Episode #8: The Phoenix Lights

**No more high volume warning for the newscast segment of this episode. Got it all fixed and evened for a smooth listen...about alien lights 👽👽👽

So far on our journey through the Archives, we have covered notorious demon possessions, ghostly encounters and hauntings, urban legends, and conspiracy theories, but what about the mysteries of the sky? The enigma that is space and the universe…aliens and UFOs. There is a plethora of stories and accounts out there that surround extraterrestrials and unidentified flying objects, so many in fact, that I had to spin the Flying Saucer Wheel of Extraterrestrial Encounters just to decide on what story to cover tonight. As fate would decide, the wheel chose a story that takes place in an area that has no shortage of UFO sightings, the Western United States, more specifically, Arizona.

Author E.M. Moon Website

The Occult Archives theme song by JunkFood2121, background music by Purple Planet Music (www.purple-planet.com)    

Transcript

So far on our journey through the Archives, we have covered notorious demon possessions, ghostly encounters and hauntings, urban legends, and conspiracy theories, but what about the mysteries of the sky? The enigma that is space and the universe…aliens and UFOs. There is a plethora of stories and accounts out there that surround extraterrestrials and unidentified flying objects, so many in fact, that I had to spin the Flying Saucer Wheel of Extraterrestrial Encounters just to decide on what story to cover tonight. As fate would decide, the wheel chose a story that takes place in an area that has no shortage of UFO sightings, the Western United States, more specifically, Arizona. 

         Phoenix is not only the capitol of Arizona, but the most populous city in the state, boasting a population of 1,680,992 people as of 2019. The city is also known as the Valley of the Sun, being part of the Salt River Valley, and is the largest in the state as well as the seat of Maricopa County. It’s home to the Phoenix Zoo, the largest privately owned, non-profit zoo in the states, the Phoenix Botanical Gardens, and South Mountain Park, the largest municipal park in the US. It’s a hub of mixed cultures, cuisines, and tourism, always hopping and FULL of people…so if there was ever  a place for aliens to just show up unannounced and undetected, this was not the place. But on March 13th, 1997, it seems that this is exactly what happened.

{Phoenix Lights News Reports}

         Lights of various descriptions were seen by thousands of people not long after sunset in a space of about 300 miles from the Nevada line, straight through Phoenix, and to the edge of Tucson. There were even sightings as far as Sonora in Mexico.

         Initial reports on the sighting came in at around 18:55 PST, or close to seven PM on the night of March 13th. The first was from a man who reported seeing a V-shaped object hovering above Henderson, Nevada. He claimed that it was about the size of a Boeing 747 and sounded like “rushing wind” and had what appeared to be six lights on its leading edge. Supposedly, these lights traveled from northwest to southeast. The next report of a sighting actually came from an unidentified former police officer of Paulden, Arizona just after leaving his house around 8:15 PM. As he was driving north, he allegedly saw a cluster of what appeared to be reddish or orange lights in the sky, comprised of four lights traversing the sky together, with a fifth light trailing behind them. Each individual light in the formation, according to the unidentified officer, appeared to consist of two separate point sources of orange light. Once he returned home, he watched the lights through a pair of binocular until they disappeared south over the horizon. In just a little over an hour, these lights had traveled roughly 214 miles across state lines. To give you an idea, it would take someone traveling in a car on the highway approximately three hours and ten minutes to travel from one city to the other. Granted, that’s going at a much slower speed, I would assume, and on a set course…but still. These lights clearly didn’t seem to be stationary, so keep that in mind.

         Shortly after that anonymous sighting in Paulden, reports of lights being seen in the area of Prescott and Prescott Valley started to crop up. At around 8:17 PM, callers began reporting that the object was definitely solid because it blocked out much of the starry sky as it passed overhead. Two minutes after the last sighting in Paulden, the unidentified object appeared in Prescott which is at least thirty-five minutes by car and another 25 miles or so from where it was last seen. 

         Devon Lorenz and his aunt, Jamie Lorenz, were standing outside on his porch in Presott Valley when they noticed a cluster of lights to the west-northwest of their home. The lights seemed to form a triangular pattern, but to them, all of the lights seemed to be red except for the light at the nose of the object, which was distinctly white. The object or objects, which they observed for about 2 to 3 minutes with binoculars, then passed directly overhead of the observers and was seen to “bank to the right” before it disappeared in the night sky to the southeast of Prescott Valley. They altitude of this unidentified object could not be determined; however, it appeared that the object was flying fairly low and without any sound whatsoever. 

Must have been running on an electric engine…

         The National UFO Reporting Center received a report from the Prescott area stating: “We observed five yellow-white lights in a “V” formation moving slowly from the northwest, across the sky to the northeast, then turn almost due south and continue until out of sight. The point of the “V” was in the direction of movement. The first three lights were in a fairly tight “V” while two of the lights were further back along the lines of the “V”s legs. During the northwest-northeast transit, one of the trailing lights moved up and joined the three then dropped back to the trailing position. I estimated the three light “V” to cover about 0.5 degrees of sky and the whole group of five lights to cover about 1 degree of sky.”

         That’s a fairly descriptive report if I’ve ever read one.

         From there, the lights began making their way to Phoenix. The first sighting from Phoenix came in from Tim Ley and his wife Bobbi, along with their son Hal and grandson Damien Turnidge, who first saw the lights when they were above Prescott Valley about 65, or 100 km, away from them. At first, it seemed to appear as if there were five separate and distinct lights in an arc-shape like they were on top of a balloon but they soon realized that the lights appeared to be moving towards them. Over the next ten minutes or so, the lights seemed to be coming closer, the distance between them increased, and they took on the shape of, you guess it, an upside down V. Eventually, when the lights appeared to be only a couple miles away, the witnesses noticed what looked like the shape of a 60-degree carpenter’s square, with the five lights set into it:  one at the front and two on each side. The lighted object appeared to be coming right down the street where they lived, about 100 to 150 feet above them, traveling at a very slow rate of speed to the point where it seemed like it was hovering in complete silence; not a peep from the unidentified object. Not long after, the object passed overhead and went through a V shaped opening in the peaks of the mountain range towards Squaw Peak Mountain and the direction of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. There were even witnesses in Glendale, a suburb northwest of Phoenix, that claimed to have seen the object pass overhead at an altitude high enough to become obscured by thin clouds at around 8:30-8:45 PM.

         Not long after the triangular formation entered Phoenix, a cement driver by the name of Bill Greiner, was hauling a load down the mountain north of the city and described the second group of lights saying, “I’ll never be the same. Before this, if anybody had told me they saw a UFO, I would’ve said, “Yeah, and I believe in the Tooth Fairy.” Now, I’ve got a whole new view and I may be just a dumb truck driver, but I’ve seen something that don’t belong here.” 

Greiner stated that the lights hovered over the area for two hours. 

         Eventually the object left Phoenix and was spotted a final time.  A report came in from a young man in the Kingman area of Arizona  who had stopped his car at a payphone to report what he had seen. “The young man en route to Los Angeles, called from a phone booth to report having seen a large and bizarre cluster of stars moving slowly in the northern sky.” 

         Even the then governer of Arizona, Fife Symington, said this to CNN about this night in March 1997:

         “In 1997, during my second term as governor of Arizona, I saw something that defied logic and challenged my reality.

I witnessed a massive delta-shaped, craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak, a mountain range in Phoenix, Arizona. It was truly breathtaking. I was absolutely stunned because I was turning to the west looking for the distant Phoenix Lights.

To my astonishment this apparition appeared; this dramatically large, very distinctive leading edge with some enormous lights was traveling through the Arizona sky.

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 it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don't fly in formation.

The incident was witnessed by hundreds -- if not thousands -- of people in Arizona, and my office was besieged with phone calls from very concerned Arizonians.

The growing hysteria intensified when the story broke nationally. I decided to lighten the mood of the state by calling a press conference where my chief of staff arrived in an alien costume. We managed to lessen the sense of panic but, at the same time, upset many of my constituents.

         These are just a handful of eye-witness accounts to what we now call the Phoenix Lights or Lights Over Phoenix, whatever name you’d like to give it. Thousands more were documented by officials from all around the area reporting the similar V shape lights and slow, inaudible movement of the object. That alone is decent proof that something was obviously seen in the Arizona night sky back in 1997, but what was it really? Of course you will have those that claim it was an actual UFO and that the aliens were just doing a little fly-by to see what everyone was up to, but your deniers seem to have the loudest voices.

         There is some controversy as how to best classify the reports on the night in question. Because of the discrepancies in the eyewitness reports, some indicate that this means there were several unidentified objects in the area at the time, each of which was its own separate “event”. Most skeptics dismiss this theory as one of “over-extrapolation from the kind of deviation common in necessarily subjective eyewitness accounts” meaning that in these sorts of situations, where you have a lot of eye-witness reports, details and supposed facts can easily be misidentified or exaggerated from person to person. The media and most skeptical investigators have mostly preferred to split the sightings into two separate cases, a first and second event, for which they offered two distinct explanations. 

         Starting with the first event, the “V”,  which appeared over Northern Arizona and gradually traveled south over nearly the ENTIRE length of the state and, eventually passing south of Tucson, was the apparently “wedge-shaped” object reported by then-Governor Symington and many others. This particular event started at about 8:15 PM over the Prescott area and was seen south of Tucson by about 8:45. Of course proponents of the “two separate events” propose that the first event still has no provable explanation, but that some evidence exists that suggests the lights were in fact—airplanes. What? No Swamp gas and weather balloons?

         According to an article by reporter Janet Gonzales that appeared in the Phoenix News times, videotape of the V shape shows the lights moving as separate entities, not as a single object; a phenomenon known as illusory contours can cause the human eye to see unconnected lines or dots as forming a single shape when in actuality they are separate. 

         Ok, so they may have been moving separately and not as a distinct single entity…but that still begs for an explanation as to how they traveled the distance that they did while staying in the formation, more or less.

         Mitch Stanley, an amateur astronomer observed high altitude lights that night, flying in formation using a Dobsonian telescope, giving 43X magnification. After observing the lights, he told his mother, who was present at the time, that the lights were aircraft. According to Stanley, the lights were quite clearly individual airplanes; a companion who was with him recalled asking Stanley at the time what the lights were, and he said, “Planes.” When Stanley first gave an account of his observation at the Discovery Channel Town Hall Meeting with all the witnesses there, he was shouted down in his assertion that what he saw was what other witnesses saw.  Obviously, what Stanley had been seeing was the Maryland National Guard jets flying in formation on their way to drop high-altitude flares at the Barry M. Goldwater bombing range south of Phoenix. His account of the nature of the lights that moved in formation that night is contradicted by some Phoenix residents without high-powered telescopes; however, no military or civilian aircraft formations were known to have been flying in the area at the time of the event. Of course, the Maryland National Guard jets were not known about at the time because their mission was a classified military mission, making it a possibility that is what was seen, by Stanley at the very least. Additionally, Prescott is home to the western campus of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University where flight training occurs with a rather large fleet of aircraft. In the same vein, there is a whispered theory on campus that the aircraft in formation that night were actually ERAU aircraft flying in formation with transponders and lights off as a prank. This is treated as a sort of a joke since such behavior is a severe violation of FAA and ERAU rules. 

         The second event was classified as the set of nine lights that appeared to hover over the city of Phoenix at around ten PM. The second event was more thoroughly covered by the media, due in part to the numerous video images taken of the lights. This was also observed by countless people who may have thought they were seeing the same lights as those reported earlier in the night. The U.S. Air Force explained the second event away as nothing more than slow-falling, long-burning LUU 2B/B illumination flares dropped by a flight of four A-10 Warthog aircraft on a training exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range in Western Pima county. This explanation states that the flares would have been visible in Phoenix and appeared to hover due to rising heat from the burning flares creating a “balloon” effect on their parachutes, which slowed the descent. The lights then appeared to wink out as they fell behind the Sierra Estrella, a mountain range to the southwest of Phoenix. Lt. Col. Ed Jones, a Maryland Air National Guard pilot, responded to a March 2007 media query, confirmed that he had flown one of the aircraft in the formation that dropped the flares on the night in question. The squadron to which he belonged was in fact at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona on a training exercise at the time and flew training sorties to the Barry Goldwater Range on that night, according to the Maryland Air National Guard. A history of the Maryland Air National Guard was published in 2000 and asserted that the squadron, the 104th Fighter Squadron, was indeed responsible for the incident. First reports of their responsibility for the event were published in the Arizona Republic Newspaper in July of 97’.

         Military flares like the ones that were supposedly used on that night can be seen from hundreds of miles away given the right environmental conditions.  Later comparisons with other known military flare drops were reported, showing similarities between known military flare drops and the Phoenix Lights. An analysis of the luminosity of the illumination flares claimed to be dropped that night determined that the luminosity of such flares at a range of about 50-70 miles would fall well within the range of the lights that were witnessed during the event. 

         Media coverage at the time of the incident was minimal. In Phoenix, a small number of local news outlets noted the event, but it didn’t really receive much attention other than that. But, for whatever reason, USA Today decided to run a front-page story about the lights on June 18th 1997 that brought national attention to the case, with ABC and NBS soon to follow with their own coverage. Shortly after the lights were seen, Arizona’s governor at the time, Fife Symington, held a press conference stating that “They found who was responsible” and proceeded to make light of the situation by bringing out his aide on stage, dressed in an alien costume. At this time, the former Governor hadn’t gone public with his own eye-witness account of the Phoenix Lights, not until 2007 when he said he had witnessed one of the “crafts of unknown origin”. In one interview he stated, “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. Other people saw it, responsible people. I don’t know why people would ridicule it.” He had earlier said, “It was enormous and inexplicable. Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too. It was dramatic. And it couldn’t have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape.” Symington also noted that he requested information from the commander of Luke Air Force Base, the general of the National Guard, and the head of the Department of Public Safety. But none of the officials he contacted had an answer for what had happened, and were just as perplexed by the situation. He later responded to an Air Force Explanation that the lights were flares saying: “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 it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don’t fly in formation.” In a later interview with UFO Hunters for their television show, Symington claimed that he had contacted the military to ask what the lights were and was met with the response of “no comment”. Symington pointed out that he was the governor of Arizona at the time, and not just some ordinary civilian.  Even Frances Barwood, the 1997 Phoenix city councilwoman who launched an investigation into the lights, said, that of the over 700 witnesses that she interviewed, “The government never interviewed even one.”

         So, what do we make of this event based on what little solid evidence there is? The Air Force and government explanation is wholly contradictory to what eye-witnesses said they saw, and they weren’t lacking in that department. Not only were there these eye-witness accounts, but there were numerous still photographs and videotapes that were made by these witnesses in Phoenix, distinctly showing a series of lights appearing at a regular interval, remaining illuminated for several moments and then going out. There isn’t much in the way of photographic or video evidence from the supposed “first event” and the only known surviving video is of poor quality, but it does show a group of lights with a clear discernible outline of a V shape, fitting the description of what other witnesses reported. Aside from that, there are many images and clips of footage that have been repeatedly aired on documentaries for channels such as the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. But the most frequently seen sequence shows what appears to be an arc of lights materializing one by one, then going out in the same fashion. UFO advocates claim that these images show that the lights were some form of “running light” or other aircraft illumination along the leading edge of the large craft—estimated to be as large as a mile in diameter—hovering over the city of Phoenix. Other similar videos taken over a half hour period show differing numbers of lights in a V or arrowhead array. Thousands of other witnesses throughout Arizona also reported a silent, mile wide V or boomerang shaped craft with a varying number of huge orbs. A significant number of these witnesses also reported that the craft was silently gliding overhead at a rather low altitude. The first-hand witnesses themselves, consistently reported that the lights appeared as “canisters of swimming light”, while the underbelly of the craft was undulating “like looking through water”.  Despite this, skeptics claim that the video is just evidence that mountains not visible at night partially obstructed views from certain angles, thereby bolstering the claim that the lights were more distant than UFO advocates claim. There were even a few people and organizations that tried to prove that it was indeed UFO’s, but the supposed evidence was essentially debunked and never went anywhere.

         My opinion on this whole thing is that…we still don’t officially know what was seen on that night. I don’t like the fact that the government and the military is the end-all, be-all of factual information when it comes to big incidents such as these because we know that there are some things that have to stay classified even if people witness it. The fact that they decided that these lights were two separate instances and not a singular event, tells me that they were trying to remove one from the other to make their answer to the mystery seem more plausible. But the eye-witness evidence from Nevada to Arizona tells us otherwise. Maybe there are some discrepancies, but overall, their accounts are fairly consistent with the shape of the craft. The amount of lights and formations, the low altitude hovering and the fact that the thing was absolutely SILENT all point to some sort of consistency in what was seen by those who reported the incident. Even Air Force Pilots like the former governor thinks that this wasn’t separate and those lights weren’t just super bright military flares. The military’s explanation was the equivalent of Kay’s line in MIB”

         “All right, Beatrice, there was no alien. The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.”

         Ok, it wasn’t that absurd, but you know what I mean. I guess, maybe, it could be what they are saying it is, but enough of us are skeptical of the government and military that we don’t buy that explanation. 

         What’s even weirder is supposedly there was a reappearance of the lights on April 21st 2008. This sighting was slightly different in that these lights appeared to change from square to triangular formation over time. A valley resident reported that shortly after the lights appeared, three jets were seen heading west in the direction of the lights. Of course, an official from Luke Air Force Base denied any sort of United States Air Force activity in the area at the time. A day later on April 22nd, a resident of the Phoenix area told a newspaper that the lights were nothing more than just his neighbor releasing helium balloons with flares attached, and this was also confirmed by a police helicopter. The day after, a Phoenix resident, who declined to be identified by news reports, claimed that he was in fact the person who had attached the flares to helium balloons and released them from his back yard. 

         Yeah, maybe. But even that has a fishy smell to it. Helium balloons wouldn’t create any sort of formation, square, triangular, or otherwise, especially if it was even slightly windy out, and the fact that the man wanted to remain unidentified is just as odd. You’d think you’d want to validate the evidence further by presenting as an identifiable resident of the area, and not just a no name confirmation that could have technically been made by anybody. Either that, or this was just a slight of hand to throw people off and take responsibility for a possible UFO event.

         But if aliens from another planet decided to do an actual fly-by in the area, what was the reason? Why would they just show up in the western United States, just before the sun set, and travel across a whole state with its driving lights on, which is dangerous, I might add…flying without your headlights on. And then there is the size of the object, from those that saw a clear outline of a solid object, that was deduced to be at least a mile across and was hovering at a low altitude and without a damn sound: no engine noises or anything of the sort like you would get with an airplane or jet. If I was an alien trying to slyly check up on planet Earth, I definitely wouldn’t be doing it in a giant ship gliding low to the ground through an area that is THE MOST POPULATED in the state. You’re just asking to be caught— unless the assumption is that humans are so terrifyingly daft, even if they DID see something vastly beyond the ordinary that they wouldn’t be believed and it would be covered up so as not to cause panic. 

         And how did these lights, or object with lights, get here? There were no reports of something coming down from the sky as far as I know. That’s not to say that it didn’t in a spot where no people were around to witness it, but based on what we know of the possible UFO, it didn’t seem to have an issue with people seeing it. Maybe it wasn’t space travel? Could have been interdimensional travel, if you believe in that, based on the accounts. The object moved a vast distance in a very short amount of time despite its apparent size. The way it disappeared and reappeared from the Nevada/Arizona line to Phoenix could indicate that it used a sort of “wormhole” or unknown scientific technology to slip through undetected and essentially leave the same way after passing through the city. 

         Who knows?

         But I had a similar encounter back in 2010 that still makes me question my sanity.

I was driving home one night from house-sitting to grab a few things I had forgotten earlier in the day. It was about ten PM and I was coming up to the turn for my neighborhood when I noticed an extremely bright, diamond shaped light high up in the sky. The light never moved, never wavered, and never shrunk in size. I was so confused by it, yet incredibly intrigued, but I took my turn and pulled into my driveway shortly, running inside to grab what I needed before I came back out. I was sitting in the car with the door open, having a moment while I smoked a cigarette and thought about the light in the sky. It was not long after that I heard, or rather felt, a hum and looked up into the trees surrounding my house. I then witnessed what appeared to be a triangular shaped craft with lights in a similar formation to those of the Phoenix Lights (though I didn’t have the sense to count them). It moved slowly overhead at a low altitude and never made a sound, but I swore I could almost feel the vibration of the object as it moved overhead. Of course, in my panicked state, I got in my car and tried to follow it because it seemed like it was heading in the direction of the house that I was sitting at. When I pulled back out onto the road, I saw nothing. I tried to discreetly check in the direction of which I thought it had headed, but there wasn’t anything in the sky and the light I had seen when entering my neighborhood was gone. 

I was on edge the whole drive back and probably a little faster than I should have because my boyfriend at the time was waiting for me to get back. As soon as I arrived at the house, I could see him sitting on the porch, and I jumped out of the car, rambling incoherently about what I had seen. Not long after, I could feel the vibration again and sure enough, in the distance, coming our direction, was whatever I had seen back at my house.  At this point, I felt slightly less crazy since my boyfriend was also seeing what I saw, but even so, we both hurried back inside, locked all the doors, and turned off the lights. My paranoia was getting the better of me as I tried to lay down and go to sleep, but I could still feel the hum of whatever had just flown over our heads.  I don’t know if that was related or not, but not long after the object moved over the house, we heard a loud crash or explosion somewhere off in the wooded area behind the house…needless to say, I didn’t sleep worth a shit that night.

Was it a UFO? Absolutely, if you look at the definition literally: it was unidentified by me, it was definitely flying, and it was…an object. Was it interdimensional beings from a far off galaxy performing another fly-by? Probably not, but who really knows. It didn’t look like any aircraft I had ever seen and it was quite large for something flying so low. The fact that it didn’t make any sort of noise and the light I had seen…or maybe I was just stressed out and hallucinating. I’ll never know.

         But back to the Phoenix Lights. What exactly did happen on that night back in 1997? Was it aliens checking out their neighbors in the galaxy? Or was it actually flares dropped on a routine exercise? Maybe it was a covert military operation instead. Most likely we will never know.

         What do you make of it?

         This story is giving me flashbacks to the first time I saw Independence Day in the theaters and I got home, couldn’t sleep, and was paranoid about an alien invasion for days. Good times…

         Anyway, I think I’ve given everyone enough potential anxiety for one night. Join me next week for the first part of Issue #2 of 667. I’m going to attempt to give you all more content with an episode of story hour and then two regular episodes each month. Fingers crossed that Retrograde doesn’t kick my ass in the Archives over the next several weeks.

         Until then, lock your doors, salt your windows, and remember… it’s ok to sleep with the lights on.