The Phoenix Lights

On the evening of 13 March 1997, with much of Arizona outdoors for Comet Hale-Bopp, witnesses from the Nevada line to Tucson reported a V-shaped formation of five to seven lights crossing the state southeast over roughly half an hour, passing over Prescott and through the Phoenix valley about 8:30 p.m. Many described a single rigid boomerang that occluded stars between its lights, enormous and silent at low altitude; others reported discernible gaps consistent with aircraft in formation.

At about 10 p.m., a second event: an arc of brilliant amber lights hanging over the Sierra Estrella southwest of the city, widely filmed. The Arizona Air National Guard subsequently confirmed that A-10 aircraft of the Maryland ANG, operating in exercise Snowbird, had dropped LUU-2 illumination flares over the Barry M. Goldwater Range at that hour; independent analyses matching the videos to the range's terrain line support the identification, and it stands as the accepted account of the 10 p.m. lights.

The 8:30 formation has no equivalent resolution. An Air Force explanation of high-altitude aircraft in formation was suggested but never documented to the event; Luke AFB stated no unusual operations. Gov. Fife Symington mocked the affair with a costumed aide that June and, ten years later, stated publicly he had seen the object himself and considered it unexplained — the era's cleanest specimen of ridicule as policy, executed by a witness. NUFORC's log for that night, preserved in this archive, records the wave as it arrived, hours ahead of any explanation.