The Phoenix Lights. It was an incident which occurred on 13 March 1997, with witnesses from as far north as the Nevada state line to as far south as Tucson.
Thousands of people phoned in sightings to emergency services that night, describing something absolutely massive and shaped like a boomerang, with five round lights along the leading edge or underside of the craft. Whatever it was reportedly made no sound, either. The lights were stationary over the Phoenix metro area, some say for as long as two hours.
This is certainly not the first encounter where civilians have claimed to see a UFO when the Air Force or Navy was conducting training operations in the same area. Military pilots themselves have even reported seeing strange aircraft while conducting flight operations. So who’s telling the truth? What are we supposed to believe?
A computer-generated depiction of what the UFO over Phoenix in March of 1997 looked like. (Courtesy of ABC 15 Arizona)
The Department of Defense, in response to the torrent of inquiries about the incident, responded by saying it was the deployment of LUU-2B/B rescue flares, deployed by USAF aircraft–in this case Fairchild-Republic A-10C Thunderbolt IIs flying a training mission over the Barry Goldwater range.
While the explanation seems plausible, recently-conducted interviews suggest something else in the sky over Arizona that night, and a specific, named operation to launched to provide suitable cover. How much does the Department of Defense know? Was it really parachute flares? Was it a secret-squirrel program like the “Aurora” spy plane? Is the Air Force covering up something else?
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