Phoenix Lights

The Phoenix Lights

Origins of the Claim

On the evening of March 13, 1997, thousands of witnesses across Arizona and portions of Nevada and Sonora, Mexico reported observing unusual lights in the night sky. Reports described a massive V-shaped or boomerang-shaped formation moving slowly and silently over populated areas, including metropolitan Phoenix. The event generated enormous media coverage, hundreds of witness testimonies, and video footage that remains among the most widely discussed UFO evidence in modern history.

Two Distinct Events

Careful investigation has established that the March 13 sightings actually comprised two separate and distinct events that have been conflated in popular accounts.

The first event occurred at approximately 8:15 p.m. and involved a formation of lights moving across Nevada into Arizona. Multiple witnesses described a large, structured craft with lights at fixed points. Some researchers and former military personnel have suggested this formation was consistent with A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft flying in formation, with their navigation lights creating the impression of a connected structure at altitude. No military unit has formally claimed responsibility for this specific event, so it is the one without an official attribution, although independent observers saw a formation of aircraft.

The second event occurred at approximately 10:00 p.m. and has a more straightforward explanation. The Maryland Air National Guard's 104th Fighter Squadron was conducting training operations known as Operation Snowbird at the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range south of Phoenix. During these exercises, LUU-2B/B illumination flares were released from aircraft at high altitude. The flares descended slowly on parachutes, creating a line of slowly falling lights that appeared stationary or slowly moving to observers on the ground. Mountains on the horizon obscured the lower portions of the flares' descent paths, giving the appearance that the lights simply disappeared.

The Governor's Response

Arizona Governor Fife Symington III held a press conference on June 19, 1997, three months after the incident, at which he appeared to mock concern about the lights by having an aide appear in an alien costume. Symington later stated, in a 2007 interview, that he himself had witnessed the lights that evening and had been struck by the experience, and that his press conference had been an attempt to use humor to defuse public anxiety. His 2007 comments were sometimes cited as a gubernatorial "admission" of something extraordinary, though Symington did not make specific claims about the lights' origin.

What Evidence Shows

The flare explanation for the 10:00 p.m. event is well-documented and broadly accepted among aviation researchers, skeptical investigators, and the military. Video analysis showing the lights disappearing sequentially from left to right — consistent with flares dropping behind a mountain ridgeline — has been presented by multiple independent investigators. The 8:15 p.m. event is less clearly resolved, and no official explanation has been formally provided for that specific formation.

Why the Claim Persists

The Phoenix Lights endure as a cultural touchstone because the sheer number of credible witnesses — including pilots, police officers, and elected officials — lends them unusual weight. The government's initially dismissive response, followed by years of non-engagement, fed suspicion. The lack of an official attribution for the first event provides space for ongoing interpretation, even though independent observers described aircraft.

Current Verdict

Unsubstantiated. The later flare event is well-explained: a Maryland Air National Guard spokesman attributed it to A-10 flare drops over the Barry M. Goldwater Range, and a pilot confirmed this on the record in 2007. The earlier V-shaped formation has never been officially attributed and no tail numbers or flight logs have been published, but the independent evidence points to conventional aircraft: an amateur astronomer watched each light resolve into a pair of lights on a squarish wing through a 10-inch telescope and said "They were planes", and later analysis of amateur video found the lights moving relative to one another, consistent with five separate aircraft (possibly A-10s or T-37 trainers) rather than a single solid craft. No physical, radar or instrument evidence of an extraterrestrial craft has been produced. The cover-up claim rests on an early Davis-Monthan statement that the base had no planes in the air (its spokesman later said he had been speaking only of the base's own aircraft) and on a months-long delay before the flare explanation appeared, not on any evidence of concealed hardware. The V-formation remains explained to a lower documentary standard than the flares, so the verdict is held at moderate rather than high confidence.

The Two Events Unpacked: Luke AFB Records and the Flare Timeline

The conflation of two separate events on the evening of March 13, 1997 has been the primary obstacle to clear public understanding of the Phoenix Lights. The first event, beginning at approximately 8:15 to 8:30 p.m., involved a formation of lights moving generally south-southeast from the Nevada border through the Phoenix metropolitan area toward Tucson. Witnesses across a roughly 300-mile corridor reported a large, structured object with fixed-point lights. The formation moved slowly and silently — or nearly so — which observers found inconsistent with conventional jet aircraft behavior at low altitude.

Luke Air Force Base, the major military installation northwest of Phoenix, initially reported no unusual activity that night. Investigators have most often connected the evening's events to A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft of the Maryland Air National Guard (the 104th Fighter Squadron of the 175th Fighter Wing), which was in Arizona for winter training and operating out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson; Skeptical Inquirer notes that the formation's squarish wings fit either A-10s or possibly T-37 trainers. A Davis-Monthan spokesman first told reporters the base had no aircraft in the air at the time of either event; he later told Phoenix New Times he had been speaking only of the base's own planes, and the base then acknowledged the Maryland unit's presence. Skeptical Inquirer's 2015 retrospective also says a formation of five aircraft was seen flying a standard route from Nellis Air Force Base to Davis-Monthan across Phoenix at about 8:30 p.m.; the Maryland spokesman separately said the flare-dropping jets never went north of Phoenix. The A-10 is a low-speed, turbofan-engined aircraft capable of forming loose visual formations; its navigation lights, observed at distance and altitude in dark sky conditions, can appear as a connected structure. Independent investigators including Dr. Lynne Kitei, who photographed the lights from her home, and researchers affiliated with the National UFO Reporting Center documented the 8:30 p.m. event extensively. No official military unit has formally come forward to claim responsibility for this specific formation, and Luke AFB's official responses to queries were non-committal in the years following the event.

The second event, at approximately 10:00 p.m., has a clear and well-documented explanation. The Maryland Air National Guard's 104th Fighter Squadron, operating out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base under the training exercise designation Operation Snowbird, released LUU-2B/B high-intensity illumination flares over the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range. These flares ignite at high altitude and descend slowly on parachutes, burning with an intense amber-orange light. Viewed from metropolitan Phoenix, approximately 50 to 60 miles north, the descending flares appeared as a slowly moving or stationary row of lights. The Estrella Mountain range to the southwest of Phoenix obscured the lower portion of the flares' descent, causing them to appear to wink out as they dropped below the ridgeline rather than fading as they naturally extinguished. This geometric explanation — confirmed by topographic analysis — accounts for the disappearance pattern that many witnesses described as unnatural.

Governor Symington's Arc and the Dilettoso Analysis

Arizona Governor Fife Symington III's handling of the Phoenix Lights became a secondary controversy that added political valence to an already intense public debate. On June 19, 1997 — three months after the sightings — Symington held a press conference at which he announced he had identified the "perpetrators" of the lights, then had an aide enter in an alien costume. The stunt was explicitly intended to defuse anxiety and, Symington later said, to use levity to move public attention past what he considered an unresolvable question. Critics argued it was dismissive of legitimate witness experiences and served to suppress rather than address the underlying question.

In 2007, a decade after the events, Symington gave a series of interviews in which he stated that he had personally witnessed the 8:30 p.m. formation from his home and had been deeply affected by the experience. He described the object as massive, structured, and unlike anything he had previously seen. His statements were widely reported as a reversal of his 1997 position. Symington was careful, however, not to claim extraterrestrial origin — he described what he saw, not what it was. His account does not resolve whether the 8:30 p.m. lights were conventional aircraft or something unidentified; it adds a credible witness to the former governor's ranks and underlines the disconnect between the official public response and the private experience of witnesses including elected officials.

Jim Dilettoso, a multimedia analyst who worked with researchers examining the Phoenix Lights footage, conducted spectral and photographic analysis of video recorded during the 10:00 p.m. event. His analysis was presented as evidence that the lights were inconsistent with military flares. Subsequent independent review of Dilettoso's methods by astronomer and skeptical investigator James McGaha and others found significant methodological flaws in his spectral analysis. McGaha, a retired military pilot familiar with LUU-2B/B flares, argued that Dilettoso's conclusions did not withstand scrutiny and that the spectral signature of the lights was consistent with the flares the 104th Fighter Squadron had released. The dispute between Dilettoso's analysis and that of McGaha and other skeptical investigators represents the methodological fault line at the center of continued debate about the 10:00 p.m. event — which, on balance, the weight of aviation and investigative evidence supports as a flare drop.

What Would Change the Verdict

Declassified military flight records establishing or conclusively ruling out the aircraft responsible for the 8:15 p.m. event would significantly clarify the record. Physical evidence of a structured craft would transform the assessment entirely.