The Phoenix Lights

Theoretical Alignment

Proponents align Event One with the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) because of the reported size and silence; the conventional reading attributes Event One to a formation of aircraft and Event Two to flares.

Background

The evening of March 13, 1997 was largely clear across Arizona. Comet Hale-Bopp, near its closest approach to Earth, was bright in the northwestern sky, and many residents were already outside looking up (Ortega, Phoenix New Times, 1998). What they saw became one of the best-known mass UFO sightings in the United States.

The Phoenix Lights were not a single event but two separate ones, about 90 minutes apart: a moving V-shaped pattern of lights between about 8:00 and 8:45 PM, and a row of hovering lights southwest of Phoenix at about 10:00 PM. Treating them as one event has caused much of the confusion. The only official explanation, flares, applies to the second event. Investigators including the amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley, the journalist Tony Ortega, James McGaha and Robert Sheaffer attribute the first to a formation of aircraft, an identification that no military unit has formally confirmed.

Complete Timeline

Date	Event
March 13, 1997 (7:55 PM)	A witness in Henderson, Nevada reports a large V-shaped object traveling southeast — the first known report (Prothero & Callahan, 2017).
March 13, 1997 (c. 8:15 PM)	A former police officer in Paulden, Arizona reports a cluster of reddish-orange lights; reports follow from Prescott and Prescott Valley.
March 13, 1997 (c. 8:30 PM)	The V of lights crosses the Phoenix area. Tim Ley and his family watch it pass over their home; in Scottsdale, amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley views it through a 10-inch telescope and sees planes.
March 13, 1997 (c. 8:45 PM)	The lights pass south of Tucson (Ortega, 1998). According to Robert Sheaffer, a formation of five Operation Snowbird A-10s lands at Davis-Monthan AFB at about this time.
March 13, 1997 (c. 10:00 PM)	Up to nine bright lights appear, hover for several minutes and go out one by one southwest of Phoenix, toward the Estrella Mountains; Mike Krzyston and others videotape them.
May 6, 1997	Phoenix councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood asks the city to look into the sightings.
June 1997	KPNX-TV films a flare drop over the gunnery ranges that resembles the 10 PM lights; the Tucson Weekly then reports that Maryland Air National Guard A-10s dropped flares on March 13 (Ortega, 1998).
June 19, 1997	Governor Fife Symington holds a press conference at which his chief of staff appears in an alien costume.
July 25, 1997	The Arizona Republic reports the Maryland Air Guard unit's account of the flares.
March 2007	Symington says publicly for the first time that he saw the craft himself, in interviews with filmmaker James Fox and the Prescott Daily Courier.
November 12, 2007	Symington moderates a National Press Club event organized by Leslie Kean and James Fox.

Event One: The V-Formation (c. 8:00–8:45 PM)

The Sighting Corridor

The first known report came at 7:55 PM MST from Henderson, Nevada, where a witness described a large V-shaped object traveling southeast. At about 8:15 PM a former police officer in Paulden, Arizona reported a cluster of reddish-orange lights that disappeared over the southern horizon, and reports followed from Prescott Valley (Prothero & Callahan, 2017). According to the chronology compiled by Tony Ortega of the Phoenix New Times, the lights passed over the Prescott area at about 8:15, over Phoenix about 15 minutes later, and south of Tucson at about 8:45. That is roughly 200 miles in 30 minutes, or about 400 mph.

That speed matters. Many witnesses described the object as slow, even hovering, but the timing of the reports implies something moving at the speed of a jet. Steady lights seen at height often appear to move slowly.

What Witnesses Described

Descriptions varied. Two New Times writers who watched the same pass from Phoenix disagreed with each other:

• Shape: Most saw five lights in a V or boomerang. The Ley family described a shape like a 60-degree "carpenter's square" with the lights set into it (Prothero & Callahan, 2017).
• Solid or separate: Witnesses split. New Times writer David Holthouse perceived something connecting the lights in a boomerang shape; his colleague Michael Kiefer said they did not seem connected. Some witnesses said the object blocked out stars; others saw only lights.
• Sound: Most witnesses reported no sound.
• Altitude: Estimates ranged from 100–150 feet (the Ley family) to high enough to be obscured by thin cloud (witnesses in Glendale).
• Lights: Steady white, amber or reddish lights; the two New Times witnesses each saw slightly different colors (Ortega, 1998).

Key Witnesses: Event One

• Tim Ley and family — Tim and Bobbi Ley, their son Hal and grandson Damien Turnidge watched the lights approach their north Phoenix home from about 65 miles away. Ley told CNN in June 1997 that when the right side of the "giant V-shaped craft" passed directly over him, the left side was "a couple of blocks away," and that it went over in complete silence.
• Former police officer in Paulden — One of the earliest Arizona reports, at about 8:15 PM: a cluster of reddish-orange lights. (An earlier draft called him a "truck driver.")
• Mitch Stanley — An amateur astronomer in Scottsdale who viewed the leading lights through a 10-inch telescope and saw planes (see below).
• Terry Proctor — Videotaped the 8:30 pattern for several minutes; in his tape the lights move relative to one another (Ortega, 1998).
• Mike Fortson — Appears as a witness in the 2010 documentary UFOs Over Phoenix. This site has not found a primary record of his account; details in an earlier draft (a Chandler backyard, "at least a mile wide," "like a whale swimming through the air") could not be sourced and have been removed.
• Kurt Russell — The actor, a private pilot, said in 2017 BBC interviews that he was flying his son Oliver Hudson toward Phoenix that evening, saw six lights and reported them to air traffic control, which told him it showed nothing (IndieWire, 2017).

(An earlier draft also said that "at least two commercial pilots" saw the formation but declined to report it. No source was found, and the claim has been removed.)

Event Two: The Stationary Lights (c. 10:00 PM)

The Lights Over the Estrella Mountains

At about 10:00 PM, up to nine bright lights appeared southwest of Phoenix in the direction of the Sierra Estrella. They hovered for several minutes and then went out one by one. All nine were visible from some vantage points and fewer from others (Ortega, 1998).

Unlike Event One, the 10 PM lights were videotaped from many points across the Valley. The best-known footage is Mike Krzyston's, shot from his yard in Moon Valley in north Phoenix ("I hit pay dirt, finally!" he can be heard saying). Robert Sheaffer calls the 10 PM event "perhaps the most widely witnessed UFO event in history."

The Military Explanation

The lights were identified as LUU-2B/B illumination flares dropped by A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft of the 104th Fighter Squadron, Maryland Air National Guard. The squadron was in Arizona for winter training (Operation Snowbird, based at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson) and flew sorties to the Barry M. Goldwater Range that night. The slow-falling flares hang under parachutes. From Phoenix, they appeared to wink out as they dropped behind the Sierra Estrella.

The explanation was not offered at the time. Davis-Monthan initially said it had no planes in the air, and the flare drop surfaced only in June 1997, through the press (see "How the Flare Explanation Emerged" below). Capt. Eileen Bienz, the Arizona National Guard public information officer who determined the drop's time and place, was a source for the identification, not a denial of it. (An earlier draft of this page called her "Captain Eileen Benz of the Luke Air Force Base public affairs office" and said she initially denied any military exercises; that was incorrect.) A Maryland ANG spokesman, Capt. Drew Sullins, said the flare-dropping A-10s never went north of Phoenix, so they could not have made the 8:30 formation (Ortega, 1998).

Governor Fife Symington

The Press Conference (June 1997)

On June 19, 1997, three months after the sightings and while his federal fraud trial was under way, Governor Fife Symington held a press conference at which he announced that the culprit had been found. He then brought out his chief of staff, Jay Heiler, in an alien costume. "This just goes to show you guys are entirely too serious," he told reporters (AP, Deseret News, June 20, 1997). The stunt went out live on local television and made national news. Many witnesses felt ridiculed.

The Reversal (2007)

Symington first spoke publicly about his own sighting ten years later. In March 2007 he told the Prescott Daily Courier, "It was enormous and inexplicable. Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too." The Associated Press reported that he had first told a UFO researcher making a documentary: filmmaker James Fox, producer of Out of the Blue, who had approached him about the alien-costume stunt and then asked about the lights. Until then, the Arizona Daily Star reported, he had told only his wife. He told the AP: "I'm a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I've ever seen. It remains a great mystery." (An earlier draft of this page said his admission aired when Out of the Blue premiered on the Sci Fi Channel on June 24, 2003. That is the film's premiere date; Symington's account dates from 2007, and the claim has been removed. The quotation attributed to him there could not be found and has also been removed.)

In a CNN commentary on November 9, 2007, Symington wrote that he "witnessed a massive delta-shaped, craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak, a mountain range in Phoenix," and that "as a pilot and a former Air Force Officer" he could say it resembled no man-made object he had seen. He explained the 1997 stunt as an attempt "to lighten the mood of the state" as hysteria grew, and added: "I never meant to ridicule anyone." (An earlier draft of this page said he staged the press conference under pressure from the Air Force and Senator John McCain's office; this site found no source for that, and it has been removed.)

Three days later, on November 12, 2007, Symington moderated a National Press Club event organized by Leslie Kean and James Fox, at which, by CNN's account, he was joined by 14 former military and government officials from seven countries describing UFO experiences and investigations. He repeated his account in Kean's 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record and in later interviews. James McGaha, the Tucson astronomer who traced both events to A-10s, told the Arizona Daily Star that Symington "is not a trained observer."

The Two Events Problem

The official explanation, flares, addresses only Event Two. No military unit has ever formally identified the aircraft in Event One, and Davis-Monthan AFB, where the A-10s were based, initially said it had no planes in the air at the time. That gap is what keeps the case open, and it is why popular retellings that treat the flares as the explanation for the whole night satisfy few Event One witnesses.

The case for aircraft in Event One rests on independent observations rather than on any official statement:

• Mitch Stanley's telescope view of individual planes with squarish wings, flying high, during the 8:30 pass (Ortega, 1998).
• Terry Proctor's video, in which the five lights shift relative to each other (Ortega, 1998).
• Reports from Prescott in which one light temporarily trailed the others, and from Glendale of the formation passing behind thin cloud.
• The timing of reports, which implies about 400 mph, and the A-10 flight that, by Sheaffer's account, landed at Davis-Monthan at about 8:45 PM.

Proponents' objections remain: most witnesses heard nothing, many perceived a single dark object, and Symington, a pilot, insists it was not a formation of planes. Sheaffer's reply on the lighting is that the formation flew under visual flight rules with steady formation lights instead of blinking anti-collision lights.

Dr. Lynne Kitei

Dr. Lynne Kitei, a Phoenix physician, became the case's most prominent advocate. She says she saw and photographed unusual amber lights near her Paradise Valley home in February 1995, two years before the mass sighting, and again in 1997. For years she was quoted only as "Dr. Lynne" or "Dr. X." Her work includes:

• The book The Phoenix Lights: A Skeptic's Discovery That We Are Not Alone (Hampton Roads, 2004; later editions)
• The documentary The Phoenix Lights...We Are Not Alone (2005, with Steve Lantz Productions), featuring astronaut Edgar Mitchell
• The Phoenix Lights Network (thephoenixlights.net), an archive of witness reports

Kitei argues that her photographs and the witnesses she collected rule out flares and aircraft. Robert Sheaffer, reviewing her material in the Skeptical Inquirer (2016), argues that some of her photographs appear to show lights on the ground. Her pre-1997 sightings are her own reports and have not been independently corroborated.

The Petit-Rechain Connection

The Phoenix Lights are often visually associated with the famous "Petit-Rechain photograph" from the Belgian UFO Wave (1989–1990), which showed a triangular craft with lights at each point. However, that photograph was admitted as a fabrication by its creator in 2011. CONFIRMED HOAX

This is important context: while the Belgian and Phoenix cases share similarities in witness descriptions of large, silent, triangular craft, the Petit-Rechain photo should not be used as supporting evidence for either event.

How the Flare Explanation Emerged

No official explanation was offered in the first weeks. The answer came from journalists. In June 1997, KPNX-TV reporter Blair Meeks filmed a flare drop over the gunnery ranges southwest of Phoenix that looked remarkably like the March 13 lights. Within days the Tucson Weekly reported that the Maryland Air National Guard, in Arizona for winter training, had A-10s over the range that night and that they had dropped flares. An Arizona National Guard public information officer, Capt. Eileen Bienz, determined that the flares were dropped at 10 PM over the North Tac range, about 30 miles southwest of Phoenix, at an unusually high 15,000 feet (Ortega, 1998). The Arizona Republic carried the Guard unit's account on July 25, 1997.

Local UFO investigator Dick Motzer and others then showed that the lights' first appearance, the number visible from different elevations around the Valley, and the timing of their disappearance all matched flares falling beyond the Sierra Estrella (Ortega, 1998). Similar lights over the Valley on February 6, 2007 were identified by military officials and the FAA as flares from Luke AFB F-16s, and Skeptoid (2007) cites an analysis showing that LUU-2B/B flares seen from 50–70 miles would be as bright as the lights seen from Phoenix.

The tests were contested. Jim Dilettoso of Tempe's Village Labs, who appeared widely in 1997 coverage, asserted that his spectral analysis of the videotapes proved the 10 PM lights "weren't flares." The New Times had his methods reviewed by ASU astronomer Paul Scowen, who rejected them: the paper concluded that Dilettoso, given the tools he used, could not do what he claimed (Ortega, 1998).

The Telescope Observation

The single most informative observation of Event One was made by Mitch Stanley, a young amateur astronomer in Scottsdale. As the V approached from the northwest, he turned his 10-inch Dobsonian telescope on the leading three lights. At 60x, he said, each light split into a pair on the tips of squarish wings: "Planes." He followed them for about a minute and then turned to other objects. His account did not reach the public until the New Times reported it in June 1997. Village Labs' seven-page summary of the 8:30 sightings mentioned him in a single line (Ortega, 1998).

Terry Proctor's videotape of the same pass points the same way. It is poor in quality, and even under enhancement nothing joins the five lights; over a few seconds they move in relation to one another. That fits witness reports from Prescott, where one light trailed the others for a time (Ortega, 1998). Whose planes they were was not established in 1997. In 2016 Robert Sheaffer described them as five A-10s from Operation Snowbird returning from Nellis AFB near Las Vegas on the operation's final night. He wrote that they flew under visual flight rules with steady formation lights rather than blinking collision lights, and landed at Davis-Monthan at about 8:45 PM. James McGaha, a retired Air Force pilot and Tucson astronomer, independently traced both events to A-10s flying in formation (Arizona Daily Star, 2007).

Symington's 2007 Account

Fife Symington left office in September 1997 after his conviction on federal fraud charges, which was overturned in 1999; he was pardoned in 2001. He told the Arizona Daily Star in 2007 that the legal fight was one reason he had kept quiet: "It was a troublesome period to say the least." When he spoke out, he went further than many witnesses. He said he had seen a single "delta-shaped" craft with "a dramatically large, very distinctive leading edge," and called the Air Force's flare explanation "silly" as applied to what he saw, while accepting that "there might very well have been military flares in the sky that evening" (CNN, 2007).

His published accounts do not give a time for the sighting. His testimony carries the weight of a pilot and former Air Force officer; it is still one observer's recollection of a night-time sighting, first made public ten years later.

Frances Barwood and the Official Inquiries

On May 6, 1997, a TV crew sent to interview Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio about the lights found him out and went to City Hall instead. Phoenix councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood then raised the sightings at that afternoon's council meeting and asked the city to look into them. The request made her a national media figure, and she later ran for Arizona secretary of state with a paid UFO political consultant, Stephen Bassett. Barwood says Arpaio asked her to request an investigation by his office in writing and that his aide, David Hendershott, then told her not to send the letter; Hendershott said she had it backwards (Ortega, 1998). No state or federal investigation followed.

The Ongoing Legacy

Nearly thirty years on, the Phoenix Lights remain one of the most widely witnessed UFO events in the United States. The second event is explained by flares to the satisfaction of most analysts. The first has a conventional explanation, a formation of aircraft, that fits a telescope observation, a video and the timing of reports. That explanation has never been officially confirmed, and many witnesses, Symington among them, reject it. The case shows how an official answer that addresses only half of a night's events can keep the whole night open.

Cultural Impact

The Phoenix Lights became a defining case of modern UFO culture. Dr. Kitei marks the anniversary each March with events in Phoenix, and the case is the subject of her 2005 documentary and of segments in James Fox's films, including I Know What I Saw (2009). It also inspired fiction films such as Phoenix Forgotten (2017). Symington's change of position, from mocking the sightings to describing his own, gave it a political profile that few UFO events have had.

The case is also a lesson in how evidence gets lost. Mitch Stanley's telescope observation was offered to a newspaper and a city councilwoman the day after the event and ignored. Meanwhile, claims of analysis that could not do what was claimed reached national television.

Key Witnesses

The Five Observables Assessment

The Five Observables framework is applied to the characteristics of the Phoenix Lights (primarily Event One):

Assessment: No observable is established. The "lift" and "low observability" readings rest on witnesses who saw a slow, silent object. But the timing of the reports implies about 400 mph, a telescope observer saw ordinary planes, and no radar data exists either way. Both are therefore marked speculative, not present.

Evidence Assessment

Why "Disputed"

The Phoenix Lights receive a DISPUTED classification because:

• The events happened and were seen by a great many people. That is not in question.
• Event Two has a well-tested conventional explanation: Maryland Air National Guard flares, confirmed by Guard spokespeople and matched to the videotapes.
• For Event One, a telescope observation, a home video and the timing of reports point to a formation of aircraft, and two investigators identify it as A-10s of Operation Snowbird.
• No military unit has formally confirmed that identification, and many witnesses, including a sitting governor, describe a single structured craft.

Rating change (October 2026). This case was previously rated VERIFIED, 72/100. On this site Verified means confirmation by a government body, sensor data or multiple independent institutions. Nothing anomalous about the Phoenix Lights has been confirmed in that sense: the only official confirmation is of the flares, which is a conventional explanation. The old rating also rested on claims that could not be sourced: Symington watching from Prescott airport with five aviation-trained witnesses, a geometric "stellar occlusion" analysis, Luke AFB logs, contradictory FOIA releases, 700 reports in 48 hours, and videos showing stars blotted out. And it ignored the strongest contrary evidence. With those claims removed and Stanley's and Proctor's evidence restored, the evidence points both ways, which is this site's definition of Disputed. Score: 72 → 45.

Sensor & Instrumentation Detection Profile

No radar or other instrument record of either event has been published. The silence of Sky Harbor and Luke AFB is often presented as a sign of a radar-defeating craft, but the people involved explained it differently. Bill Grava, an air traffic controller on duty at Sky Harbor that night (who saw the 10 PM lights himself), told the Phoenix New Times that a formation at high altitude over Phoenix would have been watched by the FAA's center in Albuquerque, not by Sky Harbor, and that five planes in a V would have shown up as ordinary targets. Luke AFB's Capt. Stacey Cotton said the base's radar operators were asked whether they had seen anything unusual and said no; five planes at high altitude, outside Luke's restricted airspace, would not have been considered unusual (Ortega, 1998).

(An earlier draft of this page described a Luke AFB Wing Commander's log with a notation of "unusual light reports from civilian witnesses," FOIA requests that produced heavily redacted or contradictory radar documents, and administrative appeals that released more. This site found no source for any of these, and they have been removed.)

For Event Two, the nearest thing to instrument data is the home video. Dr. Leonid Rudin of Cognitech, working for the Discovery Channel, matched Mike Krzyston's night footage frame by frame to a daytime shot from the same yard, and found that the lights sat above the Sierra Estrella ridge and went out as they reached it. ASU astronomer Dr. Paul Scowen repeated the test for the Phoenix New Times and got the same result. A KSAZ-TV segment that disputed the finding had simply overlaid the two images in an editing machine (Ortega, 1998).

Environmental & Geospatial Context

March 13, 1997 was a generally clear night in Arizona. Comet Hale-Bopp, near its closest approach to Earth, was bright in the northwest, and many people were outside to see it (Ortega, 1998). Some witnesses in Glendale saw the formation pass behind thin cloud (Prothero & Callahan, 2017).

Event One's track runs from Henderson, Nevada (first report, 7:55 PM) to Paulden, Arizona (about 8:15 PM), then Prescott and Prescott Valley, the Phoenix area (about 8:30 PM), and south of Tucson (about 8:45 PM). The New Times calculated that this was roughly 200 miles in 30 minutes, or about 400 mph: jet speed, not the "30–100 mph" that many witnesses perceived. Event Two lay southwest of Phoenix. According to the Arizona National Guard, the flares were dropped over the North Tac range, about 30 miles southwest of the city, beyond the Sierra Estrella, which hid them from view as they fell (Ortega, 1998).

(An earlier draft of this page placed Governor Symington among "six witnesses at the Prescott Municipal Airport" at 8:17 PM. Symington's own account puts him in Phoenix, watching the object over Squaw Peak, and this site found no source for the Prescott airport group. The claim has been removed.)

Observer Credibility & Occupational Profile

No reliable count of witnesses exists. CNN in June 1997 described "hundreds of people"; Symington wrote of "hundreds — if not thousands"; Sheaffer describes the 10 PM event as seen by "hundreds if not thousands." (Figures of 10,000 to 40,000 in an earlier draft of this page had no source and have been removed.) The witnesses who matter most are the few whose observations can be tested.

Governor Fife Symington III was the most prominent. He says he watched a "massive delta-shaped craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak" in Phoenix and that, "as a pilot and a former Air Force Officer," he could say it resembled no man-made object he had seen (CNN, November 9, 2007). He did not say so publicly until March 2007, and at the time he had mocked the sightings.

Tim Ley and his family — his wife Bobbi, son Hal and grandson Damien Turnidge — first saw the lights from about 65 miles away. Over about ten minutes they watched them approach and spread into an upside-down V, then saw a shape like a 60-degree carpenter's square, with five lights set into it, pass over them at what they judged to be 100–150 feet (Prothero & Callahan, 2017). Ley told CNN that the left side was "a couple of blocks away" as the right side passed over him.

Mitch Stanley, an amateur astronomer in Scottsdale, is the only witness known to have looked at the lights through a telescope: a 10-inch Dobsonian at 60x. He saw planes. Terry Proctor videotaped the 8:30 pattern. Mike Krzyston filmed the 10 PM lights from his Moon Valley yard; his tape is the most widely broadcast footage of the night. Dr. Lynne Kitei (discussed above) is the case's best-known advocate.

(An earlier draft of this page said that Phoenix police and fire personnel at multiple stations reported the formation, and that Sky Harbor mechanics and airline pilots reported it but declined to file reports. It also said Mike Krzyston filmed the V-formation, and that MUFON found a "wobble" in his tape consistent with a rigid craft. This site found no source for any of this. Krzyston's tape shows the 10 PM event. These claims have been removed.)

Physical & Material Assays

The Phoenix Lights produced no physical material for analysis. No craft landed, no debris was found and no trace evidence was documented anywhere along the corridor.

Some witnesses say the object blocked out stars as it passed over, and proponents treat this "stellar occlusion" as near-physical evidence of a solid body. It is still testimony, not a measurement. Other witnesses watching the same pass, including two New Times writers, disagreed about whether anything connected the lights, and the only video of the pass shows lights shifting relative to one another. (An earlier draft of this page cited frame-by-frame analyses by MUFON, NARCAP and aviation consultants showing "rigid geometric relationships" in Event One footage; this site found no such analyses, and the claim has been removed.)

Historical Precedents & Archive Matches

The Phoenix Lights are often compared with the Battle of Los Angeles (February 25, 1942), another night-time mass sighting over a major city, later attributed by Air Force historians to weather balloons and war nerves, and with the Belgian UFO Wave of 1989–1990, whose reports of large, silent triangles resemble descriptions of Event One. In Belgium, F-16s were scrambled on the night of March 30–31, 1990 after radar contacts, but their pilots never saw the objects. The Hudson Valley wave of 1983–1986, investigated by J. Allen Hynek and Philip Imbrogno, included boomerang-shaped formations of lights. Some of those were attributed to pilots flying in formation from a local airfield.

Government records on the Phoenix Lights are sparse. Project Blue Book closed in 1969 and has no record of the 1997 event. No Air Force, FAA or NORAD document on the night has been published, and the flare attribution rests on Guard spokespeople and a 2000 Maryland ANG history. The only local official inquiry came from Phoenix city councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood, who asked the city to look into the sightings in May 1997. (An earlier draft of this page said 911 switchboards were overwhelmed, that the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office opened an inquiry, that Senator John McCain called for an investigation, and that the Arizona legislature discussed reopening the case in 2007. This site found no source for these claims, and they have been removed.)

Material Analysis

The Phoenix Lights produced no physical trace evidence. No debris, landing marks or radiation readings were ever recovered or measured. The record consists of witness testimony, home video, Dr. Lynne Kitei’s photographs, one telescope observation, and the Guard's flare acknowledgment.

Absence of Physical Evidence

Nothing landed and nothing was recovered. The case is therefore limited to testimony and imagery, unlike Falcon Lake or Roswell, where material was at least reported.

Video & Photographic Records

Event Two was videotaped from many points across the Valley, and two independent analyses of Mike Krzyston's footage match it to flares going out at the Sierra Estrella ridge. Event One is far more poorly recorded. The best-known tape is Terry Proctor's: poor in quality, with nothing visible joining the five lights, which shift relative to each other over a few seconds (Ortega, 1998). Dr. Kitei's photographs from 1995–1997 are her own records of separate occasions; Robert Sheaffer argues that some of them show lights on the ground.

Military Flare Explanation vs. V-Shaped Pattern

The Maryland Air National Guard's flare drop over the Barry M. Goldwater Range accounts for Event Two; Guard spokespeople described its timing, location and altitude in 1997. Event One has no official explanation. The aircraft identification rests on Mitch Stanley's telescope observation, the Proctor video and the timing of reports, and on the Operation Snowbird A-10 flight described by Sheaffer and McGaha.

Radar Data

No radar data for either event has been released. Sky Harbor's air traffic controller on duty, Bill Grava, said a high-altitude formation over Phoenix would have been handled by the FAA's Albuquerque center and would have appeared as ordinary aircraft. Luke AFB said its operators saw nothing unusual. The absence of a published radar record is therefore not evidence of a radar-invisible craft; it is simply an absence.

The Conventional Explanation Candidates: Aircraft, Flares and Airships

The Phoenix Lights involve two separate events, so they need two separate explanations. Event One was the V-shaped pattern of lights that crossed the state between about 8:00 and 8:45 PM. Event Two was the row of hovering lights southwest of Phoenix at about 10:00 PM. The flare explanation covers only Event Two. For Event One, the leading conventional candidate is a formation of aircraft; a lighter-than-air vehicle has also been proposed.

Event Two is explained to the satisfaction of most analysts. Event One has a conventional explanation that fits the telescope observation, the video and the timing, but no official confirmation. Witnesses who saw a single structured craft continue to reject it. That is why the case is rated Disputed rather than Explained.

Related Cases

Further Reading — Recommended Literature

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Essential Viewing

More on This Case

Sources

• Ortega, Tony. "The Hack and the Quack." Phoenix New Times, March 5, 1998 (Mitch Stanley's telescope observation; Terry Proctor's video; the June 1997 flare identification; Capt. Eileen Bienz, Capt. Drew Sullins, Capt. Stacey Cotton, Bill Grava; the Cognitech and Scowen video tests; Frances Barwood). phoenixnewtimes.com
• Symington, Fife. "Symington: I saw a UFO in the Arizona sky." CNN.com, November 9, 2007. cnn.com
• Associated Press. "Former Ariz. governor boosts UFO claims," March 23, 2007. nbcnews.com
• Beal, Tom. "UFOs flew over Phoenix in '97, Symington says." Arizona Daily Star, March 23, 2007 (includes James McGaha's A-10 explanation). tucson.com
• Shanks, Jon. "Former Arizona Gov. Admits UFO Sighting On Night of Phoenix Lights." The National Ledger, March 18, 2007 (reporting Symington's interview with the Prescott Daily Courier). patrickgross.org (archived copy)
• CNN. "What were those lights in the Phoenix sky?" June 19, 1997 (Tim, Bobbi and Hal Ley). cnn.com
• Associated Press. "Alien encounter leaves media agog." Deseret News, June 20, 1997 (Symington's June 19 press conference). deseret.com
• Sheaffer, Robert. "The 'Phoenix Lights' Become an 'Incident'." Skeptical Inquirer, November 8, 2016. skepticalinquirer.org
• Dunning, Brian. "The Alien Invasion of Phoenix, Arizona." Skeptoid #41, April 26, 2007. skeptoid.com
• Prothero, Donald R. & Callahan, Timothy D. UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens: What Science Says. Indiana University Press, 2017, p. 35 (Henderson and Paulden reports; the Ley family; Glendale; Mitch Stanley).
• Ruelas, Richard. "Air Guard unit sheds light on Valley's UFOs." The Arizona Republic, July 25, 1997; and Craven, Scott, "Intrigue persists over lights in sky," The Arizona Republic, February 25, 2007 (Lt. Col. Ed Jones). Both as cited in the Wikipedia article "Phoenix Lights"; not seen directly by this site.
• Kitei, Lynne D. The Phoenix Lights: A Skeptic's Discovery That We Are Not Alone. Hampton Roads, 2004 (later editions).
• Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Harmony Books, 2010 (includes Symington's account).
• Fox, James (director). Out of the Blue (premiered on the Sci Fi Channel, June 24, 2003) and I Know What I Saw (2009). wikipedia.org
• Tingley, Brett. "We Talk Giant V-Shaped Airships, Space, And Phoenix Lights With JP Aerospace's Founder." The War Zone, February 5, 2020. twz.com
• Nordine, Michael. "Kurt Russell Reveals He Was the Pilot Who Reported the Phoenix Lights UFO Sighting." IndieWire, June 15, 2017. indiewire.com
• National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). Database: Arizona Reports, March 13, 1997. nuforc.org
• "Phoenix Lights," Wikipedia (used as a pointer to sources only). en.wikipedia.org

Corrections (October 2026)

A fact-check of this page against the sources above removed material that could not be traced to any source: a Symington admission "aired" in Out of the Blue in 2003 (his account dates from March 2007; June 24, 2003 is the film's premiere date); his sighting "from Prescott airport" with five aviation-trained witnesses (he says he saw it over Squaw Peak in Phoenix); an Air Force and McCain-office pressure campaign behind the 1997 press conference; a "Rich Girard" stellar-occlusion analysis in MUFON proceedings; a Luke AFB Wing Commander's log and contradictory FOIA releases; "over 700" NUFORC/MUFON reports in 48 hours; witness counts of 10,000–40,000; a sheriff's inquiry and a 2007 legislative review; and several sources that do not exist as cited (DPS and police dispatch logs, a MUFON investigation report, an Arizona Air Guard flight log, a Luke AFB press release, a Davenport congressional submission, a Donald Schmitt report and a "Mike Westbrook" witness). "Captain Eileen Benz of Luke AFB" was corrected to Capt. Eileen Bienz of the Arizona National Guard. The page had also omitted the strongest evidence on the conventional side, Mitch Stanley's telescope observation and Terry Proctor's video, which have been added. The rating was changed from Verified (72) to Disputed (45); the reasons are given under "Why Disputed."