🛸 UFOs & UAPDisputed

The Phoenix Lights

📅 13 March 1997 · 📍 Phoenix, Arizona, USA

Thousands of people across Arizona watched a vast V-shaped formation of lights glide overhead, then a row of hovering orbs. One of the most-witnessed UFO events ever.

What happened

On the evening of 13 March 1997, people across Arizona, from the Nevada border down to Tucson, reported a huge V- or boomerang-shaped formation of lights moving slowly and silently overhead. Many witnesses said the lights were attached to a single dark craft so large it blotted out the stars.

Around 10 pm a second event followed: a line of glowing orbs hung in the sky south-west of Phoenix, then winked out one by one. This was filmed by many people and is the footage usually shown on television.

The military said the 10 pm lights were flares dropped by A-10 aircraft on a training exercise over the Barry M. Goldwater Range. Arizona Governor Fife Symington mocked the sightings at a press conference at the time, but in 2007 said he had seen the craft himself and called it otherworldly.

Timeline

13 March 1997, ~7:30 pm
A V-shaped formation of lights is reported moving south across Arizona.
13 March 1997, ~10 pm
A row of stationary lights appears south-west of Phoenix and is widely filmed.
July 1997
The Air National Guard says its aircraft dropped illumination flares that night.
2007
Former governor Fife Symington says he saw the craft himself.

🔍 The evidence

Hundreds of witness reports across a 300-mile path.
Video of the 10 pm lights from multiple locations, which analysts have used to triangulate their position.

🤨 The skeptic’s view

The 10 pm lights match slow-falling LUU-2 illumination flares, which sank behind the mountains as they burned out.
An amateur astronomer watching through a telescope reported that the earlier V formation was a group of planes flying in formation.