The Phoenix Lights

On the evening of March 13, 1997, many people across Arizona and Nevada reported seeing strange lights in the sky, an event later known as the Phoenix Lights. The sightings occurred between 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, stretching across roughly 300 miles from the Nevada border through Phoenix to the edge of Tucson. Some witnesses described a huge object shaped like a carpenter’s square, with five spherical lights embedded in it. The incident actually involved two separate events: a triangular formation of lights that moved across the state, and a set of stationary lights seen in the Phoenix area.

Both sightings were later linked to military aircraft participating in Operation Snowbird, a winter training program run by the Air National Guard out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. The first group of lights was identified as a formation of A-10 Thunderbolt II jets returning to base. The second group was explained by researcher Robert Sheaffer as illumination flares dropped by another flight of A-10s on a training exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range in southwest Arizona. Then-Governor Fife Symington later said he witnessed the event and described it as "otherworldly." Similar reports surfaced in 2007 and 2008, attributed to military flares from Luke Air Force Base and to flares attached to helium balloons released by a civilian.

The 1997 reports began at 7:55 p.m., when a witness in Henderson, Nevada, saw a large V-shaped object moving southeast. At 8:15 p.m., a former police officer in Paulden, Arizona, reported a cluster of reddish-orange lights vanishing over the southern horizon. Soon after, sightings came from Prescott Valley. Tim Ley, his wife Bobbi, his son Hal, and his grandson Damien Turnidge first saw the lights about 65 miles away. Initially, the lights appeared as five separate points in an arc, as if on top of a balloon, but they seemed to approach. Over ten minutes, the lights spread apart and formed an upside-down V. When the object appeared a couple of miles away, the family could make out a 60-degree carpenter’s square shape with five lights—one at the front and two on each side. The object moved slowly, about 100 to 150 feet above them, silent and hovering, then passed over their heads through a V-shaped gap in the mountains toward Piestewa Peak and Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. Actor Kurt Russell, an amateur pilot, also reported the lights to air traffic control.

Between 8:30 and 8:45 p.m., witnesses in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, saw the formation pass overhead at high altitude, obscured by thin clouds. Amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley in Scottsdale observed the lights through a telescope and said they were clearly individual airplanes flying in formation. Around 10:00 p.m., many people in Phoenix reported seeing a row of brilliant lights hovering or slowly falling. Numerous photographs and videos were taken, leading Robert Sheaffer to call it "perhaps the most widely witnessed UFO event in history."

According to Sheaffer, the two unrelated incidents both stemmed from Operation Snowbird. Tucson astronomer and retired Air Force pilot James McGaha traced the first sighting—the large “flying triangle” seen around 8:00 p.m.—to five A-10 jets flying in formation under visual flight rules along an assigned air traffic corridor. Because military aircraft are exempt from FAA rules for private and commercial planes, the A-10s used steady formation lights instead of blinking collision lights. They flew over Phoenix and landed at Davis-Monthan AFB around 8:45 p.m. The second incident, the row of brilliant lights seen around 10:00 p.m., came from a flare drop exercise by different A-10s from the Maryland Air National Guard, also part of Operation Snowbird. The U.S. Air Force explained that the exercise used slow-falling, long-burning LUU-2B/B illumination flares dropped by four A-10s at the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range. The flares appeared to hover because rising heat from the burning flares created a "balloon" effect on their parachutes, slowing their descent. The lights then seemed to wink out as they fell behind the Sierra Estrella mountain range southwest of Phoenix, and likely appeared to block out background stars.