The Phoenix Lights

Hundreds of witnesses reported lights over Phoenix, Arizona, on the night of March 13, 1997. Skeptics trace them to Air National Guard training flights.

CNN reported in June 1997 that hundreds of witnesses had come forward about the lights. One family, Tim Ley's, first saw them from their Phoenix home, facing north.

Robert Sheaffer, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2016, says the episode was two separate incidents with one source: Operation Snowbird, a winter pilot training program the Air National Guard ran out of Tucson's Davis-Monthan base. The first incident, between eight and nine that evening, was a sighting of a big triangle-shaped craft. Brian Dunning, on the Skeptoid podcast in 2007, says the planes involved belonged to a Maryland Air National Guard fighter squadron, and that pilots there still joke about the episode. Wikipedia reports that a Maryland pilot, Lt. Col. Ed Jones, confirmed in March 2007 that he flew in the formation that dropped flares that night, on a training run to the Goldwater range.

In March 1998 the Phoenix New Times looked at the claims of a man named Dilettoso, whose optical analysis had been widely cited as ruling out ordinary causes for the lights of March 13. The paper said outlets including the Discovery Channel and USA Today had presented him as an expert, and that none of them had explained the science behind his claims.

In March 2007, the Associated Press reported through NBC News that former Arizona governor Symington, who by then worked as a business consultant and pastry chef, had changed his position. He now said the lights were extraterrestrial and that he had seen a UFO himself.