Mystery lingers over sighting of Phoenix Lights
Then:
It may have been the greatest UFO sighting in history.
Or the lamest.
By most accounts, a large "V" formation of lights flew silently over the state for up to two hours on March 13, 1997. It traveled along a 300-mile corridor from the Nevada line on a southern heading through Prescott Valley and Phoenix to the northern edge of Tucson. Later in the night, a second event occurred when a series of bright lights hung on Phoenix's southern horizon like a string of glowing pearls.
Now:
Five years after the Phoenix Lights streaked across Arizona, believers and skeptics are still worlds apart as to what took place.
"The Phoenix Lights case was the most dramatic UFO event we have ever handled," said Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle.
The official military explanation: the "V" formation was a squadron of military planes and the balls of light were high-intensity flares.
Eyewitnesses Charles and Joan Painter of Sun City West saw the flying "V" around Casa Grande while driving on Interstate 10. They pulled off the road to get a better look. Today, they still can't agree on what they saw, but neither felt it was extraterrestrial.
"These were conventional airplanes, but perfectly quiet," Charles said.
"I think it was one of those Stealth bombers," Joan said.
Terry Mikel of Phoenix said he saw the lights over the southern part of the Valley.
"To me they looked like a bunch of flares strung together. They flickered then blinked out."
Phoenix ufologist and technician Jim Dilettoso analyzed video of the lights and interviewed hundreds of eyewitnesses. Two years after the event, an Air Force pilot who had chased the lights in an F-15 stepped forward, he said. The pilot, flying under 7,000 feet, had close contact at Indian School and Seventh Avenue.
"It startled him," Dilettoso said. "He felt they were individual balls of light, 3 to 5 feet in diameter and in touch with each other. He couldn't explain how they could fly and hover."
The Phoenix Lights received world attention; the event was taken more seriously outside Arizona. Former Phoenix Councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood said the local media ridiculed her when she asked for and was denied an investigation. Now living with her husband, Mike, in a cabin in the Bradshaw Mountains near Dewey, Barwood still finds it incredulous how she was treated.
"All I wanted them to do was investigate this," she said. "I never said anything about extraterrestrials."
But, perhaps, Dilettoso has the best take on that strange night.
"I don't know what it was," he said. "I only know what it was not."
Find more on the Phoenix Lights and other UFO sightings at the National UFO Reporting Center's Web site:
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'The Phoenix Lights' shine again in film
Diana Balazs
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 25, 2005 12:00 AM
SCOTTSDALE - Dr. Lynne Kitei was perfectly happy being a family physician and health educator before she reluctantly came forward to tell the world about her experiences with unexplained phenomena.
She and her husband, Frank, also a family physician, had seen strange lights more than two years before the 1997 "Phoenix Lights" event.
"As a physician, I went through a lot of years trying to let this sink in. I was resistant to it, too, because I am a scientist," she said.
Kitei said she hopes her documentary, The Phoenix Lights, touches people and educates them.
"Something is out there. I don't know what these things are. I just know that they are," she said.
The documentary has sparked renewed debate over what Arizonans saw eight years ago. Was it flares? An airplane formation? Top-secret military craft? UFOs?
No black helicopters
James McGaha, a scientific and technical consultant for the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Claims of the Paranormal, cringes at the mention of UFOs.
McGaha said he has not read Kitei's book and could not comment directly on the documentary, since he has not seen it.
But he was happy to comment on the Phoenix Lights.
Skepticism is needed
McGaha, an astronomer and retired Air Force pilot, said people should be skeptical and base their beliefs on fact, not pseudo science.
"They saw flares and airplanes. That is not the same thing as saying it's an alien spacecraft from another world," the Tucson resident said.
McGaha said people want to believe in UFOs.
"They want to think that aliens are somehow flying around in spacecraft in our atmosphere and they are either coming here to hurt us or to help us. Of course, both of those notions are complete silliness," he said.
Paradise Valley resident Terri Mansfield is featured in the documentary. She and a group of hospice volunteers saw something glide across the sky that March night from the patio of a volunteer's home.
Alone in the universe?
Mansfield said the experience solidified her belief that humankind is not alone in the universe.
"It's time that humans begin to accept the fact that we have other family, whatever you want to call it, off planet, off Earth," she said.
She said the craft was silent, moved slowly and was the size of a football field.
"What I saw and what impressed me is how dark it was. There was a shimmering darkness to it. It is kind of like you would picture black satin," she said.
Mansfield said it was not a formation of planes.
Her husband, Mike, spent 22 years in the Air Force, and the couple have been to many Air Force bases and seen plenty of aircraft, she said.
"What I saw that night was nothing that I had ever seen before on Earth," Mansfield said.
UFO Sightings: Craft Over Navajo Nation, Phoenix Lights Return? - 2/14/07
Phoenix Lights: Former Governor's Declaration Gets CNN's Attention! - 3/22/07
~*~
Phoenix Lights UFO Mystery 2007: Former AZ Gov Symington Admits To Seeing "Craft Of Unknown Origin"
Written by Bill Knell
Monday, 18 June 2007
On March 13, 1997, unexplained lights appeared over Phoenix, Arizona. I was in town when the mysterious event took place. While authorities would like you to believe that these were merely military flares, former Arizona Governor Fife Symington says there is much more to the story.
Symington now admits that he was among the hundreds of witnesses who saw a huge triangular object in the skies over Phoenix. The former Governor made a number of statements about the Phoenix Lights mystery to Leslie Kean, Special Correspondent to The Prescott Daily Courier. The statements were included in an article by Kean published in the Courier on March 18, 2007. In that article, the former Arizona Governor describes what he saw on March 13, 1997:
"It was enormous and inexplicable," he said. "Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too."
Symington was referring to a V-shaped object with lights on it seen in the skies over Phoenix ten years ago. Some estimated the lights to be the size of a football field, while others said they could have been a mile long. He continued to describe his own sighting of the triangular object: "It was dramatic. And it couldn't have been flares because it was too symmetrical." The former Arizona Governor revealed the object to be a "craft of unknown origin."
While Symington hasn't been the only political figure in Arizona to comment on the Phoenix Lights, he stands alone in his admission that they were more than just flares. When asked to comment on the Phoenix Lights in 2000, Senator John McCain said, "That has never been fully explained." He also quickly added, "But I have to tell you that I do not have any evidence whatsoever of aliens or UFOs."
Fife Symington says he called the commander of Luke Air Force Base, the Arizona Department of Public Safety and a General with the Arizona National Guard back in 1997 to ask about the lights. None of them were able to provide him with any answers and seemed "perplexed." One of the problems with the sightings were the multitude of explanations available at the time.
The V-shaped object with lights was seen in the sky around 8:30pm. The lights that were videotaped and seen around 10:30pm are what most people call the Phoenix Lights. These are often explained away as flares, but not everyone agrees. People that videotaped the 10:30pm event back in 1997 say the lights were in a triangular shape. Some of them had seen military flares being dropped on other occasions and say this was something completely different. However, authorities stayed with the flares explanation and explained the earlier events as a sighting of the Hale-Bopp Comet.
Synmington called for an investigation into the Phoenix Lights shortly after the sightings occurred, but the statement was a hollow one. Either he was not able to obtain cooperation from military authorities, or he never made much of an effort. However, with pressure mounting from the public, UFO researchers and news gathering organizations, he had to eventually take some action.
On June 19, 1997, Governor Fife Symington held a press conference in Phoenix. Dressing one of his aides up as an Alien, the Governor said that the Phoenix Lights were flares and nothing to get upset about. He also said that he was only joking when he ordered the Arizona Department of Public Safety (Arizona State Police) to investigate the sightings. Today, he still defends those actions.
"I wanted people to lighten up and calm down, so I introduced a little levity. But I never felt that the overall situation was a matter of ridicule," Symington says about the infamous press conference. But not everyone was laughing. Former Phoenix Councilwoman Frances Barwood made a serious effort to investigate the sightings in 1997.
According to her recent statements, Barwood was unable to convince federal authorities to interview even one of the seven hundred witnesses that she spoke to about the Phoenix Lights. Big surprise! Being an elected official isn't enough when it comes to getting answers about UFOs from the Military. Just ask current Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano.
Janet Napolitano called for an investigation into the Phoenix Lights during her 1997 campaign to become Arizona Attorney General and was elected to that office in 1998. Despite her former position as a U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, we can assume that she was served the same plate of disinformation from the U.S. Military that the rest of us received. What does she think of Symington's new revelation and the Phoenix Lights overall? We have asked and are awaiting her answer.
My own experience earlier that day was frightening and likely related to one or both the sightings of March 13, 1997. I was driving in from Flagstaff (north to south) on I-17 in the early afternoon. On a day when traffic was already heavy and almost at a standstill, State Patrol vehicles suddenly appeared and caused vehicles to pull over to the far right lanes. A few minutes later, military vehicles filled with troops and equipment covered by tarps went flying by at high speeds. The military procession lasted several minutes.
I was later told by other drivers who attended a seminar I was giving in Phoenix that the same thing happened that night and the next day. Others who attended my seminar reported being almost 'buzzed' by the lights while driving on various local roadways. They described huge balls of light which seemed to come down very low and keep pace with traffic. Apart from all the witness reports, more than a few people took photos and video of the Phoenix Lights.
Huge triangular objects have been a constant part of the UFO phenomenon from the very beginning. Some believe the triangle sightings date to prehistory and many point to sightings that may have occurred in the late 1800s. Most witnesses at that time assumed they were experimental kites of some sort. Then, there were all the unexplained triangle sightings in the 1950s, with and without lights. Two of the most famous involved the U.S. and British Military.
Beginning on September 13, 1952, Military Personnel aboard ships involved in NATO Operation Mainbrace saw and tracked a triangular shaped object flying at over 900 mph between Denmark and Norway. Witnesses said the object emitted a bright white light. There were additional UFO sightings during the NATO exercise as well which may have included saucer and cigar shaped crafts.
In July of 1955, a dark colored boomerang hovered completely still over Lasham Airfield, Hampshire, England, during the National Gliding Competitions. Seen by trained military observers, experienced civilian pilots and untrained spectators, the object hovered for thirty seconds before moving off to the southwest.
A triangular-shaped UFO captured the attention of the world's press in November of 1989 when a huge, dark triangle with sparkling bright lights underneath was seen by citizens and police in Liege, Belgium. More sightings followed. In 1990, Belgium Military Officials announced that two F-16 jet fighters scrambled from a NATO base chased a triangular shaped object for over an hour. One jet locked the object in on radar. On the pilot's screen it looked like a diamond.
There have been recent sightings of unexplained lights near Phoenix and triangular shaped craft over New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest.
The International Paranormal UFO Society asks anyone with information about the Phoenix Lights, triangular-shaped craft or other unexplained events related to the 1997 or current sightings to email us at ipus@CanYouStandTheTruth.com This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or write to: IPUS, PO Box 203, Lebannon IN 46052. All confidentiality requests will be honored. You can also contact our Arizona Representative by email at bill@CanYouStandTheTruth.com This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it IPUS is the International Paranormal UFO Society. Visit our website and sign up for our free newsletter at http://www.CanYouStandTheTruth.com
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Author: Bill Knell
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