The Phoenix Lights

Most famous UFO cases hinge on a handful of witnesses. The Phoenix Lights are the opposite: a mass event, watched by thousands, in a major American city, on a clear spring night. That scale is exactly what makes it both compelling and hard to pin down.

What happened

The evening of March 13, 1997 actually contained at least two distinct events, and conflating them has muddied the case for decades.

The first was a moving formation. Beginning around 8:00 p.m., witnesses tracked a group of lights — many described a silent, V-shaped or boomerang arrangement — traveling from the Nevada border south across Arizona, reported in Henderson, Paulden, Prescott, and on toward Phoenix and Tucson. Some observers insisted the lights were fixed to a single enormous craft that blotted out the stars; others saw discrete lights in formation.

The second was a set of stationary lights hovering over the Phoenix area later that night, roughly 10:00 p.m., captured on multiple home video cameras.

Why it matters

The official explanation addresses both halves. The Air Force and Air National Guard attributed the later stationary lights to illumination flares dropped by A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft on a training exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range southwest of the city; a Maryland Air National Guard pilot, Lt. Col. Ed Jones, later confirmed flying one of the flare-dropping aircraft. The earlier formation, by this account, was a flight of high-altitude aircraft passing over the state. Skeptical analysts note the flares’ position over the range and their gradual fade behind a mountain range as consistent with the videos.

What keeps the case alive is partly the earlier formation, which witnesses describe in terms harder to square with a string of aircraft, and partly a remarkable piece of political theater. Then-Governor Fife Symington mocked the sightings at a 1997 press conference, parading an aide in an alien costume. A decade later, Symington reversed himself publicly, saying he had personally seen a large craft that night that he could not identify, and that he’d played it for laughs to keep the public calm.

A governor admitting he staged a joke to manage public reaction is, in its own way, as interesting as the lights. The Phoenix Lights endure less as a smoking gun than as a study in how a society processes — and performs — a thing it cannot collectively name.