography, and a loose cluster of balloons would be expected to change shape and spread apart as it traveled, not maintain a precise geometric pattern.

Unknown Craft

The explanation favored by most UFO researchers — and by Governor Symington — is that the first event involved a craft of unknown origin and technology. The case for this interpretation rests on the consistency of witness descriptions (massive, triangular, silent, solid), the 300-mile transit, the absence of any claimed conventional explanation, and the credibility of the witness pool. Critics point out that “unknown” doesn’t mean “extraterrestrial” and that argument from incredulity (the assumption that because we can’t explain it, it must be exotic) is a logical fallacy, not evidence.

The Phoenix Lights remain one of the strongest cases in the UFO research catalog precisely because the case doesn’t rely on a single blurry photo or a lone witness. It rests on a mass sighting event involving thousands of independent observers across multiple cities, including a state governor and numerous professionals with aviation experience — all describing the same thing on the same night along the same trajectory.

The Sequels: 2007 and 2008

The Phoenix Lights returned — sort of — on two subsequent occasions.

On April 21, 2007, almost exactly ten years after the original event, residents of north Phoenix reported seeing a formation of lights in the night sky. The sighting generated immediate media coverage and comparisons to the 1997 incident. This time, however, the explanation came within hours: a local resident came forward and admitted he had attached road flares to helium balloons and released them as a prank. The confession was verified, and the incident was closed.

On April 22, 2008, lights appeared over the North Valley area of Phoenix. Once again, the military confirmed that flares had been dropped during training exercises at the nearby range. The 2008 lights bore a strong resemblance to Event Two of the original 1997 incident and none at all to Event One.

The sequels, ironically, may have helped the original case more than they hurt it. Each subsequent flare sighting gave Phoenix residents a direct point of comparison — and many of those who had witnessed the 1997 traversal event stated categorically that what they had seen in 1997 was nothing like the flares of 2007 and 2008.

Cultural Impact

The Phoenix Lights have become embedded in American UFO lore with a prominence rivaled only by Roswell. The incident has been the subject of numerous documentaries, including the 2005 film Out of the Blue, the 2009 I Know What I Saw, and the 2020 documentary simply titled The Phoenix Lights. It has been featured in television series from UFO Hunters to Unsolved Mysteries to the History Channel’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.

The case is frequently cited in congressional discussions of UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) transparency. When Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act provisions requiring the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to investigate historical UAP cases, the Phoenix Lights were among the incidents most commonly referenced by legislators as examples of events deserving formal review.

Frances Barwood, the Phoenix City Councilwoman who collected hundreds of witness reports and called for an investigation in 1997, paid a political price for her efforts. She was mocked by fellow council members and unfavorably covered in local media. She ran for Arizona Secretary of State in 1998 and lost, with her association with the Phoenix Lights frequently cited by opponents. History has been considerably kinder to her than her contemporaries were.

In Phoenix itself, the anniversary of the lights has become something of an informal local observance. March 13 events, ranging from serious panel discussions to tongue-in-cheek “sky watching parties,” have been held in the years since 1997. The incident put Phoenix on the map for something other than dry heat and sprawl — a distinction the city’s tourism board has, understandably, never quite figured out how to market.

Why This Case Endures

The Phoenix Lights endure as one of the strongest UFO cases on record for reasons that have nothing to do with blurry footage or anonymous tipsters. The case has:

• Mass witnesses: Thousands of independent observers across a 300-mile corridor, including professionals, pilots, and a governor
• Two distinct events: One explained (flares), one not — which means the military’s own explanation implicitly acknowledges it doesn’t cover everything that happened that night
• A governor’s confession: A sitting governor who initially mocked the event, then admitted ten years later that he had witnessed an “otherworldly” craft
• No competing explanation: Unlike most UFO cases, where skeptics can point to a probable mundane cause, the first event has no widely accepted conventional explanation
• Repeatability problems: Subsequent sightings in 2007 and 2008 were quickly explained, reinforcing that the 1997 traversal event was fundamentally different

What the Phoenix Lights don’t have is a resolution. Nearly three decades after thousands of people watched something cross their state on a clear March evening, nobody — not the Air Force, not the FAA, not NASA, not AARO — has offered a comprehensive explanation for the first event. The flares covered the second. The first remains what it was that night: something enormous, silent, and unexplained, crossing Arizona under the stars.

Timeline

• 8:15 PM, March 13, 1997 — First report from Henderson, Nevada: V-shaped formation of lights moving southeast
• 8:17 PM — Sighting reported in Paulden, Arizona, north of Prescott
• 8:20 PM — Tim Ley and family observe formation directly overhead in Prescott; describe stars being blocked by solid structure
• 8:30 PM — Formation passes over Dewey, continuing southeast
• 8:30–9:30 PM — Hundreds of witnesses in north Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, and Glendale observe the V-formation
• ~10:00 PM — Second event: stationary lights appear over Sierra Estrella mountain range; widely videotaped
• ~10:00 PM — Maryland Air National Guard A-10s drop LUU-2B/B flares at Barry Goldwater Range
• ~10:30 PM — Stationary lights extinguish one by one
• March–June 1997 — Councilwoman Frances Barwood collects 700+ witness reports, calls for investigation
• June 19, 1997 — Governor Symington holds press conference with aide in alien costume
• 2004 — Dr. Lynne Kitei publishes The Phoenix Lights: A Skeptic’s Discovery That We Are Not Alone
• April 2007 — Lights reported over Phoenix; traced to a hoaxer’s flares on helium balloons
• March 2007 — Governor Symington admits on CNN he witnessed the lights and calls them “otherworldly”
• April 2008 — Lights over Phoenix confirmed as military flares from training exercises
• 2020 — Documentary film The Phoenix Lights released

Sources & Further Reading

• Kitei, Lynne D. The Phoenix Lights: A Skeptic’s Discovery That We Are Not Alone. Hampton Roads Publishing, 2004.
• Hamilton, William F. “The Phoenix Lights Event — Mass Sighting in Arizona.” MUFON UFO Journal, 1997.
• National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). “Reports from March 13, 1997.” nuforc.org.
• Symington, Fife. “Symington Confirms He Witnessed the Phoenix Lights.” CNN Interview with Anderson Cooper, March 2007.
• “Phoenix Lights.” The Arizona Republic, multiple articles, 1997–2008.
• “The Phoenix Lights — Were They Flares?” Skeptical Inquirer, 1998.
• U.S. Air Force / Maryland Air National Guard 104th Fighter Squadron. Public statements regarding LUU-2B/B flare drops, 1997.
• McGaha, James. “The Phoenix Lights — An Analysis.” Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 22, No. 4, 1998.