Summary
On the night of 13 March 1997, people from the Nevada line through Phoenix to Tucson reported lights in the sky, in two waves that do not match each other. Around 8 p.m., witnesses described a V or a boomerang of lights moving southeast, silent, with a dark shape they said hid the stars. Around 10 p.m., a row of amber lights stood south of Phoenix and went out one by one behind the Sierra Estrella. Those later lights were filmed. In July 1997 the Maryland Air National Guard said A-10s training on the Barry M. Goldwater Range had dropped high-intensity parachute flares there that night, and had dumped the rest before returning to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Governor Fife Symington, who had mocked the reports that June, wrote in 2007 that he had seen the earlier V, and that it was not the flares.
Background
The first reports that evening are of a formation, not of a hovering arc. About 7:55 p.m. a witness in Henderson, Nevada, reported a large V moving southeast. About 8:15 p.m. a former police officer in Paulden, Arizona, reported a cluster of reddish lights. From Prescott the same kind of report continues over Phoenix and on toward Tucson: several lights, often counted as five to seven, warm or amber, in a wedge, moving slowly, with no engine the witnesses could hear. People who say they stood under it describe a solid dark body between the lights, wide enough that it blocked stars, and some put that width at several football fields. Those sizes are estimates made at night, with no fixed edge to measure against. This pass was not the event that filled the newscasts. Few of these witnesses had a camera running.
The pictures that did air are from about 10 p.m., south of the city: a line of bright amber lights over the mountains, sinking, and winking out behind the Estrella ridge. Home video of that line ran on local television and then, in June, nationally, after USA Today picked up the story. Senator John McCain asked the Air Force to look. Davis-Monthan first found that its own planes had landed before 6 p.m. A unit at Marana then reported A-10s that appeared to be following Interstate 10 back toward Tucson. Lieutenant Keith Shepherd, public information officer at Davis-Monthan, said an eight-plane squadron of the Maryland Air National Guard’s 175th Fighter Wing, in Arizona for Operation Snowbird, had landed at the base about 8:30 p.m. after coming from the Phoenix side.
Captain Drew Sullins, speaking for that Guard wing, told the press the jets had been on the Goldwater Range, about sixty miles south-southwest of Phoenix, dropping high-intensity flares by parachute from altitude to light a target area, and that before the flight home they jettisoned the flares still aboard. He said one pilot called the dump “one hell of a light show.” Captain Eileen Bienz of the Arizona Air National Guard had traced the Maryland unit after the calls kept coming. A parachute flare burns, drifts, and goes out. From Phoenix, a row of them over the range sits in the same part of the sky as the videotaped lights and disappears as each one falls behind the ridge. That is the 10 p.m. event. Sullins’s account does not, by itself, cover the reports from Paulden and Prescott earlier in the evening. The 8:30 landing does put Maryland A-10s over the Phoenix-to-Tucson route at the time of the first pass. Whether those jets, seen as lights with the airframes lost in the dark, are the V, is the open question. It is not settled by the flare tapes.
On 19 June 1997 Symington said in the morning that the state would look into the lights. That afternoon he called reporters back, had his chief of staff, Jay Heiler, brought in handcuffed and dressed as an alien, and said the press was being entirely too serious. In a CNN piece on 9 November 2007 he wrote that he had been looking west for the distant lights and instead saw a massive delta shape pass over Squaw Peak, now Piestewa Peak, silent, with a long lighted leading edge. He had been an Air Force officer. He wrote that it was not flares, because flares do not fly in formation, and that he had staged the costume so the state would calm down. He allowed that flares may have been in the sky that night, and said what he saw was not those flares. That is his account, ten years later, of the first pass.
James McGaha, a retired Air Force pilot in Tucson, said in 2007 that he had traced both showings to A-10s, one a formation and one a flare drop. People who stood under the early V still describe one silent object rather than several jets. No recording from that first pass has been tied to a measured wingspan.
Research notes
Historical research: Mass Eyewitness Observation and Anomalous Atmospheric Phenomena
The Phoenix Lights incident serves as a prominent case study in cognitive psychology, optical perception in nocturnal environments, and the sociology of mass witness phenomena.
Academic analysis evaluates the event by separating sensory data into distinct observational categories:
From an optical and psychological perspective, researchers study the challenges of estimating the size, speed, and altitude of ungrounded light sources against a featureless night sky. The human visual system frequently relies on Gestalt principles of grouping, wherein isolated lights moving in synchronized trajectories are perceived as a single, solid structure—a phenomenon known as perceptual completion. Skeptical models argue that this cognitive effect, combined with localized atmospheric refraction and low-frequency engine sound suppression, accounts for reports of a unified "wedge" craft.
Conversely, social scientists and anomalous-phenomena analysts focus on the high consistency among independent witness statements collected prior to widespread media coverage. The simultaneous observation across multiple municipalities by individuals with aviation experience provides a robust dataset. Consequently, academia views the event as a dual phenomenon: a thoroughly documented deployment of military illumination flares alongside an unsolved, multi-state observational event that continues to inform research into human perception and nocturnal aerial tracking.
Historical research: The 10 p.m. tapes are the flares; the earlier V was not that drop.
Keep the night in two pieces. The videos, the Estrella ridge, and the Maryland Guard’s July 1997 statement belong to the 10 p.m. row. High-intensity flares on parachutes, dropped over the Goldwater Range and dumped before the flight back to Tucson, look from the city like a line of amber lights that go out one at a time. That part of the file is identified.
The earlier reports are a wedge of lights moving from the north, through Phoenix, toward Tucson, around 8 p.m. The flare drop does not start in Henderson or Paulden. A flight of the same A-10s did land at Davis-Monthan about 8:30 p.m. after coming from the Phoenix side, and a helicopter unit reported A-10s along Interstate 10. That is the ordinary reading of the first pass: several jets, seen as lights, the bodies too dark to separate. Witnesses who say they were underneath describe silence, a single dark shape, and stars gone between the lights. Bright lights hide stars by glare. A formation can be heard or not, depending on altitude and where the listener stands. Those reports were not filmed the way the 10 p.m. row was filmed.
Symington’s costume on 19 June was a joke, the same day he had promised an investigation. His 2007 account is that he saw the delta while looking for the distant lights, and that he has never accepted the flares as that object. He is a witness to the first pass, writing a decade later. He is not a measurement of it, and he does not put the videotaped row back in doubt. The flares are the tapes. The V is still a formation of lights whose airframes nobody photographed.