The Phoenix Lights UFO: Flares, Formation, or Something Else?

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While Crimes A Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe at Crimes A Reddit podcast on YouTube, this is ReWine. On the night of March 13, 1997, thousands of people in Arizona saw something that shouldn't be possible.

That spring, a comment called Halebop, was blazing across the sky.

The brightest comment most people had seen in their entire lives. So all over the state, families were out in their backyards, cameras ready, next crane toward the stars. And that's when something else came into view. A massive silent formation of lights in the shape of a V, moving slowly south, so low,

and so wide, that some people swore it blocked out the stars behind it. They drifted over the whole state, and the edge of that across Phoenix down toward Mexico, and then it was gone. So what really crossed the sky, that night?

“A secret flight of jets, a trick of flares and comet fever, or could it have been the”

largest mass UFO sighting in American history. I'm Dr. Hoony Bought, and this is Hidden History, a rewine original powered by paved studios. On this show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained, examining all the different theories from science to the supernatural and everything in between.

From vantage civilizations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena, I'm looking at it all, and I want you to join me. Before we begin, I'd love it if you could rate, review, and follow Hidden History, your support allows our community to grow, and for other people, to discover the show. We're also on YouTube with full video that brings each episode to life, just search

@HiddenHistoryPod, and subscribe. Today's episode is all about the Phoenix Lights.

“On one night in 1997, thousands of people across Arizona looked up, it saw something in the”

sky they couldn't explain. Use it affirmation of military jets, flares dropped over bombing range, or a single silent craft, the size of a city block, floating right over their heads. Whatever was really in a sky that night, there was a very real reason so many people in Arizona were already outside looking up.

In the spring of 1997, comet Hillbop was putting on the show of a lifetime. It was so bright, you could see it with the naked eye for months, hanging there in the evening sky like a smudge of light with a tail. And here's a fun fact that tells you just how special it was. The last time Hillbop swung past Earth around 2200 BC, woolly mammoths were still around.

And after this recent past in 1997, it won't be back for roughly another 2,500 years. So all across Arizona, people were rightfully treating it like an event. Back to our telescopes were out, cameras were loaded, if you're going to see something

incredible in the sky, March of 1997 was the time to be looking.

And the culture was prime for it too. This was the era of the exfiles of late night radio callers trading their own encounters of a whole new age fascination with what might be out there. So when someone in 1997 looked up and saw a strange light, it's not surprising they might think UFO, especially considering how much military activity goes on in the area.

There's a reason the military loves the Arizona desert. Clear skies, dry air, and hundreds of miles of empty, restricted air space were you can fly and train without bothering anyone. New winter air national garden units were colder parts of the country would fly south to Arizona to get their training hours in.

A program nicknamed Operation Snowbird, stage out of Davis, month in Air Force Base, their Tucson. They give it like spring training but for fighter pilots. And south west of Phoenix, says a massive stretch of off-limits desert called the Barry and Goldwater Range, one of the largest military training areas in the country.

sky on purpose.

“On any given night in March, there is a very good chance somebody in a fighter jet was”

up there doing something bright. And all that activity did something to the people who lived out there. It made a strange light in the sky feel almost ordinary, which is part of what makes that one night in March so remarkable. Whatever cross the sky over Arizona was strange enough to stop even people who were used

to stream skies dead in their tracks. And it all came together into one of these strangest nights the state had ever seen.

Hold on to that, because as the sun went down on March 13th, the first phone calls were

about to start coming in and they weren't coming from Phoenix. They were coming from Nevada. The first reports came in around 730 in the evening from New Henderson, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas.

“People described bright lights moving south in a formation.”

That formation, a rough V or boom ring, is a detail that would stay strikingly consistent all night from one town to the next. Nothing panicked yet, just hey, what is that? As those lights drift south into Arizona, the calls got stranger and more urgent. By around 815, the lights had reached Prescott in Central Arizona.

And now witnesses weren't describing random dots anymore. They were describing a shape of a V or a boom ring with several distinct lights spaced out along it moving slowly and silently overhead. What a plane or helicopter, something that just glided. It this is where the descriptions start to get eerie.

One family up in Prescott area reported watching the lights approach from the north and as the formation passed over them, they said it wasn't a cluster of separate objects at all. It was one solid dark structured mass with the lights fixed to it as if they were all bolted to the same enormous frame.

No blinking navigation lights, no strobes, no sound, one witness said it moved like it was a no hurry whatsoever, and whatever it was, it was headed straight for the biggest city in the state, around 830 it reached Phoenix. This is the sighting that made history. People poured out of their houses, neighbors stood in the street, drivers pulled over

in the highway and got out of their cars, across the entire metro area, thousands of people looked up and saw the same thing, an enormous V of lights passing directly overhead.

And here's what makes this event so hard to dismiss.

The details people gave were remarkably consistent, whether they were in Glendale or Tempe or downtown Phoenix. It was silent, no engine roar, no rush of wind, none of the sound you'd expect from anything that big, moving that low, it was slow, drifting, not streaking and it was massive, think city block big.

Some witnesses said it was so massive that as it passed over them, it seemed to slide over the rooftops like a ceiling. For the minute or two it took to pass, a lot of people said the same strange thing. The whole world seemed to go quiet.

“One of those witnesses was a woman who would become one of the most important voices in”

this whole story. Dr. Len Ketai was a respected physician in Paradise Valley just outside Phoenix. That night, she looked out over the city as a set of amber orbs, and then watched them shift into formation. Years later, she described it like this, quote, "it was a mile wide formation of

these orbs, and I caught them head on turning into a V," end quote. Ketai grabbed a camera and took pictures, but she didn't do anything with them, at least not publicly. She was a respected physician with a serious career, and she understood exactly what talking about a UFO would do to her reputation, so she sat on.

She was today anonymous for seven years before she felt safe enough to come forward as a witness.

Think about that for a second.

But Dr. was so afraid of being laughed at, that she kept photographs of one of the biggest UFO events in history in a drawer for the better part of a decade. And that fear turns out to be central to this whole story. But here's my favorite part of the Phoenix timeline, because it's the kind of detail you just can't make up.

That same night, a private plane was on final approach to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. With the controls, it was a licensed pilot flying his son in to see the boy's girlfriend.

The pilot looked up and saw six lights in a perfect be hanging over the airport.

“Being an experienced flyer, he did the responsible thing.”

He radioed the control tower and reported them. The tower told him there was nothing on radar. That pilot, it was the actor Kurt Russell. Now Russell didn't tell the story until 2017, so 20 years later. He said he completely forgot about it until he walked into a room one day, saw a documentary

about the Phoenix lights playing and realized with the jolt that the anonymous pilot they were describing was him. I've got to say, of all the ways to find out you're part of one of the most famous UFO events in history, catching it on TV in your living room has to be near the top. So here's the first event.

The Great Silent V, sliding across some 300 miles of the American South West from the Asian Nevada down toward Mexico.

And here's what makes it especially haunting, after it passed over Phoenix, it was gone.

The V moved off to the south and disappeared, for about an hour, the sky was quiet, because what happened next around 9.15 to 10pm was a completely different thing. This time, a row of glowing amber lights appeared low over the southwest horizon, out near the Sierra Estrea mountain range. But these lights behave nothing like the V. They did across the sky, they did hold a formation

and tripped, they just hung there, and neat row of them suspended over the mountains. And then, after several minutes, one by one, they slowly faded and winked out, top to bottom, like someone flipping off a row of light switches. A Phoenix resident named Michael Christen caught the whole thing on video from his backyard, standing there in the dark with a camcorder, narrating in real time as the lights glowed

and dropped away. And that footage, the row of hovering failing lights became the single most broadcast image of the entire Phoenix lights phenomenon. If you've ever seen the Phoenix lights video, this is almost certainly the one you're picturing.

“But here's the thing, because Christen's footage is from the second event, it became the”

visual shorthand for the entire night, including the giant silent V that came at our earlier that nobody got a clean video up. So when people argue about the Phoenix lights, they're often picturing the hovering lights while describing the moving craft, two different things blurred into one. So by the end of the night, Arizona had witnessed two very different things, a giant

moving V, and a set of hovering lights an hour later. By morning, the entire state wanted an explanation.

Setting one would take years and when it finally came, it would only make people angrier.

The morning after, Arizona woke up to a statewide mystery. The scale of it was staggering. A pole taking that year suggested that up to 10% of all people living in Arizona believe they'd seen something in the sky that night. Some witnesses and researchers have put the number of people who saw the lights somewhere

between 10 and 20,000. Now those are estimates, not a headcount. But by any measure, this was one of the most widely witnessed sky events in modern history. So people did what you'd expect. They demanded answers.

The first official to really push with a Phoenix City councilwoman named Francis Barwood.

She hadn't seen the lights herself, but her office was flooded with calls from constituents who had, and she decided they deserved an answer. So she did the thing that elected official is supposed to do. She started asking questions publicly in collecting witness statements. It for her trouble, she got mocked.

Barwood was painted around town as the UFO lady. Her colleagues distanced themselves. The message she got loud and clear was that asking the question at all was a career risk. Whether that's true or not, it tells you something.

“Because she got that treatment, what chance did a regular person have?”

And when people went looking for an official investigation, they got Stonewalled even harder. The US Air Force used to have a whole program for investigating UFO reports. It was called Project Blue Book, but Blue Book had been shut down back in 1969. So when the people of Arizona came asking, the Air Force's answer was essentially, "That's not our job anymore."

No agency stepped up to investigate the largest UFO sighting in decades. And then came a moment that, for me, defines this whole story.

called a press conference.

“He announced that they'd finally identify the culprit behind the Phoenix lights.”

Then he had his chief of staff walk out, wearing a full alien costume, oversized head, and giant eyes, the works. The room laughed. As I'm telling you, told reporters, "This just goes to show you that you guys are entirely too serious."

And quote. For the thousands of people who truly believed they'd seen something real, it was humiliating. Their governor had turned their experience into a punchline, unlive television. There's a bit of a little follow-up here too. Just a few months after that press conference, Simultin resigned.

He had been convicted of being fraud tied to his real estate business. That conviction was later overturned on appeal. But the man who laughed off the Phoenix lights left office in disgrace before the year was out. Meanwhile, the story went national.

The same month as a press conference, USA today put the Phoenix lights on its front page as suddenly the whole country was talking about it.

“The word is that leave us, with a legitimate puzzle, and one crucial clue that splits”

the case wide open. Remember those two events? The moving view around 830 in the hovering lights around 10, a lot of witnesses have made one very pointed argument over the years.

They say the most dramatic sightings the giant silent craft came first, well before the

later hovering lights. And that timing is the crack in the whole official story. It fits one of those events beautifully and the other one not so much. So what actually crossed Arizona sky that night? There are three big answers.

Let's get into that. Let's start with the explanation, most scientists and skeptics accept. It's really two explanations, one for each event. Let's start with the easy one. Those hovering lights around 10,000.

The one in Michael Christen's famous video. The official answer is flares, specifically high intensity illumination flares, dropped by a 10 fighter jets during a night time training exercise on the buried goldwater range south west of the city. These are bright magnesium flares that drift down slowly under parachutes, which is exactly

why they'd appear to hover and then wink out one at a time as they burned out or dropped behind the mountains. This isn't just a guess, in 2017 Lieutenant Colonel Ed Jones, a retired officer from Maryland Air National Guard, told the Arizona Republic that he was one of the pilots who dropped those flares that night.

An actual named pilot on the record saying, "That was us."

“So for this event, I think the science is pretty solid.”

But what about the first event, the big silent V?

That one is harder. This is where the key witness of the whole episode comes in, a witness the believers and skeptics have been fighting over for almost 30 years. His name is Mitch Stanley. In 1997, he was a 21-year-old amateur astronomer living in Scottsdale, Arizona.

In all the night, a Mark 13, he happened to be out in his yard with a serious piece of equipment. A 10-inch dobsonian telescope. That's a big reflecting telescope that got us a lot of light and let's see in fine detail. When the V of lights came over, Stanley pointed his telescope right at it, and what he saw was very different from what everyone's squinting with a naked eye saw.

Under magnification, each single light split into a pair of lights, one on each tip of a squareish wing. He wasn't looking at one object. He was looking at a formation of individual aircraft, flying high enough that they looked small even through the scope.

In other words, according to the one person who actually magnified it that night, the great silent V was a flight of planes. But which planes were they? The best answer comes from a retired Air Force major in astronomer named James McGayha, who full 810 Warhog jets out of that various same base Davis month in McGayha points out something

that clears up the single most common objection to the airplane theory.

People always say, but it was totally silent, planes aren't silent.

McGayha's answer is the 810 is actually the quietest jet the Air Force flies. At high altitude on a still night, a formation of them passing over really could make almost no sound you'd notice. There's one more piece of the size I want to give you, because it explains the single strangest part of the wind is accounts.

The size. Remember, people said this thing was a mile wide, big enough to plot out the stars.

Your brain has nothing to measure against.

“No trees, no rooftops, no horizon, just lights against black.”

UFO researchers Tim Printy went back through the wind's sketches and found something really telling. People's estimates of how big the object was ranged from a couple of degrees of sky all the way up to 20 degrees or more. That's an enormous spread for the same object on the same night, and to me, that spread

is the tell. A formation of planes flying very high, spread out across a wide patch of sky directly over your head could actually fill your whole field of view, and with nothing to anchor how far away it is, your brain quietly translates, fills the sky into must be gigantic, and must be close.

It's not that people relying, it's like human eyes are just really, really bad at this

particular job. Now the honest Captain view ties it all together, neatly.

“The writer Robert Schaefer has argued that the Phoenix lights were too unrelated incidents,”

but both cause of the same organization. Those air-national guard units in Arizona for winter training. The early V was a formation of their jets. The later hovering lights were their flares, same source to events one very confusing night. Case closed, right, but not for everyone.

Witnesses raise that timing issue, the dramatic V came a full hour before any flares went up. So whatever the V was, it wasn't the flares. Thousands of people insist they saw one solid object, not five separate planes. As skeptics have to still explain why Mitch Stanley, the star witness, didn't come forward

for months. So the science is strong, but it leaves a gap, and that gap is where the other theories live. Here's a question I find more interesting than was it Aliens. It's why do so many people still refuse to believe the planes and flares explanation even now?

The answer has less to do with what was in the sky and more to do with how the people and charge behaved on the ground. Think about it from an ordinary resident's point of view. You saw something extraordinary, so did your neighbors, so did off duty cops, airline pilots, so did Kurt Russell, you called the authorities, and their response you got was no

investigation, a shrug from the Air Force, and eventually your own governor is sending out someone in a rubber alien mask telling you that you're too serious. What authority response to a real experience with mockery and silence, it doesn't make people stop believing, it does the opposite, it makes them believe there's something to hide, every non-answer became evidence.

“If it was really just training flares, why wouldn't anyone just say so clearly at the time?”

Why the ridicule? And there's a cold road logic that adds another dimension to it. When military really was doing secret and semi-secret things in the Arizona desert, classified ranges, weapon tests, training programs, they had no interest in explaining to the public. However, this is the same broad chunk of the American Southwest that gave us air 51 and

decades of "we can neither confirm nor deny." So when the Air Force gave vague dismissive or slow answers about the Phoenix lights, it looked exactly like a cover-up. Even if the thing they were being key to about was just a routine flight and a box of flares.

There's also a simpler, more human version of this theory. Maybe nobody covered up anything at all, maybe the military legitimately didn't connect the dots between one unit's evening formation and another unit's flair drop and our later.

So they shrugged and moved on, never realizing that to hundreds of thousands of people, those

two-ordered events had braided together into something that looked like a visitation. Now I want to add one piece of context here. The Phoenix lights happened at an incredibly charged, cultural moment. That same March in 1997, a group called Heavenscape made headlines around the world, but its members died by mass suicide.

And part of what that group believed was that a spacecraft was traveling behind a comet hillbob coming to collect them. Let me be crystal clear, there is no connection between Heavenscape and the Phoenix lights. But the fact that both happened the same month, both tied to that same bright comet in the sky, tells you everything about the mood of 1997.

People were pruned, the comet was up there, the culture was obsessed with the idea of visitors. And into that atmosphere came an unexplained set of lights. So of course the story caught fire. The counter-armage to all that is simple though, and fair, Manifastered Mystery explains

It doesn't explain what thousands of people actually saw with their own eyes. Plenty of those witnesses had no political acts to grind, they just looked up, so let's get them to floor.

Here's a theory that never dies, and is carried by some truly credible people.

“That's what makes it so hard to wave away.”

The claim is true for it. That first event, the Great V, was not a formation of five planes and it was not flares. It was one single, structured, silent craft, miles wide, floating low over Arizona. And the most striking voice for this theory is the very man who once mocked it, Governor 5 Simington.

Ten years after the alien costume stunned, Simington came forward and emitted that he had seen the craft himself that night. And this is a man who knows the sky, he's a former Air Force pilot, I'm a pilot he said, and I know just about every machine that flies.

He insisted that the craft was "bigger than anything I've ever seen," and he wouldn't

even further than that. Simington said that "in your gut, you could just tell it was other royalty," and quote. So why did he stay quiet for a decade? And why did he mock it in public? Well, by his own account, he was afraid of causing a public panic, and he didn't want

to rail the business of running the state. So the governor of Arizona looked at what he believed was an unexplained craft, and decided that the responsible move was to make everyone laugh at it. And Simington isn't the only witness like this, it's the core of the believer's argument. It's not about the number of witnesses, it's about their caliber.

We're talking about a physician, Dr. Ketai, commercial and private pilots, police officers, people whose entire job is to observe carefully and report accurately. That's the case documentary filmmaker James Fox built in his film, I know what I saw. The title literally comes from a Phoenix witness. Fox interviewed around 150 people about that night, a stacked up witness after credible

witness. His whole argument is, if you wouldn't dismiss these people's testimony in a courtroom, why dismiss it here, and it's worth pausing on what these people actually described because it usually wasn't vague. Over and over, they didn't just say, I saw some lights. They said they saw a solid object, a dark continuous shape connecting the lights, a defined

edge cutting across stars, one enormous body moving with a single purpose. Not fire planes that happen to be flying near each other, but one thing.

Several witnesses said the lights never wavered or drifted away separate aircraft would.

They say locked in place relative to one another as a bolted to the same giant frame. If for a lot of them, that's the detail that airplane theory just can't quite reach. Lock the size or the silence, but the gut level certainty that they were looking at one connected machine.

“And Dr. Ketai has a specific point of challenge to the flare theory that I think deserves”

a fair hearing. She asked how flares could possibly cross the entire state for hours while holding in her words a rock solid B. So is there a hard proof it was an alien craft? No.

There's no clear photograph that resolves a solid hull and no piece of it sitting in a lab. In the skeptical counterweights or real ones, human memory can be unreliable, especially under awe. Again, in the dark with no reference points, our brains are terrible at judging the size

and distance of a light in the sky, which is why the size estimates were all over the map. And then there's Mitch Stanley, the only person who put telescope on it, a reported planes. Here's why this theory refuses to die. It feels the space that the other ones leave empty, because even after you accept the flares and even after you accept Stanley's telescope, you're still left with thousands

of ordinary people describing something that felt like nothing built by human hands. Some feel that gap with secret military attack we hadn't seen yet. Some feel it with visitors from somewhere far away, but almost nobody can look at thousands of shaken witnesses in a governor who flew fire jets and filled that gap with nothing at all.

We're just not built to leave a hole that big alone.

“You know, the more I turn to start over, the more I think it isn't really about aliens”

at all. It's about what it feels like to be certain of something and have no one believe you. Think about all those people that night. They didn't ask for anything strange to happen. They were just standing in their yards looking at a comet, and then they saw something

So they did what we're all taught to do. They told the truth to the people in charge. And the people in charge handed them a rubber alien mask.

“I think that's the real legacy of the Phoenix lights.”

Not the mystery in the sky, we can live with the mystery. Humans are actually pretty good at not knowing things. What we can't stand is not being believed. There's something uniquely lonely about saying, "I know what I saw at having the whole world lap of you."

And when authority response or real experience with mockery instead of curiosity, people don't just stop trusting that authority. They stop trusting the order and explanation, even when the order and explanation happens to be true. So maybe the lesson of Phoenix isn't "look to the skies," maybe it's "take people seriously,"

because the surest way to turn a training exercise into a legend that lasts 30 years is to laugh at the people who saw it. OK, so after all that, what do I actually think happen over Arizona that night? I think it was two events with two different answers.

The second event, those hovering lights around 10pm in the famous video to me, that

one subtle. Those are flares over the gold water range. A name pilot has said on the record that he dropped them. The behavior the lights have fits flares perfectly. I'm comfortable closing that one.

The first event, the great silent V, is the hard one, but when I weigh the evidence, I keep coming back to one person, Mitch Stanley. He's the only human being who put an actual telescope on that formation, and he saw individual planes. Everyone else was looking up with the naked eye in the dark with nothing to judge scale

against. So to me, I think the V was a high altitude formation of aircraft. Most likely those A10s, and the hovering lights for their flares in our later. But I mean this, I can completely understand why that feels too small for what people experienced. But a former Air Force pilot who governed the state, says it was bigger than anything

he'd ever seen and felt otherworldly, I'm not just going to roll my eyes at that.

I just think aw, darkness, and human imagination are powerful things, and they can make even

a flight of planes feel otherworldly.

“Do I think we've heard the absolute last word in the Phoenix lights?”

No, and honestly, I kind of love that we haven't. So let's play the game if the Phoenix lights happen tonight, how would it go down? First of all, for guests, seven years of anonymous silence. Within minutes, there'd be a thousand vertical videos on TikTok and X. Pastight Phoenix lights would be trending worldwide before the lights even finished crossing

the sky. Dr. Ketai wouldn't have to wait to come forward. She'd be one of 10,000 people posting the same footage from 10,000 backyards. And what's interesting is that the mystery might actually get solved faster. Anyone with a phone could open a flight tracking app like Flight Radar 24, and check in real

time whether there were aircraft on that flight path. If the A10s showed up on the tracker, then mystery over. And this is the twist, that same technology could pour gasoline on the fire. Because if the app showed nothing there, if thousands of people had video of a V, and the trackers came back empty, that absence would become the biggest piece of evidence

and UFO history. And then there's AI. Within a day, the internet would be flooded with fake enhanced footage. Glowing saucers dropped into the real videos, fake witness interviews, fake military documents, and nobody would be able to agree on which clips were real.

We'd have more information than the people of 1997 ever dreamed of. As somehow, understand the event, less. Oh, and Kurt Russell. In today's world, he lies streamed the entire approach into Sky Harbor. There is no 20-year mystery, no forgotten memory, no catching it on TV years later.

There's just a verified celebrity pilot with six lights over his cockpit

and four million people watching live.

“Which one do you think about it brings us right back to where we started?”

More cameras, more data, more noise. It's still that same, very human need to be believed. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of Hidden History, I'm Dr. Greeney, but join me next time as we explore another unbelievable story from the past. What do you think of the Phoenix lights?

Are you a skeptic or a true believer? And what do you think cross Arizona at that night? Let me know in the comments and I might talk about it in a future episode. And be sure to subscribe on YouTube or rate-reviewed fall if you're listening to an audio, so we can keep building this community together.

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