The Phoenix Lights, Explained: What Thousands Saw Over Arizona in 1997

On the night of March 13, 1997, people across Arizona looked up and saw lights they couldn't explain. Nearly three decades later, the "Phoenix Lights" remain one of the most widely witnessed UFO events in American history, and one of the most argued about.

Two sightings, not one

Part of the confusion is that people were describing two different things. Writing in Skeptical Inquirer (opens in a new tab), researcher Robert Sheaffer notes that many people were outside that night to look at the bright Comet Hale-Bopp, and he separates the evening into two unrelated incidents. The first was a large "flying triangle" of lights reported during the 8 o'clock hour. The second, starting around 10 p.m., was what most people remember: "a row of brilliant lights hovering in the sky, or slowly falling," seen by hundreds if not thousands of people in the Phoenix area and widely photographed and filmed.

The military explanation

Military officials initially said they had nothing in the air over Phoenix. That changed that summer. The New York Times reported (opens in a new tab) in July 1997 that the Air National Guard had traced the lights to jets from the Maryland Air National Guard, which were dropping high-intensity flares over a bombing range south of Phoenix that night. According to the Times, the location matched where many people reported seeing lights.

Sheaffer's account adds detail. He ties both incidents to Operation Snowbird, a winter pilot-training program the Air National Guard ran out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. In his telling, the 8 p.m. "triangle" was five A-10 jets flying back to Tucson in formation, showing formation lights rather than the usual blinking collision lights; he notes that the only known video shows the lights moving relative to each other, not as one solid object. The 10 p.m. lights, he writes, were a flare drop by A-10s from the Maryland unit. Illumination flares descend slowly under parachutes, which can make them appear to hover.

Why many witnesses don't buy it

The flare explanation never satisfied everyone. The Arizona Republic (opens in a new tab) has summarized the main objections: witnesses described a solid triangular or V-shaped object rather than drifting points of light, said it moved silently, and reported sightings that lasted longer than a typical flare drop. The Republic notes that the witnesses included pilots and police officers as well as ordinary residents.

The most prominent skeptic of the official story is Arizona's own governor at the time, Fife Symington. In a 2007 commentary for CNN (opens in a new tab), Symington wrote that he saw "a massive delta-shaped craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak." He wrote that, as a pilot and former Air Force officer, the craft "did not resemble any man-made object I'd ever seen," adding: "it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don't fly in formation." In the same piece, Symington said that at the time he called a press conference to "lighten the mood," rather than discuss what he had seen.

What we can say

The best-documented part of the night, the 10 p.m. row of hovering lights, has a specific, checkable explanation: the Maryland Air National Guard has said its jets dropped flares at that time and place. The earlier formation is harder to pin down, and honest witnesses, including a sitting governor, describe something that doesn't fit easily with the flare story. Both things can be true: a real military exercise, and a set of eyewitness accounts that still haven't been fully explained to the people who saw them.