Other over Scottsdale, AZ

The report, as filed

I was traveling north on Hayden Rd. just after 7:30 pm on Friday, 21 February 2020 and making a right turn into the complex my mother lives in when I noticed what looked like a single engine plane banking down toward the intersection ahead of me. I stopped my truck just inside the driveway and watched out my open driver’s side window thinking I was about to witness a huge explosion. I was facing north and the thing(s) I witnessed were moving toward me and to the left, so southwest. It was already dark and all I could really see at first were lights. As I watched I realized there were two things happening: one looked to be a single engine plane turning down and left (so, eastward) and crashing in slow motion toward the intersection; the other thing looked to be the lights of a helicopter staying the original SW trajectory. The first object, as it was facing me during its turn, was visible only as (what looked like) the two FAA wingtip lights, except both were red. I could just barely make out a structure between the lights. It completed its turn and slowed in the air to almost a stop, pointing down at an angle toward the intersection. At this point I could make out a third red light behind the two, which showed me the angle. It wasn’t a completely side-on view, maybe ten degrees toward me. Suddenly the area between the two front lights looked like a bank of ten large flat screens, side by side, and they were alternating the purplish glow similar to a blacklight from the center out to the red lights at the tip, then back to center. I could count five pulses from center to tips, so I assume ten “screens”. It did this four or five times that I could count as it floated. The craft was barely moving forward at this point. It was pointing straight at the westbound traffic parked at the intersection and flashing this pattern in that type of blacklight that isn’t really visible straight on. I feel like I could only see the purplish glow because of the angle I was looking at it from. The second set of lights that looked like helicopter lights kept on coasting, and after that brief few seconds of purplish pulsing the first set of lights began to turn back toward me and rise. Then a car pulled into the drive behind me, almost hitting me, so I had to pull forward into the complex and park. I did this quickly and grabbed my binoculars (I use a crappy old tracfone, so I didn’t bother trying to get a picture with it). I stepped back toward Hayden Rd. and I could see the lights were already flying together again and had resumed the SW trajectory. I looked through my binoculars and I could see that the one set of lights was indeed a helicopter because there is so much ambient light from the ground below. The red lights that floated over the intersection were on what honestly looked like a huge flat triangular box, one on each corner. And it was moving flat side forward, counterintuitively for a flying triangular shape. After a few more seconds they were lost to the distance behind a big stand of palms. I got the impression that all three sides of this craft were the same kind of screens. And as it was floating over the intersection I was reminded of how a cuttlefish hunts, using pulsing color patterns to hypnotize prey. I asked the local community in many forums and face to face if anyone saw this and found nothing. I searched numerous times over the following months for some kind of advertisement craft that matched this and found nothing. It’s unidentified, but whatever it was it’s official SOMEWHERE because of that helicopter escort.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #165569). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.