The Phoenix Lights: What Thousands Saw Over Arizona in March 1997

This article documents widely-reported accounts and historical records of unexplained phenomena. It does not assert supernatural causation.

At approximately 8:15 p.m. on Thursday, March 13, 1997, something large and silent crossed into Nevada airspace near Henderson. Over the next two hours, it — or something — would be reported by hundreds of witnesses across nearly 300 miles of the American Southwest, triggering one of the most extensively documented mass-sighting events in modern UFO history. By the time the night was over, thousands of people in the Phoenix metropolitan area had stepped outside to watch lights hang motionless over the city. The governor of Arizona was among them. It would take him a decade to say so publicly.

What Was Reported

The March 13 event is best understood as two distinct occurrences that shared a night and, for years, were conflated into a single story.

The first event began around 8:15–8:30 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. A witness in Henderson, Nevada, called police to report a large V-shaped or boomerang-shaped object with lights at each point passing silently to the southeast. From that moment, a chain of reports followed the same object — or a similar one — southward along a corridor roughly tracking U.S. Route 93 through Kingman, Prescott, and the Phoenix metro area, continuing south toward Tucson. The reports arrived roughly in sequence, consistent with a southeastward track at an estimated speed that investigators later placed between 30 and 100 miles per hour — unusually slow for conventional military aircraft.

In Paulden, Arizona, a former police officer named Bill Greiner reported a cluster of reddish-orange lights in a V formation passing overhead. Near Prescott, a group of witnesses including a former airline pilot described a massive triangular craft that blocked out stars as it passed — suggesting a solid object rather than a loose formation of aircraft. The object was described as enormous, with multiple witnesses estimating its angular size as wider than their outstretched hand held at arm’s length. Sounds described ranged from a faint low hum to complete silence.

Tim Ley, a resident of north Phoenix, offered one of the most detailed accounts of this first event. Ley reported watching a huge, structured V-shaped craft with five lights approach steadily from the northwest. He described being able to track it for several minutes as it moved over his neighborhood and passed directly overhead — silent, low, and impossibly large. His son and daughter-in-law were present and corroborated the report. Investigator and author Richard Motzer later documented the Ley family account in detail as part of a broader survey conducted for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).

The second event occurred around 10:00 p.m. A stationary arc of orange-white lights appeared south of Phoenix, hovering above the Estrella Mountains and visible from much of the city. These lights did not move. They appeared one by one, held position for several minutes, then winked out sequentially. This is the event most prominently captured on video — and this is the event the Air Force later explained.

The Witnesses

Witness estimates for the combined events range widely — from hundreds to upward of 10,000 people, a figure that reflects the Phoenix metro population’s density and the brightness of the 10 p.m. lights rather than a verified count. The diversity of the witnesses, however, is notable.

Fife Symington III was serving as Governor of Arizona on March 13, 1997. He later stated that he had seen the V-formation object himself that evening, describing it as a “craft of unknown origin” moving over the Valley of the Sun. He did not say so publicly at the time. Instead, at a press conference held in June 1997 — after months of public pressure and media coverage — Symington staged a theatrical stunt, having a staff member dressed in an alien costume walk into the briefing room. He told reporters they had found the culprit. The crowd laughed. The issue was, for a time, defused.

In 2007, Symington reversed course. Writing in an opinion piece for CNN and giving subsequent interviews, he stated plainly that he had witnessed a large, structured craft that night and that his 1997 press conference had been an attempt to lighten what had become a tense public situation. “It was dramatic,” he told CNN. “And it couldn’t have been flares because it was too symmetrical.” He called on the federal government to take the question seriously.

Mike Krzyston, a Phoenix resident, captured the 10 p.m. lights on home video. His footage — showing a string of glowing orbs hanging above the mountain ridgeline south of the city — became the most widely broadcast visual record of the evening and was aired repeatedly by local and national news outlets. It is the Krzyston video that the Air Force response directly addressed.

Dr. Lynne Kitei, a physician practicing in Phoenix at the time, photographed lights she had been observing on multiple occasions near her home in the months surrounding the March event. She later published a book, The Phoenix Lights (2000, updated 2010), and produced a documentary, assembling witness testimony and advocating for continued investigation.

What Investigators Found

The official response came from the Maryland Air National Guard’s 104th Fighter Squadron and the U.S. Air Force. In response to congressional inquiries forwarded by Arizona Representative Dr. J.D. Hayworth and Senator John McCain’s office, the Air Force stated that the 10 p.m. lights were LUU-2B/B high-altitude illumination flares dropped by A-10 Warthog aircraft on a training exercise over the Barry M. Goldwater Range, located southwest of Phoenix. The flares, designed to illuminate ground targets, burn brightly at high altitude and descend slowly under parachutes. The Estrella Mountains, the Air Force noted, would have masked the flares’ descent from Phoenix-area viewers, making them appear to hover. The Maryland ANG confirmed that a formation of A-10s had been operating in the area that night.

This explanation for the 10 p.m. static lights is broadly accepted among aviation researchers and skeptical investigators. James McGaha, a retired Air Force pilot and astronomer who investigated the case for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, concluded that the flare explanation was geometrically and temporally consistent with the Krzyston video and other accounts of the second event. The sequential disappearance of the lights — one by one — fits the behavior of individual flares burning out, not a structured craft powering down.

The 8:30 p.m. V-formation event received no official explanation. MUFON investigators, including Richard Motzer, conducted systematic interviews with witnesses along the corridor from Henderson to Tucson and mapped the sighting reports chronologically. Their analysis suggested a single object — or a tight formation — moving on a consistent southeastward heading. The MUFON report noted the absence of any confirmed civilian or military flight plan matching the described trajectory, altitude, and speed. No aircraft type in the public inventory was identified as a match for a slow-moving, silent, structured craft of the scale witnesses described.

Radar data became a contested point. The FAA’s Luke Air Force Base approach control and nearby civilian radar facilities did not produce publicly released returns that confirmed a large low-altitude object on the reported track. Investigators argued this could indicate the object was either extremely low (below effective radar coverage in terrain-rich areas), was constructed of radar-absorbing materials, or was not a single solid object. Skeptics argued the absence of radar confirmation was itself evidence against a large craft.

Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) received multiple real-time calls on the night of March 13 and maintained one of the largest archives of witness submissions from the event. His database remains a primary research resource for the 8:30 p.m. reports.

Possible Explanations

For the 10 p.m. event, the A-10 flare explanation is well-supported and widely accepted. The geometry works. The timing matches. The behavior of the lights — static, then sequentially extinguishing — fits flare physics. This portion of the Phoenix Lights story has a credible conventional answer.

The 8:30 p.m. V-formation is a different matter. Several conventional candidates have been proposed:

• A formation of aircraft: Multiple civilian or military aircraft flying in loose formation could produce a V-shaped light pattern. The Air Force denied conducting such an operation, and no formation flight plan has been publicly identified. Witness descriptions of a single solid object blocking stars are harder to account for with this explanation.
• High-altitude aircraft or classified platform: Some investigators have raised the possibility of a large, slow-moving reconnaissance or experimental aircraft — the scale and silence described by multiple witnesses is consistent with a very high-altitude craft whose engine noise would not reach the ground. The B-2 Spirit was operational by 1997 but has a distinct flying-wing profile and is not typically associated with low, slow passes over populated areas.
• Misidentification and psychological contagion: Skeptics including McGaha and author and astronomer Phil Plait have argued that a combination of aircraft lights, planets (Jupiter was prominent in the western sky that evening), and the power of suggestion among a large population could produce a cascade of consistent-seeming reports. This explanation struggles to account for witnesses like the Ley family, who described structured, close-range observation over multiple minutes.
• A truly unidentified object: The MUFON analysis found no satisfactory conventional match. The case remains officially unexplained as regards the first event.

It is worth stating plainly: “unidentified” does not mean extraterrestrial. It means the available evidence has not produced a confirmed identification. Those are different things.

Why It Still Matters

The Phoenix Lights case is significant for several reasons that extend beyond the question of what was in the sky. It demonstrated that mass UFO sightings are not limited to isolated rural witnesses — this event occurred over one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States, reported by a cross-section of the population that included a sitting governor, medical professionals, and a former police officer.

Governor Symington’s 2007 admission added an unusual dimension: a senior elected official publicly stating he had witnessed something he could not explain, and acknowledging that his earlier public response had been a deliberate deflection. Whether his account of the V-formation is accurate is unverifiable, but his willingness to speak on record added weight to calls for institutional attention to UAP reports that eventually contributed to the climate leading to the 2017 New York Times revelations about the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

The case also illustrates the importance of separating events that share a date and location. Conflating the explained 10 p.m. flares with the unexplained 8:30 p.m. reports muddies analysis in both directions — it allows critics to dismiss the entire night with the flare explanation, and it allows advocates to claim more than the evidence supports.

What flew over Arizona on the night of March 13, 1997 — at least at 8:30 p.m. — has not been officially identified. The witnesses are documented. The reports are on record. The investigation remains open in every meaningful sense. That alone places the Phoenix Lights among the most consequential UAP cases in American history.

Related case file: The Belgian UFO Wave of 1989-1990: Triangular Craft Over a NATO Country.

Related case files

• The Belgian UFO Wave of 1989-1990: Triangular Craft Over a NATO Country
• The Hudson Valley UFO Wave: Boomerang Craft Over New York and Connecticut
• The Stephenville UFO Sightings of 2008
• The Tic Tac UFO: Inside the 2004 Nimitz Encounter and the Pentagon’s Response
• The 1986 JAL 1628 Incident: A Cargo Pilot’s UFO Encounter Over Alaska