What Were the Phoenix Lights?

Background

On the evening of 13 March 1997, witnesses across a stretch of roughly 300 miles, from Henderson, Nevada, through Phoenix, Arizona, to the edge of Tucson, reported unusual lights in the sky over a window of about three hours. The reports actually describe two separate events. Around 7:55pm, a witness in Henderson reported a large, V-shaped object moving southeast; over the following hour, similar reports of a silent, slow-moving formation of lights came in from across Arizona, with numerous witnesses in the Phoenix area describing a single, enormous, dark shape, some estimated at nearly a mile across, that seemed to block out the stars behind it as it passed overhead. Then, at around 10pm, a separate and distinct set of stationary, glowing orange-red lights appeared, hovering in a line over the city before fading out one by one.

The sightings drew an unusually large number of witnesses for a single UFO event, in part because Phoenix is a major metropolitan area and the lights were visible from a wide radius, and in part because local television stations broadcast footage of the second, stationary lights live that same night. Arizona's then-governor, Fife Symington, initially responded with public mockery: at a press conference shortly afterward, he had an aide brought out dressed as an alien, treating the reports as a joke. Ten years later, in 2007, Symington reversed course publicly, stating he had personally seen the object that night, describing it as "otherworldly," and saying he had chosen not to discuss it at the time to avoid alarming the public.

Main Theories

The confirmed flare explanation, for the second event

The later, stationary lights have a confirmed, undisputed explanation. Eight A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft of the Maryland Air National Guard, on a training deployment out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, dropped LUU-2B/B illumination flares from roughly 15,000 feet during a night exercise over the Barry M. Goldwater Range, about 60 miles southwest of Phoenix. The flares descend slowly under parachutes, and rising heat from their burning creates a "ballooning" effect that can make them appear to hover in a fixed line rather than fall, exactly matching witness descriptions of the second wave of lights. In March 2007, Lieutenant Colonel Ed Jones, one of the Maryland ANG pilots who flew that night, publicly confirmed his squadron had dropped the flares, closing out the only part of the case that was ever in genuine dispute among investigators.

The disputed structured-craft claim, for the earlier V-formation

The earlier, V-shaped formation has no equivalent official confirmation. The most common sceptical explanation holds that witnesses saw a formation of separate aircraft, whether returning military jets or civilian traffic, whose individual lights, viewed from below at night and at considerable distance, can visually merge into what looks like a single connected shape, an effect well documented in other night-sky misidentifications. No specific flight has ever been officially identified as the source of this particular formation, unlike the confirmed flare exercise for the later lights.

Many of the witnesses who reported the V-formation dispute this account specifically because of what they say they observed: not a loose cluster of individual lights, but a single, silent, solid structure large enough to blot out the stars behind it as it moved, a description a formation of individually smaller, separately lit aircraft does not straightforwardly produce. Proponents of this position, Governor Symington prominent among them by 2007, do not typically claim to know what the object was, only that the aircraft-formation explanation does not match what they say they personally saw.

Common Misconceptions

The Phoenix Lights are often discussed as a single unexplained event, when the case actually contains one confirmed explanation and one unresolved one. The 10pm stationary lights are settled: military flares, confirmed by the pilots who dropped them. The earlier V-formation is the part that remains genuinely disputed, and conflating the two makes the confirmed flare explanation sound like it resolves more of the case than it actually does.

It is also sometimes assumed that Governor Symington's 2007 statement amounted to a claim that the object was extraterrestrial. It did not: Symington described the sighting as personally convincing and "otherworldly" but stopped short of stating a specific explanation, a more cautious position than his remark is often summarised as in popular retellings.

Current Consensus

Investigators, including sceptical researchers who have examined the case in detail, agree without serious dispute that the 10pm stationary lights were the confirmed Maryland Air National Guard flare exercise. The earlier V-formation remains the case's genuinely open question: no government body has offered a confirmed identification of it, the aircraft-formation explanation is the leading account among sceptics but is not universally accepted even among researchers who reject an extraordinary explanation, and a substantial number of witnesses, including credentialed and initially sceptical ones such as Symington, maintain that what they saw does not fit that explanation.

Why This Mystery Endures

The Phoenix Lights endure partly because of their scale: unlike an isolated sighting by one or two witnesses, thousands of people across three states saw some part of the same event on the same night, and Phoenix television stations aired footage of the second light group live, giving the case a documentary record most UFO sightings never acquire. That combination of mass witnessing and video footage keeps it distinct from cases resting on individual testimony alone, in the same way a credentialed, publicly documented witness base has helped sustain interest in Rendlesham Forest and the Roswell incident decades after their own more mundane elements were substantially explained.

Governor Symington's reversal adds a rare narrative arc uncommon in UFO cases: a public official who mocked the reports at the time later stating, once out of office and with nothing obvious to gain, that he too had seen something he could not explain. That combination, genuine mass witnessing, partial but incomplete official resolution, and a credible, initially sceptical witness changing his account years later, is exactly the mixture that keeps a case alive in public interest long after the easier parts of it have been settled. The Phoenix Lights are part of this site's broader UFOs and UAPs coverage.