On March 13, 1997, a massive V-shaped formation of lights appeared over Phoenix, Arizona. Thousands of witnesses made it one of the largest mass UFO sightings in American history.
March 13, 1997. Approximately 7:30 PM. Near Henderson, on the Arizona-Nevada border, the first reports came in.
A massive V-shaped—or boomerang-shaped—formation of lights was moving slowly southward. Witness accounts were remarkably consistent. Five to seven lights maintained a perfect formation, moving in absolute silence. And every witness said the same thing: "It was enormous."
The formation traveled from the Nevada border across the Phoenix metropolitan area and vanished toward Tucson. Along a flight path spanning roughly two hours, an estimated thousands to over ten thousand residents witnessed the lights.
The incident collectively known as "The Phoenix Lights" actually comprised two distinct phenomena.
The first event occurred between approximately 7:30 and 9:00 PM: the V-shaped formation of lights that traversed northern Arizona and passed over Phoenix. Many witnesses reported seeing a massive, dark, triangular structure between the lights—not just lights, but a colossal object carrying the lights.
The second event occurred around 10:00 PM: a row of stationary lights that appeared southwest of Phoenix. This was later confirmed to be a series of illumination flares dropped by the U.S. Air Force from Luke Air Force Base during a training exercise.
The controversy arose when the military attempted to apply the flare explanation to both events.
At the time of the incident, Arizona Governor Fife Symington III held a press conference to calm public anxiety. He brought out an aide dressed in an alien costume and turned the event into a joke.
A decade later, in 2007, Symington made a stunning admission.
"I saw the lights myself. It was enormous and inexplicable. No country on Earth has aircraft like that."
A former state governor coming forward as a witness lent the incident a weight that few UFO cases have ever carried.
The second event—the flares—is solved. But the V-shaped formation—the first event—has never been explained.
Air traffic control records show no aircraft in the relevant corridors. A theory attributing the lights to a formation of A-10 Thunderbolts from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base has been proposed, but the formation's size and flight timeline do not align with witness testimony.
Thousands of witnesses. Video recordings. The testimony of a former governor. Despite this volume of evidence, no one has determined what hovered over Phoenix on the night of March 13, 1997.
The Phoenix Lights transformed the UFO debate in the United States. This was not a lone farmer in a remote field. This was a major American city—the fifth largest in the nation—where thousands of people simultaneously observed something that neither the military nor science could identify.
The lights did not return. But the memory of that silent V-shaped shadow, blotting out the stars as it drifted over the desert, remains seared into the consciousness of everyone who saw it.
