The Phoenix Lights: Arizona's 1997 Mass UFO Sighting

On the night of March 13, 1997, thousands of people across Nevada and Arizona looked up and saw something they still argue about. It's one of the biggest mass UFO sightings in American history, and it happened over a major city full of people with cameras.

Event one: the V

The first report came from a man in Nevada who saw a V-shaped formation of lights. Over the next several hours, reports poured in as it moved southeast across Nevada and into Arizona. Witnesses described five to seven lights along the edge of something.

That "something" is the part that sticks. "We could see the outline of a mass behind the lights, but you couldn't actually see the mass," witness Dana Valentine said. Another, Tim Ley, said it looked "as though something was blotting out the stars." People commonly guessed it was about a mile wide. Some said it moved too slowly for an airplane and made no sound.

Event two: the hovering lights

Later, after 9 p.m., a row of glowing orbs appeared and seemed to hang in the sky over Phoenix. This is the footage most people have seen.

The official answer

Military officials said A-10 Thunderbolt jets from the Maryland Air National Guard were on a training mission that night, flying in a V formation, which lined up with sightings between about 7:55 and 8:40 p.m. The later lights, they said, were parachute flares dropped by A-10 pilots training near the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range.

The trouble: the Guard didn't acknowledge the flare drops until the following month. And skeptics of the skeptics point out that a jet formation doesn't explain a dark shape blocking out stars. An anonymous pilot on Unsolved Mysteries in 1999 argued flares would never be dropped over a populated area.

The governor and the alien costume

Then-Governor Fife Symington made it weirder. At a press conference in June 1997, he unveiled "the guilty party": an aide in an alien costume. Big laughs. Years later, he reversed course and said he had seen the object himself, describing it as "bigger than anything that I've ever seen."

Where that leaves us

Two events got lumped into one story. The flares probably explain the second. The first one, the shape a lot of sober adults say blotted out the stars, is the part that keeps the Phoenix Lights in every UFO documentary ever made. Synthia's take: when the governor goes from mocking it to admitting he saw it, you're allowed to keep wondering.