The Phoenix Lights: a City Full of Witnesses

What makes Phoenix the mass-sighting benchmark is arithmetic: on the clear evening of March 13, 1997, THOUSANDS of Arizonans — families in yards for a comet, commuters, an actor-governor among them, as he admitted a decade later — watched something pass overhead. The event was actually two. First, around 8 p.m., a vast V-formation of lights glided silently from Nevada across Phoenix toward Tucson; witnesses up and down the corridor described not separate craft but ONE immense boomerang OCCLUDING STARS between its lights — "a carpenter's square, a mile wide," said one — moving slow and dead quiet. Second, around 10 p.m., a string of lights hung over the city's southwest, filmed by many, fading out one by one.

The official answer and its remainder

The 10 p.m. lights have a firm explanation: the Maryland Air National Guard confirmed dropping illumination FLARES over the Barry Goldwater Range that night; the fade-out sequence and positions match flares sinking behind the Estrella mountains. Most famous footage shows THIS event, and skeptics rightly bank it. The 8 p.m. V is the remainder: flares don't cruise 200 miles in formation, and the Air Force's alternative — high-altitude A-10s in formation — collides with the signature detail hundreds gave independently: the black mass BETWEEN the lights, blotting out stars, silent at low apparent altitude. Governor Fife Symington mocked the affair in 1997 with an alien-costumed aide; in 2007 he stated he had seen the V himself: "craft of unknown origin... I was a pilot in the Air Force, and it was bigger than anything I've ever seen."

Phoenix set our standard for what witness VOLUME can and cannot settle: a thousand cameras solved the flares in a week, and a thousand eyewitnesses have kept the boomerang unsolved for a generation.