Phoenix Lights

Origin Story

Shortly after 8pm on March 13, 1997, observers across a stretch of Nevada and Arizona nearly 300 miles long watched a broad, silent V-shaped formation of lights cross the sky, followed later that night by a separate set of lights that hung stationary over Phoenix for hours before winking out one at a time. Thousands of people saw some part of the event, including then-governor Fife Symington, who watched it from his own back yard.

Evidence & Claims

Amateur video of both phases circulated for years afterward, and the consistency of independent accounts across such a wide area became the sighting's strongest evidence: whatever it was, a huge number of unconnected witnesses described the same shape moving the same way. Symington himself initially handled the frenzy by staging a press conference where he had an aide walk out in an alien costume, telling reporters "you guys are entirely too serious." Ten years later, in 2007, he reversed course entirely, telling a documentary crew he'd personally witnessed a massive, silent, definitely-not-an-aircraft object that night and had stayed quiet at the time because he didn't want to add to the panic, or to his own legal troubles; Symington was fighting bank fraud charges that same year.

Skeptical Explanations

The Air Force and independent investigators attribute the earlier V-formation to aircraft flying in tight formation and the later stationary lights to high-altitude flares dropped during a National Guard exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range, an explanation most researchers accept for at least the second phase. It doesn't fully satisfy everyone, including some witnesses who insist the first, V-shaped object was solid and moved with a silence and steadiness they'd never associate with aircraft, flares, or anything else they could name.

The 1997 sighting was witnessed across a huge swath of the Phoenix sky, not at one location. There's nowhere specific to visit.