The New Phoenix Lights Sighting Rekindles Mystery of the 90s
Those of us who were in Phoenix, Arizona, in the spring of 1997 were treated to a still-baffling phenomenon. Unlike many other UFO sightings, the one on March 13, now famously called “The Phoenix Lights,” was undeniable in its length, breadth, and duration. Thousands of people stood in astonishment as a gigantic alien craft hovered without a sound, in plain sight, catching the attention of the local and national news media, as well as the governor. But this was no once-in-a-lifetime event — just before the close of 2019, Phoenix was again visited by what many witnesses say were extraterrestrial spacecraft.
When events such as these mass sightings occur, the official reports are quite predictable. Regardless of what thousands of people attest to, government and military officials release statements that are beyond absurd to those whose experiences are undeniable. In the 1997 incident over Phoenix, the US Air Force attributed the sighting to flares dropped by an A-10 Warthog military aircraft engaged in training exercises at the Barry Goldwater Range in Southwest Arizona. However, eyewitnesses know what they saw: five lights in a formation that slowly loomed over Phoenix like a cloud for more than three hours, from 7.30 p.m. to 10.30 p.m.
Arizona’s governor, Fife Symington, later testified that he witnessed a massive delta-shaped craft silently navigate over the Squaw Peak mountain range. “It was truly breathtaking… I was absolutely stunned… As a pilot and former Air Force officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I’d ever seen.”
Closing Out 2019 With a Series of Sightings
On December 8, 2019, yet another remarkable visitation caught the attention of thousands of people when multiple witnesses reported and recorded a lighted orb over the busy city of Mesa. The larger orbs appeared to have produced smaller orbs. So far, officials from government, law enforcement, and the military have not replied with their usual “weather balloon” or “flare” explanations. They seem to be just as puzzled as the witnesses are.
British media outlet Express, wrote, “A STRANGE orb-like appeared in the skies above Arizona – and no one knows what they are, leading to theories of alien visitation…On Sunday, December 8, a couple in Mesa, Arizona, spotted the strange lights hovering near high in the sky. The object, which has caused confusion among the public and the military, was seen moving erratically and in all directions.” There is no official explanation of what the oddity is.
Regarding the December 8 Phoenix UFO, one eye witness told a local television station that the orb “started kind of moving diagonally across, trying to figure out which way it was heading. And as it did, that’s when we noticed it started dropping things from it…It was a cloudy night and had drizzled off and on. Regular planes had been flying by since we can see the flight path for the airport … Then ‘boom;’ it started dropping what looked like orange fireballs or something that traveled for a few seconds before they faded out and disappeared … All of a sudden I saw this bright glowing orange light. I thought it was a planet or a star at first and then I realized ‘oh that’s close and it’s moving towards us.’”
Arizona, a Hotbed of UFO Activity
The Patch, an online newspaper out of Tucson, noted that thousands of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) are reported every year. Just in 2019, more than 200 were witnessed over the skies of Arizona. The National UFO Reporting Center’s website noted that Phoenix had five UFO sightings reported in December, including one on December 20. The report read, “Bright lights hovering – There were 2 bright lights in the sky hovering, then suddenly vanished.”
One of the last Phoenix UFO sightings of 2019 was reported on December 12: “30 lights in a perfect line heading from NNE sky to SSE horizon over Phoenix, AZ at 6:15 a.m. on 12/12/2019.” An eyewitness said, “I saw the first light as it came into view in the NNE sky. It was a light; I thought it may have been the ISS [International Space Station]. I have witnessed this before. Usually, I would watch the light pass over until it vanished in the SSE sky, then go inside to the computer to check my sighting. This morning, however, the lights kept on coming. They were spaced apart and formed a line. I thought maybe satellites or possible commercial flight paths, but they kept on coming. I then thought military but they kept on coming. There were two instances when there were two lights moving parallel with each other. They all were moving in a perfect line perfectly spaced. I counted at least 30.”
Phoenix’s Channel 12 News reported that discs, triangles, lights, and fireballs are among the objects reported by witnesses in Phoenix and throughout Arizona. The objects last anywhere from seconds to more than an hour.
Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center in Harrington, Washington, said that there were 221 sightings of UFOs in Arizona in 2019. Many of the sightings were in metropolitan areas rather than rural locations. On December 18th, a witness said, “I was sitting at my kitchen table and I saw a saucer with blue lights, ran outside, it was cruising low and slow from South Mountain traveling Northeast towards Scottsdale.” Two separate reports filed on the same day, December 12, detailed a similar event, with both parties describing “thirty star-like objects traveling in a line.”
Two months earlier, in September 2019, at least one person reported “Six silver irregular flying objects zig-zagging over Scottsdale, AZ.”
Davenport said, “We are being visited routinely by these things that since 1947 we’ve called UFOs…Nobody knows exactly what they are, but many believe these UFOS might be signs of life beyond our planet. If this is true, if there’s even a shard of a possibility that this is true, it is the biggest scientific question that has ever confronted mankind.”
One Question Lingers: Why Arizona?
Many areas of Arizona do not have the same number of city lights as other largely populated places, making objects in the sky much easier to see at night. And, because Arizona’s climate is so dry there are often very few clouds to obscure stargazing — or UFO-spotting. In any case, with such a dazzling display of the heavens over the still desert landscape, what you see flying across the sky is often unmistakably otherworldly.
And then there are claims that Arizona contains a number of unusual vortices, including many in the mountain town of Sedona, 115 miles north of Phoenix, said to be sights of powerfully attractive energy currents emanating from the mountainous terrain.
Preston Dennet, author of UFOs Over Arizona: A True History of Extraterrestrial Encounters in the Grand Canyon State, wrote that Arizona has been a UFO hotspot for more than 100 years. He noted that there are 81 locations that “provide a dazzling array of sightings, landings, face-to-face encounters, abductions, and even UFO crash/retrievals.” Among the incidents of UFO and alien sightings are the Paradise Valley UFO crash, the Travis Walton Abduction, and the Phoenix Lights.
Jim Dobson wrote for Forbes that, according to the National UFO Reporting Center, there were more than “4,881 reported sightings in the United States in 2017, imagine how many were not reported.” In Sedona, tourists head into the night, equipped with night vision glasses, binoculars, and telescopes. The amount of activity recorded is tremendous, with reported sightings of orbs, portals, and aliens all within the high desert.
In March 2018, two airline pilots at 30,000 feet over Arizona reported an unidentified flying object as it flew over their planes. The incident made the national news. CBS News reported that both pilots, one of a Learjet operated by Phoenix Air and the other of an American Airlines flight, independently called in the sighting. Coincidentally, the UFO sighting took place just 500 miles away from Roswell, New Mexico. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) subsequently released a recording of the radio broadcasts.
Perhaps one of the most notorious UFO incidents occurred when a forestry worker named Travis Walton claimed to be abducted by aliens on November 5, 1975, in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest three hours Northeast of Phoenix. Walton reappeared after a five-day search and his case remains one of the most famous abduction accounts. Walton’s experience was scripted into the 1993 film called Fire in the Sky.
Too Many Sightings to Deny
Accounts of UFO activity over the Grand Canyon state go on and on and on. Testimony is given by seasoned military personnel, commercial and private airplane pilots, Native Americans gazing up at the stars, amateur, and university astronomers, and homeowners casually glancing skyward on one of an endless string of crystal clear evenings.
While the Phoenix Lights incident was amazing by any standard, odds are that if you desperately want to see a UFO, Arizona is one of the best bets for you to realize your dream. But you may want to bring along a really good camera and a steady hand because a long history of official denial has shown that you’ll be singing into the wind, or at least preaching to the chorus when you see something that your eyes and brain are telling you cannot be anything from this planet.
UFOS: The Evidence No One Is Talking About
UFOs… whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, there is actually a mounting body of evidence regarding the UFO phenomenon that can no longer be ignored. If you look past all of the alien horror films, the fake blurry UFO videos, and the Ancient Aliens memes, you’d be surprised at how many former high ranking government officials, scientists, and military contractors believe that UFOs should be taken more seriously.
Former Canadian Minister of National Defense, Paul Hellyer, believes we’re already being visited: “At least four alien species have been visiting Earth for thousands of years.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton stated on Jimmy Kimmel that she would search for more UFO files if elected. Hillary’s former campaign manager and former Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton and Obama, John Podesta, has repeatedly said he believes the UFO phenomenon is something very serious and worth investigating. Before Podesta left his position at the White House, he tweeted, “Finally, my biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files. #thetruthisoutthere”
10-year-NASA contractor, Rob Bigelow, who develops space habitat pods, gave this shocking statement during a 60 Minutes interview: “There has been and is an existing presence, an E.T. presence. And I spent millions and millions and millions – I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.” Those millions of dollars Bigelow spent was authorized by the Pentagon’s top secret UFO research program called the Aerial Threat Identification Program. Rob Bigelow was the sole contractor.
Bigelow continued to explain that you don’t have to go anywhere to find ET life because it’s right underneath our noses. He also said he’s had his own close encounter with an ET. He declined to go into further details. In The New York Times article “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” they mentioned Bigelow even has recovered UFO debris and metal alloys stored in one of his facilities in Las Vegas. They stated, “researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.”
When former Nevada senator and co-founder of the UFO research program, Harry Reid, was interviewed about the debris on CBS 8 Las Vegas, he said he knew nothing about it. However, he was glad that they declassified the program because “now we have scientific evidence.” What scientific evidence is Reid referring to? Whatever the case may be, the Pentagon spent nearly $110 million dollars on the program, proving our government takes UFOs seriously.
The last time the government publically had this level of interest in UFOs was in the 1950’s when UFO sightings were all the craze and were being investigated by the U.S. Air Force under Project Blue Book. After 17 years of research, Blue Book ended in 1968 when the Air Force concluded that most of UFO sightings could be debunked as Venus, satellites, birds, and swamp gas. But here’s what most people don’t know. In 1993, declassified documents from 1952 revealed that the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board made it a mandate to purposefully debunk all UFO reports for national security concerns. They concluded that when it came to the subject of UFOs, the American people were dangerously gullible and prone to, “hysterical mass behavior.” They feared the Soviets would use UFOs as a distraction to overload intelligence channels and then carry out a genuine attack on American soil.
These documents also revealed that the CIA planned on partnering with the mass media, Hollywood, business clubs, and even the Disney Corporation to discredit all UFO research. How effective they were at implementing that plan is unknown. However, the CIA was successful at debunking UFOs using Project Blue Book.
After reviewing 6 years of data in only 12 hours (just 1% of all the research), the CIA made a hasty conclusion that most of the UFO reports could be explained and that further investigation was not worth the effort. The CIA then ordered the Air Force to stop talking about UFOs and begin a debunking campaign to lessen public interest.
U.S. Congressional hearings in the 1960’s later revealed that Project Blue Book was completely incompetent. Personnel were using improper scientific methods, they were completely understaffed, and were horribly trained. Scientific advisor to Project Blue Book, J. Allen Hynek, an initial skeptic of UFOs, later admitted the Air Force were improperly labeling UFO sightings as explained, despite the absence of any substantial evidence. After Blue Book, Hynek became a ufologist and said that the UFO phenomenon deserved serious scientific examination.
Regardless of the backlash, the CIA and Air Force’s debunking campaigns still worked. UFO research became taboo, people became disillusioned, and the media covered UFOs less and less. The influence of these disinformation campaigns have even discouraged government officials from speaking out. The former governor of Phoenix, Arizona, Fife Symington, during the 1997 Phoenix Lights event is a perfect example.
The Phoenix Lights were witnessed by 20,000 people or more. Shortly after the sighting, the governor made a huge joke about the event during a national press conference. He had a handcuffed man in an alien costume enter the room and said people are taking all of this too seriously. The explanation given at the time was that the lights were flare exercises conducted by the Air Force. However, in 2011, the governor later came forward in the documentary “Secret Access: UFOs on the Record” and confessed that he saw the lights right above him near his house. On CNN he said, “it was probably some form of an alien spacecraft.” Symington explained at the time he was driven to give an explanation instead of just saying “I don’t know” and admitting to complete vulnerability. He continued to say public officials need to be more open and more courageous in dealing with issues like this and that it’s time to square up and do the right thing. The Air Force’s flare explanation was later debunked because they conducted their exercise at 10pm. Thousands of people were reporting the lights as early as 8:30pm.
The UFO ridicule factor, created by the CIA, has succeeded in deterring citizens and public officials from the public discussion of UFOs. However, in the last two decades, more than 500 former government officials, scientists, and contractors have come forward about their concerns over the phenomenon. Hundreds of declassified and leaked UFO documents can be found online, thanks to FOIA requests and tireless researchers. Hopefully more people will learn the truth on the government suppression of UFO research and begin to study the UFO phenomenon with proper scientific methods and an open mind.
