Phoenix Lights 1997: a flare drop, an unidentified formation, no federal file

On the night of 13 March 1997 a V of five lights crossed Arizona around 8:30 p.m., and a row of hovering lights appeared southwest of Phoenix at about 10 p.m. The Maryland Air National Guard later said its A-10s had dropped flares that night; who flew the earlier formation was never established.

33.4484° N · 112.0740° W · Phoenix, Arizona · 13 Mar 1997

Source: AP · Phoenix New Times

Two sets of lights, ninety minutes apart

Many Arizonans were outdoors on the evening of 13 March 1997 because Comet Hale-Bopp was near its closest approach to Earth and bright in the northwest sky. According to a 1998 Phoenix New Times investigation, at about 8:15 p.m. a V-shaped pattern of five lights passed over the Prescott area; about 15 minutes later it crossed Phoenix, and at 8:45 it passed south of Tucson, having travelled nearly the length of the state ^[5].

A second, separate event began at about 10 p.m., when up to nine bright lights appeared, hovered for several minutes and disappeared southwest of Phoenix in the direction of the Sierra Estrella. Video cameras across the Valley recorded this string of lights ^[5]. Writers sympathetic to the UFO interpretation also keep the two apart: Leslie Kean, reporting in 2007, wrote that the 10 p.m. lights shown repeatedly on television most likely were flares, according to video analysts, and that people who saw the earlier objects saw something entirely different ^[1].

The 8:30 formation

Accounts of the first event diverged. Kean wrote that thousands saw a vast triangular and V-shaped object, which witnesses estimated at up to a mile long ^[1]. The New Times found that some witnesses saw unconnected lights while others described a giant triangular craft, some placing it high and others barely overhead. A home video of the formation by Terry Proctor showed the five lights moving in relation to each other within a few seconds, which the paper took as evidence of five separate objects rather than one solid body ^[5].

In Scottsdale, Mitch Stanley aimed a 10-inch Dobsonian telescope, magnifying 60 times, at the leading three lights. He told the New Times that each light split into pairs on the tips of squarish wings, and that he followed the planes for about a minute. The Maryland Air National Guard's spokesman said its A-10s never went north of Phoenix and so could not have been the 8:30 formation ^[5].

Radar does not settle the question. Luke Air Force Base said its operators saw nothing unusual and that a high-altitude formation outside its restricted airspace would not have been considered unusual. Nobody asked the Federal Aviation Administration for its radar tapes in time; a request by 28 March would have preserved a permanent record. No base or airport ever identified the five aircraft ^[5].

They were planes. There’s no way I could have mistaken that.

— Mitch Stanley, amateur astronomer, to Phoenix New Times [5]

The 10 p.m. lights and the flare statement

In June 1997 KPNX-TV reporter Blair Meeks filmed military flares over the gunnery ranges southwest of Phoenix that looked much like the 10 p.m. lights. Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson had told reporters it had no planes in the air at either time. Only after Captain Eileen Bienz of the Arizona National Guard heard from Guard helicopter pilots that A-10s had been seen heading for Tucson at about 10 p.m. did the base confirm that the Maryland Air National Guard had dropped flares southwest of Phoenix that night ^[5].

On 25 July 1997 Captain Drew Sullins, spokesman for the Maryland Air National Guard, told the Associated Press that eight of its A-10 jets had flown training missions that night over the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range, dropping high-intensity parachute flares from 15,000 feet, and had dumped their remaining flares at high altitude before returning to Davis-Monthan ^[4]. The published accounts differ on distance: the AP put the range 60 miles southwest of Phoenix, while Bienz placed the drop over the North Tac range 30 miles southwest ^[4][5]. The AP noted that the flare explanation did not cover sightings from northwestern Arizona ^[4].

Image analysts hired by the Discovery Channel, and ASU astronomer Paul Scowen working for the New Times, aligned frames of Mike Krzyston's video with daytime views of the Sierra Estrella and found the lights at or just above the ridgeline, blinking out as they reached it, as distant flares would. Krzyston maintained that the lights hovered in front of the mountains ^[5].

If that is their explanation then they need to do a re-enactment so people can say that's what they saw or not what they saw

— Frances Emma Barwood, Phoenix city councilwoman, to the AP, July 1997 [4]

The governor's joke, and his reversal

Phoenix city councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood raised the sightings at a council meeting on 6 May 1997 and became the only public official pressing for an inquiry; the Air Force told her it had got out of the business of investigating UFOs ^[5]. On 19 June 1997 Governor Fife Symington told a news conference that an alien had been captured, then brought out his chief of staff, Jay Heiler, in an alien costume, telling reporters they were entirely too serious ^[3].

Ten years later Symington said he had seen the formation himself. He told Kean it was a large triangular "craft of unknown origin" that could not have been flares because it was too symmetrical, and said he had called the commander at Luke Air Force Base, the general in charge of the National Guard and the head of the Department of Public Safety, none of whom had answers ^[1]. He told the Associated Press he had kept quiet to avoid panic at a time when he faced fraud charges, and had told no one but his wife ^[3]. To CNN he described the craft as "enormous" and said it felt "otherworldly" ^[2].

Tucson astronomer and retired Air Force pilot James McGaha, who investigated both sightings, told the AP that both were A-10s flying in formation and dropping flares ^[2], a view that sits awkwardly with the Guard's statement that its A-10s never flew north of Phoenix ^[5].

I'm a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I've ever seen.

— Fife Symington, former governor of Arizona, to the AP, March 2007 [2]

What the government record holds

No military or civil investigation file on the Phoenix Lights is held in the realufo.org archive, and none has been published. According to Kean, in 2000 the Department of Defense said it could find no information about the triangular object after a search ordered by the U.S. District Court in Phoenix on behalf of witnesses; that year Senator John McCain said the lights had never been fully explained, but that he had no evidence of aliens or UFOs ^[1].

Popular retellings place the case in AARO's 2024 Historical Record Report and in the 2021 intelligence-community preliminary assessment on UAP, but neither document mentions Phoenix: the AARO report reviews official government investigative efforts from 1945 onward ^[6], and the 2021 assessment examined incidents that occurred between 2004 and 2021 ^[7].

What the records support is narrower than the legend: an Air National Guard flare drop that accounts for the 10 p.m. lights, and an 8:30 formation that one telescope observer saw as aircraft and that no agency ever identified ^[4][5].

These reports describe incidents that occurred between 2004 and 2021

— ODNI, Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, June 2021 [7]

Last fact-checked: 2026-10-03. Every claim cites its source.