The Phoenix Lights, Still Unexplainable

Henderson, Nevada, March 13, 1997. , police in this small desert city receive reports of a massive, V-shaped, unidentified flying object in the night sky. Over the next three hours, the craft is witnessed by thousands of people as it journeys southeast into the state of Arizona.

Because most of the sightings were reported by the residents of Phoenix, the incident is known as the Phoenix Lights. For me, it was just another night. I was at home, I was upstairs in our bedroom, and I'm lying in bed, I see three lights pop up.

I grab my video camera, I run outside on the balcony, and I did capture video affirmations of these lights or actual craft arranged in a V or triangle. We're talking mile to eight miles wide, gliding silently, some at a distance, but most at rooftop level. Some people said they could have thrown a rock at it.

It was that close. Phoenix is a city of about five million people, and here they are looking up and seeing this immense UFO flying at fairly low altitude quite slowly. This was a sighting on almost unprecedented scale.

The giant V-shaped object reportedly hovered above Phoenix for three hours before it finally disappeared over the horizon. The Phoenix Lights incident made headlines across the country. Many eyewitnesses were convinced that what they saw was not a man-made airplane, but rather an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Lots of people saw this. You have a lot of general consistency with how this was reported. But you had skeptics saying, well, the thing that people saw going down the state was actually just aircraft.

And then a spokesperson from the National Guard made an announcement and said, yeah, those lights that people saw over the city, that was actually flares that we dropped by A-10 warthog aircraft. Not if you talk to the witnesses. There were a number of witnesses who were quite adamant that this was extraterrestrial.

And one of the witnesses, turns out, was actually the governor of the state, five Simington. As a pilot and a former Air Force officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object that I'd ever seen. With the Phoenix Lights phenomena, what's really exciting is that more and more credible people have come forward.

All I knew is that it was so beyond anything I ever imagined being here on this earth. To date, the Phoenix Lights phenomena has never been recreated or explained. While the Phoenix Lights is one of the most extraordinary UFO encounters in history, it is just one of many mysterious sightings that have taken place in the state of Arizona.

According to the National UFO Reporting Center, there have been approximately 5,000 UFO reports in Arizona, going all the way back to the 1940s. On July 7, 1947, William A. Rhodes, an amateur photographer, saw an elliptical metallic object.

He managed to capture two excellent photographs of this object at very low altitude. And he sent them into the Arizona Republic newspaper, which published them on the front page. And if you look at these photographs, you can see that they show a very solid-looking metallic gray object at low altitude.

These photographs have never been debunked, so this is a very important case. There was what I believe is a genuine UFO crash that occurred in Kingman, Arizona in May of 1953. This was apparently the recovery of a virtually intact downed flying saucer.

Witnesses came out, and this was quite a significant case. And then probably the most famous of the many UFO sightings Arizona has had is the Travis Walton abduction experience from 1975 that took place in November of that year and made national news. And so Arizona has its own long history of anomalous activity, for sure.