The Phoenix Lights: What Happened on March 13, 1997

How the Phoenix Lights Unfolded on March 13, 1997

The reports that make up the Phoenix Lights cover roughly three hours, from about 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, and a corridor of about 300 miles. That corridor ran from the Nevada border, down through Phoenix, to the outskirts of Tucson. Lights of different kinds were seen along all of it.

The key to the whole case is that it was not one event. There were two, and they looked quite different:

• The moving formation, seen mostly between about 8:00 and 8:45 p.m.: a set of lights in an arc or V shape travelling across the state toward the southeast.
• The stationary lights, seen around 10:00 p.m.: a line of brilliant lights that appeared to hover or sink slowly over the Phoenix area.

Most later confusion comes from merging these into one story. Anyone telling the story of the Phoenix Lights has to keep them separate.

A rough timeline of the night

1. About 7:55 p.m. A witness in Henderson, Nevada, reports a large V-shaped object heading southeast.
2. About 8:15 p.m. A former police officer in Paulden, Arizona, reports a cluster of reddish-orange lights sinking below the southern horizon.
3. Shortly after. More reports come in from around Prescott Valley.
4. 8:30 to 8:45 p.m. Witnesses in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, see the formation pass high enough overhead to be hidden at times by thin cloud.
5. About 10:00 p.m. Many people in the Phoenix area see a row of bright lights hanging in the sky. Photographs and video are taken across the city.

The First Event: A Formation Moving South

The Ley family’s account

One of the best-known accounts of the early formation comes from Tim Ley, his wife Bobbi, his son Hal and his grandson Damien Turnidge. According to the family, they first noticed the lights when they were still around 65 miles away. At that distance they looked like five separate lights in an arc, almost as if they sat on top of a balloon.

Over about ten minutes, the family said, the lights seemed to come closer and spread apart until they formed an upside-down V. When the lights were perhaps a couple of miles off, the witnesses described a shape like a 60-degree carpenter’s square, with one light at the point and two along each arm.

In their telling, the object then passed over them at what they judged to be 100 to 150 feet, moving so slowly it seemed to hover in silence. They said it slipped through a gap in the mountains toward Piestewa Peak and on in the direction of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

A pilot in the air

The lights were seen from the air as well as the ground. Actor Kurt Russell, an amateur pilot, reported them to air traffic control that night. He did not speak publicly about being that pilot until 2017, two decades later.

The view through a telescope

Not every witness saw a solid shape. In Scottsdale, amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley watched the formation through a telescope. According to Stanley, the lights were clearly separate aircraft flying in formation. The Glendale reports of the lights being hidden by thin cloud also point to something flying high, not skimming the rooftops.

The Second Event: Lights Hanging Over the Valley

Around 10:00 p.m., a different scene played out. Large numbers of people in and around Phoenix saw a row of brilliant lights that seemed to float above the horizon or drift slowly down. Unlike the earlier formation, these lights did not cross the sky. They stayed in roughly one place.

This second event produced most of the photographs and videotapes of the Phoenix Lights. The footage shows lights appearing at regular intervals, staying lit for a while, then going out. Because so many people saw and recorded it, writer and skeptic Robert Sheaffer later called it perhaps the most widely witnessed UFO event in history.

By mid-June 1997 the story had reached national newspapers and television, and the Phoenix Lights became one of the defining UFO cases of the decade. For more cases from that tradition, the journal’s UFO and UAP section collects the major sightings.

The Official Explanation: Operation Snowbird

Both halves of the Phoenix Lights have been linked to the same military program: Operation Snowbird. This was a winter pilot-training program run by the Air National Guard out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. The aircraft involved were A-10 Thunderbolt II jets.

The formation: five A-10s heading for Tucson

Sheaffer, and separately Tucson astronomer and retired Air Force pilot James McGaha, traced the early formation to five A-10s from Operation Snowbird. They were following an assigned air traffic corridor under visual flight rules, meaning the pilots were flying by sight rather than relying on instruments and close control from the ground.

One detail explains why the jets did not look like ordinary planes. Federal Aviation Administration lighting rules for civilian aircraft do not apply to military aircraft. According to the investigators, the A-10s were showing steady formation lights instead of the blinking anti-collision lights people expect to see. The formation flew over Phoenix and on to Tucson, landing at Davis-Monthan at about 8:45 p.m.

The 10 p.m. lights: illumination flares

The U.S. Air Force explained the later lights as LUU-2B/B illumination flares, parachute flares built to light up large areas of ground at night. According to that account, a flight of four A-10s from the Maryland Air National Guard, also flying under Operation Snowbird, dropped them during a training exercise over the Barry M. Goldwater Range in western Pima County.

Several features of the flare explanation match what people saw:

• The hovering. Heat from a burning flare fills its parachute like a small hot-air balloon and slows its fall, so from a distance it can seem to hang still.
• The winking out. As the flares fell, they dropped behind the Sierra Estrella range southwest of Phoenix. Those mountains were invisible against the night sky, so the lights seemed simply to switch off.
• The footage. Analysts concluded that the unseen ridgeline blocked some flares from some viewpoints, which is why videos show lights appearing and vanishing in sequence.
• The brightness. An analysis of these flares found that at a range of about 50 to 70 miles, their brightness would match what was seen from Phoenix.

The paper trail for this part is unusually solid. The Arizona Republic first reported the Maryland Guard link in July 1997. A history of the Maryland Air National Guard published in 2000 named the 104th Fighter Squadron as responsible. In March 2007, Lt. Col. Ed Jones, a Maryland Guard pilot, confirmed to the press that he had flown one of the aircraft that dropped flares that night. Local television stations later aired known military flare drops for comparison, and the resemblance was close.

What is documented and what is claimed

The Case for Something Stranger

The flare explanation speaks to the 10 p.m. lights. The sharpest disagreement over the Phoenix Lights concerns the earlier formation.

The strongest argument for something stranger comes from the witnesses themselves. Families in different places described a single structured shape, often a boomerang or carpenter’s square, moving slowly and without sound. To them, a formation of jets flying high and fast does not fit an object that seemed close enough to judge in feet rather than miles.

Skeptics answer that a handful of lights against a black sky gives the eye nothing to judge distance or size by. The brain tends to connect points of light into one outline, and darkness between the lights is easily read as a solid body. High-flying jets could also be too far away to hear. Stanley’s telescope view and the Glendale reports of clouds passing in front of the lights support that reading.

The governor’s turn

The most famous believer is Fife Symington, Arizona’s governor at the time. Shortly after the sightings he held a press conference, joked that the culprit had been found, then brought out an aide in an alien costume.

In 2007, Symington changed course. He said he had seen the lights himself, called the sight otherworldly, and said that as a pilot who knew almost every machine that flies, he had never seen anything so big. He also reportedly said he had stayed quiet to avoid alarming the public. For believers, a sitting governor’s silence fits a larger pattern of official reluctance, a theme explored across the journal’s coverage of conspiracy theories.

Physician Lynne D. Kitei, who wrote a book about the Phoenix Lights, became another prominent voice. The documentary based on it, The Phoenix Lights...We Are Not Alone, features Symington and astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

The airship hypothesis

Some skeptics have offered a middle path: an experimental lighter-than-air craft, a large blimp-like vehicle, flying in the area. Geoscientist Ben McGee pointed to JP Aerospace’s Ascender, a big V-shaped airship design, and said he would be surprised if the government were not using something similar.

JP Aerospace founder John Powell has firmly denied that his company or its equipment was involved. He acknowledged that the company was testing vehicles at the time and had built airships for defense agencies, but called any link speculation. A defense report describes a related Air Force concept, the Near-Space Maneuvering Vehicle, a V-shaped airship 175 feet long that ran into technical trouble and was cancelled in 2005. No evidence ties any such craft to the night of March 13, 1997.

Common Mistakes in Retelling the Phoenix Lights

Because the case has been told so many times, certain errors have hardened into the popular version. These are the ones that most distort the record:

1. Treating it as one event. The formation and the hovering lights came about two hours apart and look nothing alike.
2. Using the 10 p.m. video as proof of a giant craft. The famous footage shows the second event. It is not a recording of the V-shaped formation.
3. Assuming the flare explanation covers everything. Flares account for the stationary lights. The formation has a separate explanation, which rests more on investigators’ reconstruction and less on named military records.
4. Blending in later sightings. Lights over Phoenix in 2007 and 2008 are often presented as part of the 1997 story. Each had its own cause.
5. Inflating the numbers. No reliable headcount of witnesses exists, and big round figures do not come from any formal survey.

A worked example: lining up two reports

Here is how the separation works in practice. Take two accounts of the formation from the same hour.

The Ley family describes five lights forming a solid shape that passed 100 to 150 feet overhead. The Glendale witnesses, a little later and farther along the route, describe the same formation high enough for thin cloud to cover it.

Both can be honest reports of the same lights. But they cannot both be accurate about altitude. Lights hidden by cloud are above that cloud, far higher than a hundred feet. Since judging the height of a light at night is notoriously hard, the cloud detail is the firmer piece of evidence. That does not prove the lights were A-10s. It does show why investigators of the Phoenix Lights gave more weight to physical clues like cloud cover and telescope views than to estimates of size and distance.

The same method fits newer cases. The 2004 Tic Tac encounter is debated partly because radar and infrared data can be checked against what the pilots described.

Later Lights, Films and the Phoenix Incident

The Phoenix sky did not go quiet after 1997, and later sightings were quickly compared with the Phoenix Lights. On February 6, 2007, a local Fox station recorded lights over the area. Military officials and the FAA said they were flares dropped by F-16 Fighting Falcons training out of Luke Air Force Base.

On April 21, 2008, residents reported lights that seemed to shift from a square into a triangle. One resident said three jets were seen heading toward them, while a Luke official said the Air Force had no activity in the area. The next day, a Phoenix man said the lights were his neighbor’s helium balloons with flares attached, and a police helicopter confirmed it. A man who declined to be named then said he had released them from his back yard.

The case has also had a long life on screen. The best-known works include:

• The Phoenix Lights...We Are Not Alone, the documentary based on Kitei’s book.
• Night Skies (2007), a horror film released straight to DVD.
• The Phoenix Incident (2015), a science-fiction film with conspiracy and horror themes.
• The Phoenix Tapes ‘97 (2016), a found-footage film.
• Phoenix Forgotten (2017), another found-footage feature.

The fiction films borrow the setting and the mood, but their stories are invented. Strange lights over open country are an old motif. The will-o’-the-wisp of European folklore and modern ghost-light legends draw on the same pull that the Phoenix Lights still have: a light that seems to mean something, with nothing nearby to explain it.

What Remains Unexplained

Taken as a whole, the record on the Phoenix Lights favors ordinary explanations. The 10 p.m. lights have an identified unit, a named pilot, a known flare type and a geometry that matches the footage. The early formation has a plausible match in the A-10 flight into Tucson, supported by a telescope observation and the cloud reports.

Real questions remain anyway. The formation explanation depends mostly on investigators’ reconstruction, not a public flight record matched minute by minute to each sighting. Some witnesses still insist they saw a single dark structure, not separate lights. Symington’s account, from a pilot and a former governor, has never been fully reconciled with the A-10 explanation. And the airship idea, though unproven, keeps alive the possibility that something unusual but earthly was flying.

Today the Phoenix Lights would likely be filed as UAP, the government’s current term for unidentified anomalous phenomena, explained in the journal’s guide to what UAP means. The case’s lasting lesson is about perception as much as the sky: many sincere people can watch the same lights and come away with different stories. For long-form conversations about cases like this, the Troubled Minds Vault holds the radio show’s archive.

Questions and answers

What happened on March 13, 1997?

On the evening of March 13, 1997, people across Arizona and southern Nevada reported strange lights between about 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. There were two separate events. First, a V-shaped formation of lights moved south over the state around 8 p.m. Then, near 10 p.m., a row of bright lights seemed to hover over the Phoenix area before vanishing. Together they became known as the Phoenix Lights.

What were the Phoenix Lights, according to the military?

The 10 p.m. lights were explained as LUU-2B/B illumination flares dropped by Maryland Air National Guard A-10 jets training at the Barry M. Goldwater Range as part of Operation Snowbird. A pilot from that squadron later confirmed he had flown in the formation. Investigators traced the earlier V-shaped formation to five A-10s flying to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson.

Is the Phoenix Incident movie real?

No. The Phoenix Incident is a 2015 science-fiction film with conspiracy and horror themes. It borrows the setting of the 1997 Phoenix Lights, but its story and characters are fictional. Other films inspired by the event, such as Phoenix Forgotten (2017) and The Phoenix Tapes '97 (2016), are also dramatized found-footage works, not records of what happened that night.

How many UFO sightings have there been in Arizona?

No single official count exists. Civilian groups that collect reports keep their own databases, and their numbers change constantly and depend on who chose to file a report. Arizona's clear desert skies, large military training ranges and active air bases mean residents often see flares, jets and other lights that look unusual. Some of those reports are later explained and some are not.

Did Governor Fife Symington see the Phoenix Lights?

In 2007, a decade after the event, former Arizona governor Fife Symington said he had seen the lights himself and called the object otherworldly. As a pilot, he said, it was bigger than any aircraft he knew. In 1997, shortly after the sightings, he had held a joking press conference at which an aide appeared in an alien costume.

Is there real footage of the Phoenix Lights?

Yes. Many residents photographed and videotaped the lights seen around 10 p.m. on March 13, 1997. The footage shows a row of lights appearing, staying lit for a while, then going out one by one. Analysts later concluded it shows flares falling behind the Sierra Estrella mountains. Far less imagery exists of the earlier V-shaped formation that many witnesses describe.

Stay curious. Keep the question open.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads.