The Phoenix Lights: Two Events on One Evening, and Why the Distinction Matters.

What happened, in a paragraph.

On the evening of Thursday, March 13, 1997, two visually distinct aerial phenomena were observed across central and southern Arizona. The first, beginning at approximately 7:55 to 8:00 PM Mountain Standard Time, was a V-shaped or boomerang-shaped formation of lights observed traveling slowly from north to south. The formation was first reported near Henderson, Nevada, then over the Prescott Valley, then over Phoenix, then over Tucson, the southern reports running to approximately 8:45 PM. Witness accounts of the 8:00 PM event consistently described either an arrangement of discrete lights moving in coherent formation or, in a smaller number of higher-detail accounts, a solid dark wedge or "carpenter's square" shape that occluded stars as it passed overhead at low altitude. The second event, beginning at approximately 9:30 to 10:00 PM, consisted of a horizontal arc or row of stationary or slowly-descending bright orange lights visible over the south Phoenix mountain ranges, particularly the Estrella Mountains. The 10:00 PM event was extensively photographed and video-recorded; the 8:00 PM event was less so, both because it was earlier in the evening and because witnesses were not yet primed to record what they were seeing. The state's then-governor, Fife Symington III, was among those who saw the earlier formation; he held a satirical press conference about the event on June 19, 1997, but in 2007 publicly confirmed that he had personally observed "a massive, delta-shaped craft that defied logic." The U.S. Air Force's explanation, offered through the Air National Guard in July 1997 and reaffirmed since, attributes the 10:00 PM event to LUU-2B/B illumination flares dropped by A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft from the Maryland Air National Guard's 175th Wing during Operation Snowbird exercises at the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range. That explanation fits the 10:00 PM observations well. It is not a comprehensive explanation of the 8:00 PM formation, which traversed the state at a speed and along a trajectory inconsistent with stationary flare drops.

The documented record.

The 8:00 PM event: the formation passage

The earliest reports collected in MUFON and Air National Guard inquiries the following week were from witnesses in southern Nevada and northern Arizona. Verified At approximately 7:55 PM MST, observers in Henderson, Nevada (southeast of Las Vegas) reported a "huge V-shaped object" moving slowly to the south. Subsequent reports placed similar observations over Paulden, Prescott, Prescott Valley, Dewey, Wickenburg, Phoenix proper, Scottsdale, Glendale, and finally Tucson, with the latest Tucson observations at approximately 8:45 PM [1][2].

The formation's reported size varied between witnesses. Some described an arrangement of five to seven lights in a V or chevron pattern. Others described a single dark wedge-shaped body, hundreds or thousands of feet across, on which the lights were embedded. Several Phoenix-area witnesses reported that they could see stars in the gaps between the lights early in the passage, and that as the object passed nearly overhead the stars were occluded — suggesting a single physical structure. The passage was reported as silent or near-silent; reported altitudes ranged from very low (one or two thousand feet) to very high.

Among the witnesses to the 8:00 PM event were the Krzysston family of Phoenix; Tim Ley and his family of Phoenix; Trig Johnston, a retired commercial airline pilot; Dr. Lynne D. Kitei, a Phoenix physician who later wrote one of the principal book-length accounts of the case [3]; and Frances Emma Barwood, then a member of the Phoenix City Council, who would become the case's principal advocate within city government.

The 10:00 PM event: the stationary arc

Beginning at approximately 9:30 PM and persisting in observable form until approximately 10:30 PM, a horizontal line of bright orange-yellow lights appeared over the mountain ranges south and southwest of Phoenix. Verified The lights were reported as either stationary or slowly drifting; several individually winked out over the course of the observation. This event was photographed and video-recorded extensively, including by Mike Krzysston, Terry Proctor, and several local television stations who picked up amateur recordings the following day [2][4].

The 10:00 PM event is the one most often shown in subsequent media coverage of the "Phoenix Lights," and the specific observations to which the eventual flare explanation was directed.

The Air National Guard / Operation Snowbird

On July 17, 1997, in response to mounting press inquiry, the public affairs office of the Maryland Air National Guard issued a statement identifying the source of the 10:00 PM event. Verified A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft from the Maryland Air National Guard's 104th Fighter Squadron (175th Fighter Wing) had been deployed to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson for Operation Snowbird, a routine winter training rotation. On the evening of March 13, four A-10s had conducted live-flare training at the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range, dropping LUU-2B/B parachute-suspended illumination flares. The LUU-2B/B is a high-intensity magnesium flare that burns for approximately five minutes and descends slowly under a parachute; from distance and against a dark ridge line, a sequence of such flares would appear as a horizontal arc of stationary orange lights that gradually wink out [4].

The viewing geometry was checked by subsequent observers, including (independently) the Maricopa Audubon Society and the Arizona Republic. From Phoenix, the line of sight to the Goldwater Range passes through the Estrella Mountains; the flares' parachute descent behind the ridge would produce the observed sequential extinction [4][5]. The flare explanation for the 10:00 PM event is generally accepted, including by most subsequent serious investigators.

The flare explanation does not cleanly fit the 8:00 PM event

The Air National Guard's July 1997 statement addressed the 10:00 PM lights. Verified It did not specifically address the 8:00 PM formation passage. Several features of the earlier event are difficult to attribute to flare drops:

• The 8:00 PM formation was reported moving in coherent translation from Henderson, NV through Phoenix to Tucson — a north-to-south transit of approximately 300 miles. Flares dropped at a fixed range do not produce a moving formation traversing that distance.
• The 8:00 PM event was reported approximately ninety minutes to two hours before the documented Snowbird flare training.
• Several 8:00 PM witnesses, including pilots and observers with star-occlusion observations, reported a single coherent dark structure rather than discrete light sources.

Subsequent explanations for the 8:00 PM event have included a flight of five A-10 aircraft transiting south in a wedge formation at high altitude, with the aircraft's wing-mounted lights producing the observed array. The Air National Guard, in subsequent statements, has not formally adopted this explanation but has not ruled it out. The "high-altitude aircraft formation" hypothesis is consistent with the reported lateral motion but less easily reconciled with the star-occlusion accounts and with the reported low altitude in some Phoenix observations [5][6].

Governor Fife Symington III

Fife Symington III served as Governor of Arizona from 1991 to 1997, resigning shortly after the events of March 13 for reasons unrelated to the case (a federal fraud conviction subsequently overturned on appeal). Verified In the weeks following March 13, Symington's office received substantial constituent inquiry about the lights. On June 19, 1997, the governor held a press conference at which his chief of staff, Jay Heiler, presented a man in an alien costume — identified as a captured suspect — in a satirical performance Symington said was intended to relieve public anxiety. The press conference was widely interpreted at the time as dismissive [6].

Ten years later, in 2007, Symington publicly reversed his position. In a March 2007 interview, then-statements in subsequent appearances (including an op-ed contribution and an appearance in James Fox's 2007 documentary Out of the Blue), Symington stated that he had personally observed the 8:00 PM formation from the Squaw Peak area of Phoenix and that it was "a massive, delta-shaped craft that defied logic." Symington characterized the 1997 press conference as an attempt to defuse public alarm and stated that he had not intended at the time to mock the witnesses' observations [7]. Verified

Frances Emma Barwood

Frances Emma Barwood was a Phoenix City Council member in 1997. Verified Among elected officials at any level in Arizona, Barwood took the case most seriously, calling for a formal city investigation and collecting witness statements at council meetings. The city did not undertake the investigation she requested. Barwood lost her 1998 re-election bid; she has since attributed her loss in part to her vocal stance on the lights, although her own subsequent campaign activity suggests the actual cause was substantially more complex. Her witness-statement collection nonetheless represents the most substantial contemporaneous documentary effort to record 8:00 PM accounts from Phoenix residents [3][6].

MUFON and the civilian investigation

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the principal civilian UFO investigation organization in the United States, undertook a substantial investigation of the case in the weeks following March 13. Verified Field investigators including Richard Motzer (Arizona MUFON state director at the time) and Tom King collected over two hundred witness statements. MUFON's report concluded that the 8:00 PM event was likely a single solid object of unknown origin and characterized the 10:00 PM event as more ambiguous (a position later modified after the July 1997 flare explanation was offered) [1][3]. Claimed

The video record

Several video and photographic records exist. Verified The Mike Krzysston tape (10:00 PM event), the Terry Proctor video (10:00 PM event), the "Lights Out" Channel 3 KTVK news coverage compilations, and a handful of Tim Ley family photographs (8:00 PM event) constitute the primary visual record. The 8:00 PM imagery is generally of lower quality and shorter duration than the 10:00 PM imagery, reflecting the relative observer-preparation difference between the two events.

The candidate explanations.

Hypothesis: Operation Snowbird flares (10:00 PM event)

Argument: the LUU-2B/B parachute flares dropped by the 104th Fighter Squadron's A-10s on the Barry Goldwater Range produced the 10:00 PM stationary arc. The viewing geometry, the timing, the descent profile, the sequential extinction, and the official acknowledgment all align. Claimed

Limits: The explanation is well-supported for the 10:00 PM event and is the consensus position among most serious investigators of the case. It is not a comprehensive explanation of the 8:00 PM formation passage.

Hypothesis: High-altitude aircraft formation (8:00 PM event)

Argument: a formation of military aircraft at high altitude, transiting from the north en route to a base further south, would produce a slowly-translating array of lights consistent with the reported observations. Specific candidate flights have been proposed in subsequent investigations. Claimed

Limits: The hypothesis is consistent with the moving-formation observations and with the reported north-to-south progression. It is harder to reconcile with the star-occlusion reports, the reported low altitude in several accounts, and the reported silence. No specific candidate flight has been definitively identified in the public record.

Hypothesis: Non-human technology

Argument: the 8:00 PM event involved a single solid, low-flying, silent craft of dimensions and performance characteristics not consistent with any known terrestrial aircraft. Advanced by some MUFON investigators and (in his 2007 statements) by Symington. Claimed

Limits: The argument depends on the reliability of the star-occlusion observations and the low-altitude reports, which together imply a single physical structure of substantial size. These observations are real and recorded, but witness perception of altitude and size in night-sky conditions is notoriously unreliable. The absence of corroborating radar data (the FAA has stated that nothing anomalous appeared on radar that evening; that statement has been challenged by some researchers but no contradicting record has emerged) is a substantive evidentiary gap.

Hypothesis: Misperception and conflation

Argument: the 8:00 PM event was a high-altitude aircraft formation that was subsequently conflated in popular memory with the 10:00 PM flare event, producing a composite "Phoenix Lights" narrative that no single physical event actually corresponds to. Claimed

Limits: The conflation argument has explanatory force for the popular framing of the case, but the contemporaneous record (MUFON's witness statements, the Barwood collection, the Ley family photographs) does document a distinct 8:00 PM event that was not produced by reconstruction. The question is what that event physically was, not whether it occurred.

The unanswered questions.

The FAA radar record

The Federal Aviation Administration's official position is that no anomalous radar returns were recorded over Arizona on the evening of March 13, 1997. Disputed The corresponding contemporaneous radar tape data has not been comprehensively released or independently reviewed. Several researchers have requested it under FOIA with mixed results. Whether a coherent low-altitude object would have appeared on the relevant radar systems is itself a technical question that depends on the radar coverage profile at the altitudes some witnesses described.

The 8:00 PM aircraft flight, if any

If the 8:00 PM event was a high-altitude military aircraft formation, the specific flight has not been publicly identified. The Air National Guard has confirmed Operation Snowbird's flare training but has not addressed a separate north-to-south formation transit at the relevant time. Whether such a flight is documented in operational records that have not been requested or released is unknown. Unverified

The reconciliation of star occlusion

Several 8:00 PM witnesses reported that stars were visible between the lights early in the passage and became occluded as the formation passed overhead, suggesting a single solid structure. This observation is the most evidentiarily significant feature of the 8:00 PM event that the conventional explanations have not directly addressed. Whether the observations are reliable, and whether they are reconcilable with a high-altitude aircraft formation under specific atmospheric conditions, has not been investigated in published technical work.

The June 1997 press conference

The internal staff discussions that produced Symington's June 19, 1997 satirical press conference have not been publicly documented. Symington's 2007 statements characterize the event as a deliberate attempt to defuse alarm; whether other staff members understood it the same way at the time, and whether Symington's chief of staff Jay Heiler ever publicly endorsed Symington's later characterization, is not on the public record [7]. Disputed

The full witness population

Estimates of total witness count to the 8:00 PM event vary from "several hundred" to "tens of thousands" depending on how the population is defined. MUFON's collected statements (over two hundred) represent only the self-reporting subset. Whether a substantially more comprehensive witness-population analysis would change the case's evidentiary profile is unknown; no such analysis has been undertaken.

Primary material.

Contemporaneous (March 1997) material:

• Tim Ley family photographs, Phoenix, March 13, 1997 (8:00 PM event).
• Mike Krzysston video tape, March 13, 1997 (10:00 PM event, approximately 7 minutes).
• Terry Proctor video tape, March 13, 1997 (10:00 PM event).
• Arizona Republic coverage, March 14–25, 1997.
• KTVK Channel 3 news compilations, March 14, 1997 onward.

MUFON and civilian-investigation material:

• MUFON Arizona witness-statement archive, collected March–June 1997, principal collator Richard Motzer.
• Frances Emma Barwood witness-statement files, collected at and after Phoenix City Council meetings, March–December 1997.

Official statements:

• Maryland Air National Guard / 175th Wing public affairs statement on Operation Snowbird flare training, July 17, 1997.
• U.S. Air Force public affairs subsequent statements, 1997–2007.
• Office of Governor Fife Symington III press conference transcript and video, June 19, 1997.

Later witness material:

• Symington, Fife III. Statements to Leslie Kean, March 2007, and subsequent interviews including Out of the Blue (James Fox, 2007).
• Kitei, Lynne D. The Phoenix Lights: A Skeptic's Discovery That We Are Not Alone. Hampton Roads, 2004.

The sequence.

1. March 13, 1997, 7:55 PM MST First reports of a V-formation of lights over Henderson, Nevada.
2. March 13, 1997, 8:15–8:30 PM Formation reported over Prescott, Prescott Valley, then Phoenix.
3. March 13, 1997, 8:30–8:45 PM Final reports of the formation over Tucson and the Tucson valley.
4. March 13, 1997, 9:30–10:30 PM Stationary arc of orange lights observed over the south Phoenix mountain ranges.
5. March 14, 1997 Local news coverage begins. Arizona Republic coverage runs the following week.
6. March–June 1997 MUFON Arizona and Frances Emma Barwood collect witness statements.
7. June 18, 1997 USA Today publishes a national article on the case, sharply increasing press attention.
8. June 19, 1997 Governor Symington holds the alien-costume press conference.
9. July 17, 1997 Maryland Air National Guard issues the Operation Snowbird flare statement for the 10:00 PM event.
10. 2000 Symington completes resignation-related legal proceedings; conviction subsequently overturned on appeal.
11. 2004 Lynne D. Kitei publishes The Phoenix Lights.
12. March 2007 Symington publicly reverses his earlier position; states he saw "a massive, delta-shaped craft."
13. November 2007 James Fox's documentary Out of the Blue released, including Symington's interview.
14. March 13, 2017 Twentieth-anniversary press coverage; Phoenix-area observances.
15. 2017–2024 Post-NYT-disclosure era; the case re-enters mainstream UAP discussion alongside the Nimitz material.

Cases on this archive that connect.

The Nimitz Tic-Tac (File 010) — the modern case whose institutional framing — AATIP, AARO, Fravor testimony — established the bureaucratic precedent for serious treatment of pilot and witness accounts. Phoenix is the standout mass-witness ground-observation case; Nimitz is the standout multi-sensor pilot case.

The Roswell Incident (File 004) — the 1947 case whose half-century institutional treatment Phoenix in some ways mirrors: an initial dramatic claim, an official mundane explanation, and a long-running dispute about whether the mundane explanation comprehensively addresses the original observation.

Planned: the Belgian Wave (1989–1990), comparable triangle-formation case; the Stephenville, Texas incident (January 2008); and a dedicated file on the Hudson Valley sightings (1982–1986).

Full bibliography.

1. Motzer, Richard. MUFON Arizona field investigation reports, March–December 1997. Compiled witness statements held in MUFON's case archive.
2. "Lights in the Phoenix Sky." Arizona Republic, multi-day coverage, March 14–25, 1997.
3. Kitei, Lynne D. The Phoenix Lights: A Skeptic's Discovery That We Are Not Alone. Hampton Roads, 2004. Witness-perspective book-length treatment with reproduced contemporaneous statements.
4. Maryland Air National Guard, 175th Fighter Wing Public Affairs. Statement on Operation Snowbird flare training of March 13, 1997. Released July 17, 1997.
5. "Phoenix Lights Solved." Phoenix New Times, July 1997. Reporting on the flare explanation, including verification of viewing geometry from Phoenix to the Goldwater Range via the Estrella Mountains.
6. Office of the Governor of Arizona. Press conference, June 19, 1997. Transcript and video held in state press archive.
7. Symington, Fife III. Interviews with Leslie Kean, March 2007; subsequently quoted at length in Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Three Rivers Press, 2010.
8. Fox, James (director). Out of the Blue. Hannover House, 2007. Includes Symington's first on-camera reversal.
9. Druffel, Ann; Wood, Robert M.; Kelson, Eric. "Phoenix Lights: Photographic Analyses." MUFON Journal, multiple issues 1998–2000.
10. Federal Aviation Administration. Response to FOIA inquiry regarding radar records for Arizona airspace on March 13, 1997. Multiple responses, 1997–2008.
11. Sweetman, Bill. "The Phoenix Lights Decoded." Popular Mechanics, October 2007. Skeptical reconstruction of the case with the high-altitude-formation hypothesis for the 8:00 PM event.
12. Stanford, James. Symington and the Phoenix Lights: A Witness Reconsiders. Arizona Highways, March 2017 anniversary feature.
13. James, Tim. "What Really Happened Over Phoenix." Sky & Telescope retrospective, 2017.