Case Study: Phoenix, Arizona 1997, over an astronaut photograph of Phoenix at night

Case Study: The Phoenix Lights, Arizona, 1997

Article|History of UAPs|UFO/UAP and the US Government|Core Learning Tools

byNPI

onOctober 18, 2026

On March 13, 1997, thousands of Arizonans saw lights they could not explain, including the governor, who mocked the sightings and admitted a decade later he had seen the craft himself. Two events, one night, and what is still unexplained.

On the night of March 13, 1997, thousands of people across Arizona looked up at something they could not explain. One of them was the governor, who mocked the sightings in public and admitted ten years later that he had seen the craft himself.

The Phoenix Lights are among the most widely witnessed UFO events in American history. Reports came in from a corridor of nearly 300 miles, from the Nevada line through Prescott and Phoenix to the edge of Tucson, over about three hours on a clear Thursday evening.

Much of the confusion around the case comes from the fact that two different things happened that night. The later event, a row of glowing orbs that hung over the mountains southwest of Phoenix around 10 p.m., has a well-documented explanation, and this page accepts it. The earlier event, a vast V-shaped formation of lights that passed slowly and silently over the state, is the one that witnesses, including Arizona’s governor, still say defies explanation.

This NPI Preliminary Review separates the two, sets out what the witnesses reported, examines the explanations, and asks why the people who spoke up were laughed at.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Phoenix Lights” · HISTORY UK · Phoenix New Times oral history (March 2022)

I’m a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I’ve ever seen.

Fife Symington IIIGovernor of Arizona in 1997, speaking in 2007

Event One: The V

Between about 7:30 and 9 p.m., witnesses across two states described the same thing: a huge, slow, silent arrangement of lights in the shape of a V.

The first reports came from Henderson, Nevada, a little before 8 p.m. Within minutes, callers in Paulden, Prescott and Prescott Valley were describing a formation of lights moving southeast. By about 8:30 it was over the Phoenix area, and later it was reported near Tucson.

The accounts share a pattern. Witnesses described five to seven steady lights set along the edge of a V or a chevron, moving together, slowly, without sound. Many said the lights seemed attached to something. “All you could see was the outline, as though something was blotting out the stars,” said Tim Ley, who watched it pass over his family in Phoenix. Another witness, Dana Valentine, recalled “a gray distortion of the night sky, wavy.” Estimates of its size, which are hard for anyone to judge at night, commonly ran to a mile or more across.

Actor Kurt Russell, a pilot, reported the lights to air traffic control. A former police officer in Paulden was among the first of many callers to the National UFO Reporting Center’s hotline.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Phoenix Lights” · HISTORY UK · Phoenix New Times oral history (2022) · ufouap.com timeline

Event Two: The Lights Over the Estrella Mountains

The 10 p.m. lights are the most photographed part of the case, and they have a sound explanation.

At around 10 p.m., residents of Phoenix watched and videotaped a line of bright amber orbs that seemed to hang low in the sky to the southwest, then wink out one by one. These are the images most people now picture when they hear “Phoenix Lights.”

In July 1997, the Maryland Air National Guard confirmed that A-10 aircraft on a training deployment, Operation Snowbird, had dropped high-intensity LUU-2B/B illumination flares over the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range that night. The flares descend slowly on parachutes, and from Phoenix they would have appeared above the Sierra Estrella range, which hid them as they fell. A pilot who flew in that formation later confirmed it publicly, and analysts have shown that the brightness seen from Phoenix matches flares at that distance.

The evidence for this explanation is strong, and NPI accepts it. But it explains only the second event. It says nothing about the formation thousands of people saw two hours earlier.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Phoenix Lights” (citing Ball, Maryland Air National Guard history, 2000; The Arizona Republic, Feb. 25, 2007; McGaha and Nickell, Skeptical Inquirer, 2015) · HISTORY UK

The Governor’s Joke, and His Confession

Arizona’s governor turned the sightings into a punchline. Ten years later he told the public he had seen the craft too.

The sightings got little national attention until USA Today ran the story in June 1997. As calls for answers grew, Governor Fife Symington III called a press conference, promised to find out who was responsible, and then brought out his chief of staff in an alien costume. “This just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious,” he told reporters.

In March 2007, Symington said that he had seen the V himself that night, from the Phoenix area, and had kept quiet. “I’m a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies,” he told the Arizona Daily Star. “It was bigger than anything that I’ve ever seen. It remains a great mystery. Other people saw it, responsible people. I don’t know why people would ridicule it.” He described the object to ABC News as “a geometric form with extremely bright lights on the leading edge.”

Later that year, in a commentary for CNN, he wrote that he had seen a “massive delta-shaped” craft “silently navigate over Squaw Peak.” He added, “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 he rejected the flare explanation for what he saw: “flares don’t fly in formation.”

Why the joke? “What I was trying to do was have fun and make a spoof, and stop all the public hysteria that was going on at the time,” Symington told ABC News. That summer he was also facing a federal fraud trial. He was convicted that September and resigned; the conviction was overturned on appeal in 1999, and he was pardoned in 2001. “It was a fairly tumultuous time for me politically,” he later said, “and I certainly didn’t want to pour any kerosene on the fire.”

Sources: Associated Press via Deseret News (March 25, 2007) · ABC News (March 30, 2007) · Fife Symington, CNN (Nov. 9, 2007) · Phoenix New Times oral history (2022)

The Officials Who Asked

Not every public official laughed.

Phoenix city councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood was the first elected official to ask, in public, what people had seen. “I asked if anybody knew what this object was and could we check into it,” she later recalled. “I was met by a whole bunch of stares.” She has said she had no doubt about what people saw: “You can’t get that many people to agree on the same object.”

Dr. Lynne Kitei, a Phoenix physician who filmed lights from her home that night, became one of the case’s most persistent investigators and later made a documentary about it. Her position, twenty years on, was simple: “I have no idea what they were.” She wanted it studied, not dismissed.

Sources: FOX 10 Phoenix (March 13, 2017) · Phoenix New Times oral history (2022)

Skepticism and Alternative Explanations

Skeptics have offered an explanation for the V as well. Here is the case for it, and where witnesses push back.

Aircraft in formation. Mitch Stanley, a 21-year-old amateur astronomer in Scottsdale, said he looked at the formation through a telescope as it passed and saw individual airplanes. “They were just planes,” he said. Skeptics Robert Sheaffer and astronomer James McGaha, a retired Air Force pilot, argue that the V was a formation of military aircraft flying under visual flight rules, with steady lights rather than flashing ones. Skeptics also note that people tend to perceive a solid shape connecting lights against a dark sky.

Where witnesses push back. Many witnesses describe a single object, not a group of planes: lights that held perfectly fixed positions relative to each other, a body that blocked the stars, no sound as it passed low overhead. A former F-15 pilot, speaking anonymously to the Phoenix New Times, said aircraft “wouldn’t stay in formation and move and fly really slowly out of sight.” And Symington, a pilot and former Air Force officer who saw it himself, remains unpersuaded.

What is still missing. No detailed official accounting of the first event has been made public. Until one is, the case for the airplane explanation rests largely on one telescope observation and on reconstruction by independent researchers, and the case against it rests on the testimony of thousands of people.

Sources: Phoenix New Times oral history (2022) · Associated Press via Deseret News (2007) · Wikipedia, “Phoenix Lights” (citing Sheaffer, Skeptical Inquirer, 2016)

Why the Phoenix Lights Matter

The Phoenix Lights show how a real mystery gets buried. Two events were blended into one, the better-explained one became the face of the case, and the explanation for it was used to wave away the other. The most senior official in the state ridiculed his own constituents in public, and the witnesses learned what happens to people who speak up.

It also shows that the stigma can break. A governor who once mocked the sightings came back, ten years later, to say he had seen the craft too, and to ask why anyone would ridicule the people who reported it. That is the kind of honesty the disclosure movement asks of every official, and the reason NPI works to make it safe, and expected, for those who know more to say so.