The Phoenix Lights (1997)

A clear night with more eyes on the sky

On Thursday, March 13, 1997, half of Arizona was already outdoors looking up. Comet Hale–Bopp hung in the northwest, the brightest comet in a generation, and the evening was clear. Then the telephone began ringing at the National UFO Reporting Center, a one-man hotline run by Peter Davenport out of Seattle. The calls marched down the map: Henderson, Nevada; Paulden and Prescott Valley; the whole Phoenix basin; Casa Grande; the outskirts of Tucson. Some callers had seen separate lights. Others described a single black V, or a boomerang, or a carpenter’s square, so big it took minutes to pass. Again and again they remarked on the same thing. It made no sound.

Phoenix city lights stretch across the basin beneath a dark sky, viewed from South Mountain. — Phoenix from South Mountain, December 31, 2010. A later view of the city where witnesses watched the lights in 1997. Photo: Alan Stark; resized and converted to WebP. Image source · CC BY-SA 2.0

Sources: Multiple sightings over Arizona, March 13, 1997Summary of “Phoenix Lights” EventPhoenix Lights — 2 Years Later

The V comes down the state

The earliest report in Davenport’s files came from a young man in Henderson who, at about 6:55 p.m. Pacific time, watched a V-shaped object with six large lights on its leading edge come out of the northwest and pass overhead toward Arizona. He later wrote that it was the size of a 747 and sounded like rushing wind. The first person to call the hotline that night was a former police officer in Paulden, north of Prescott. Driving from his house at about 8:15 p.m. Mountain time, he saw a cluster of reddish-orange lights to the west—four together and a fifth trailing. He went back for binoculars, watched for two minutes, heard nothing, and noticed that each light seemed to be made of two. In Dewey, a man held his fist out at arm’s length and could not cover the thing. By about 8:30 the formation was over Phoenix.

Sources: Summary of “Phoenix Lights” EventMultiple sightings over Arizona, March 13, 1997

The Ley family’s account

Tim and Bobbi Ley and their son Hal watched it come out of the north toward their Phoenix neighborhood. Tim told CNN that June that he had grown antsy as the lights kept coming; then the V slid directly overhead. When its right arm was above their heads, he said, the left was a couple of blocks away. None of them heard a thing. Bobbi called it overwhelming but not threatening, and said it was the silence that awed her. Tim, who described himself as having been a polite skeptic, was one no longer. The computer rendering he later made of a vast black chevron became the picture most people carry of the Phoenix Lights, although it is a drawing of a memory and not a photograph.

A black V-shaped outline with five white circles along its two arms. — A later schematic of the reported V-shaped object, drawn by Codyorb in 2018. This is an illustration, not a photograph or Tim Ley’s original rendering. Public domain; rendered from SVG on a white background and converted to WebP. Image source · Public domain

Sources: What were those lights in the Phoenix sky?

A telescope breaks the silhouette apart

In a Scottsdale backyard at the same moment, twenty-one-year-old Mitch Stanley was out with the big Dobsonian telescope he used most clear nights: a ten-inch mirror gathering some 1,500 times the light of the naked eye, with a 60-power eyepiece. His mother, Linda, pointed out the lights and asked what they were. He swung the scope onto the leading three, looked, and answered with one word: “Planes.” Each light had resolved into a pair, one on each squarish wing of a small aircraft. He watched for about a minute and went back to the stars; he had not come out to look at airplanes. When the newspapers filled with talk of a mile-wide craft, a coworker of Linda’s phoned a Phoenix city councilwoman and the Arizona Republic to say that someone had had a telescope on the thing. Neither called back, reporter Tony Ortega found, and Stanley’s story waited three months to be printed. Davenport’s own first news release, meanwhile, mentioned another amateur astronomer in west Phoenix who thought each light was double.

Sources: Answering the “Arizona Question”The Hack and the QuackMultiple sightings over Arizona, March 13, 1997

A second display to the southwest

At about ten o’clock, with the V long gone toward Tucson, a new set of lights appeared low in the southwest: an arc of brilliant amber-white orbs, as many as nine, that hung over the Estrella Mountains, drifted a little, and went out one after another. This was the display the camcorders caught. Mike Krzyston taped it from his yard in Moon Valley, exclaiming on the soundtrack that he had finally hit pay dirt. Dr. Lynne Kitei, a Phoenix physician, filmed it too, and would spend the next decades on a book, a documentary, and yearly anniversary gatherings. Every piece of footage the world has seen of the Phoenix Lights comes from these few minutes, two hours after the V and in a different part of the sky.

Sources: The Hack and the QuackPhoenix lights revisitedThe ‘Phoenix Lights’ Become an ‘Incident’

The councilwoman asks a question

Military officials said they had had nothing in the air over Phoenix, and for two months that was nearly the whole official response. On May 6 a television crew looking for a local reaction buttonholed city councilwoman Frances Barwood, and that afternoon she asked in open session whether anyone at City Hall meant to find out what had flown over the city. By her later count more than seven hundred witnesses contacted her; columnists and cartoonists had a holiday. The city told her that Phoenix had no air force. The Air Force told her it no longer investigated UFOs. Senator John McCain passed her letter along. On June 18 USA Today put the story on its front page, and the networks followed.

Sources: The Hack and the QuackMilitary now says flares may be cause of mysterious lightsPhoenix Lights — 2 Years LaterCase Closed?

A governor makes the mystery a joke

Governor Fife Symington had troubles of his own that week: he was on trial in federal court for bank fraud. On Thursday, June 19, he used the lunch recess to announce that he was ordering the Department of Public Safety to get to the bottom of the lights. After court he called the cameras back—at least two stations carried it live—to say that the guilty party had been found and was in custody. In shuffled a figure in a glittering pink-and-silver alien suit with a huge head and googly eyes. Unmasked, it was his chief of staff, Jay Heiler, a self-described Trekkie. “This just goes to show you guys are entirely too serious,” the governor told the press. The room laughed. Many of the people who had stood in their driveways on March 13 never forgave him.

Sources: ‘Alien’ encounter leaves media agogFormer Ariz. governor boosts UFO claims

The military answer arrives late

The explanation for the ten o’clock lights came in late July, after Capt. Eileen Bienz of the Arizona National Guard got what the Associated Press called one too many calls and started checking flight logs. Visiting A-10 attack jets of the Maryland Air National Guard’s 175th Wing had been in Tucson for Operation Snowbird, the winter training program at Davis–Monthan Air Force Base. Maryland spokesman Capt. Drew Sullins said eight of them had been dropping high-intensity illumination flares that night from 15,000 feet over the Barry M. Goldwater range, sixty miles south-southwest of Phoenix, and had dumped the rest before heading home; one pilot had remarked on the hell of a light show they made. A parachute flare burns for minutes, sinks slowly, and winks out. Optical physicist Bruce Maccabee, no debunker, triangulated three of the videos and put the lights sixty to eighty miles away, over the range. An imaging firm hired by the Discovery Channel laid Krzyston’s tape over a daytime shot and showed each light vanishing as it reached the ridgeline of the Estrellas. Krzyston insisted they had been in front of the mountains. Barwood demanded the Guard do it again where everyone could watch.

Sources: Military now says flares may be cause of mysterious lightsCase Closed?Flares Caused Old Sky Lights, Air Guard SaysPhoenix lights revisitedThe Hack and the Quack

Symington’s second account

Symington was convicted later that year and left office; the conviction was overturned, and President Clinton pardoned him in 2001. By 2007 he was working as a consultant and a pastry chef when he told interviewers that he had been holding something back. He too had gone outside on March 13, he said, and had seen it: a massive, delta-shaped craft, silent, with a distinctive leading edge of enormous lights, gliding over Squaw Peak. As a pilot and former Air Force officer he was sure it was no flare—flares, he noted, do not fly in formation. To the Associated Press he used the word “otherworldly.” The costume stunt, he now wrote, had been meant to puncture a growing hysteria, and he had never intended to ridicule anyone. He had kept quiet as governor, he explained, because he did not want to cause a panic.

Fife Symington in a pale blue shirt at an event in Scottsdale. — Fife Symington at an event in Scottsdale on June 2, 2017, twenty years after the sighting. Photo: Gage Skidmore; resized and converted to WebP. Image source · CC BY-SA 3.0

Sources: Symington: I saw a UFO in the Arizona skyFormer Ariz. governor boosts UFO claims

The pilot on approach

One more celebrity witness surfaced twenty years on. In 2017 the actor Kurt Russell, a private pilot, said that he had been flying his son Oliver into Phoenix that night when he saw six lights in a uniform V over the airport on approach. He called it in, he said, and then forgot all about it until years later, when his partner Goldie Hawn was watching a television special on the Phoenix Lights. A Sky Harbor controller on duty that night, Bill Grava, told Ortega he had seen only the ten o’clock lights sinking behind the mountains and had taken them for flares. A flight of aircraft sharing a single transponder code, he pointed out, would show up on his scope as one blip or none.

Sources: Kurt Russell Reveals He Was the Pilot Who Reported the Phoenix LightsThe Hack and the Quack

What survives over Phoenix

The second half of the night is as solved as such things get. The first half is a contest between a young man at an eyepiece who saw wings and hundreds of people in their yards who saw the stars go out. Sullins said the Maryland A-10s never flew north of Phoenix, so whoever was flying the V at 8:30—if it was anyone—has never been named, and no flight plan has ever been produced. Were they five aircraft in loose formation, too high to hear, their lights joined into one black shape by the eye’s habit of connecting dots? Then whose were they, and why did no one ever say so? And what did a governor with everything to lose by saying it see over Squaw Peak?

Sources: The Hack and the QuackThe ‘Phoenix Lights’ Become an ‘Incident’Symington: I saw a UFO in the Arizona sky

Two episodes, not one continuous object

The record divides into a traveling V during the eight o’clock hour and a nearly stationary arc southwest of Phoenix around ten. Their timing, motion, geography, and surviving imagery are all different, yet “Phoenix Lights” names both, and footage of the second is routinely shown as though it were the first. Any explanation has to say which one it explains.

Sources: Summary of “Phoenix Lights” EventPhoenix lights revisitedThe ‘Phoenix Lights’ Become an ‘Incident’

What the military record supports

Contemporaneous wire and newspaper reports quote Arizona and Maryland Guard officers on the visiting A-10s, Operation Snowbird, the Goldwater range, and the flare drop; the 175th Wing’s own history confirms the unit, though not the episode. Independent triangulation of the videos, the ridgeline overlay, and a comparison drop filmed by a Phoenix station in 1997 all agree with flares. None of this is a flight log for the earlier formation. Robert Sheaffer’s reconstruction of the V as aircraft transiting toward Davis–Monthan fits the route and timing but names no unit.

Sources: Military now says flares may be cause of mysterious lightsFlares Caused Old Sky Lights, Air Guard SaysHistoryPhoenix lights revisitedThe ‘Phoenix Lights’ Become an ‘Incident’

The best evidence for the early formation

The V rests on testimony. Stanley’s telescope favors separate airplanes, and he is supported by the Paulden caller’s binoculars and a second amateur astronomer, both of whom saw paired lights. Accounts of blotted-out stars, a solid underside, and rooftop altitude favor one object, but no one had a distance to go with their angle, and without one a formation at 15,000 feet and a craft at 1,500 look the same. A caller who said he was a Luke airman and described F-15s scrambling to intercept could not be traced.

Sources: Answering the “Arizona Question”Multiple sightings over Arizona, March 13, 1997Summary of “Phoenix Lights” Event

Later memory and public theater

Symington’s 2007 statement and Russell’s 2017 story are first-person accounts given ten and twenty years after the fact by men who said nothing at the time; Russell’s is uncorroborated. The alien-suit press conference, by contrast, is thoroughly documented, and did more than any sighting to convince witnesses that officials would sooner laugh than look.

Sources: Symington: I saw a UFO in the Arizona skyKurt Russell Reveals He Was the Pilot Who Reported the Phoenix Lights‘Alien’ encounter leaves media agog

Classification

This file is classified as a two-event record. The ten o’clock lights have a strong, documented flare explanation. The eight-thirty V is consistent with aircraft in formation and has one good observation to that effect, but the aircraft have never been identified, and that gap is what “disputed” means here.

Sources: Phoenix lights revisitedThe ‘Phoenix Lights’ Become an ‘Incident’The Hack and the Quack

GO TO THE SOURCE

Sources & interviews

Multiple sightings over Arizona, March 13, 1997National UFO Reporting Center · Peter Davenport · First news release, March 1997 · Via the Internet Archive Summary of “Phoenix Lights” EventPeter Davenport · National UFO Reporting Center · Hotline reports and witness chronology What were those lights in the Phoenix sky?CNN and KSAZ · June 19, 1997 · Contemporary witness reporting via the Internet Archive ‘Alien’ encounter leaves media agogDeseret News · June 20, 1997 · Wire report on Symington’s press conference Answering the “Arizona Question”Tony Ortega · Tucson Weekly / Phoenix New Times · July 3, 1997 · Telescope witness investigation Case Closed?Jim Nintzel and Julian Grajewski · Tucson Weekly · July 24, 1997 Military now says flares may be cause of mysterious lightsAssociated Press · Las Vegas Sun · July 25, 1997 Flares, not UFOs, caused light show, military saysDeseret News · July 26, 1997 · Associated Press reporting Flares Caused Old Sky Lights, Air Guard SaysThe New York Times · July 27, 1997 · Contemporary Air National Guard reporting The Hack and the QuackTony Ortega · Phoenix New Times · March 5, 1998 · One-year investigation Phoenix lights revisitedBruce Maccabee · MUFON UFO Journal · February 1999 · Video triangulation Phoenix Lights — 2 Years LaterNational UFO Reporting Center · March 1999 · Witness chronology via the Internet Archive Former Ariz. governor boosts UFO claimsAssociated Press · NBC News · March 2007 Symington: I saw a UFO in the Arizona skyFife Symington · CNN first-person commentary · November 9, 2007 The ‘Phoenix Lights’ Become an ‘Incident’Robert Sheaffer · Skeptical Inquirer · July/August 2016 · Aircraft-and-flare reconstruction Kurt Russell Reveals He Was the Pilot Who Reported the Phoenix LightsIndieWire · June 15, 2017 History175th Wing, Maryland Air National Guard · Official unit history Phoenix LightsWikipedia · Orientation and reference trail · Consulted September 16, 2026

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Connected files

The Belgian UFO WaveSeven years earlier, another silent triangle of lights, another country looking up—and a famous image that was not what it seemed.The Westall School MysteryHundreds of daylight witnesses, and an official response that left them angrier than the sighting did.The Washington FlapThe original case of a capital city, a press conference, and an explanation half the witnesses refused.Leslie KeanThe journalist to whom Symington gave one of his first interviews as a witness.

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The Phoenix Lights