MYSTERY
The Phoenix Lights: The Mass Sighting Over Arizona
On the evening of 13 March 1997, thousands of people across the American state of Arizona looked up and saw something they could not explain. Reports poured in from a corridor hundreds of kilometers long, from near the Nevada border down through the city of Phoenix and on toward Tucson, and they described, in fact, two distinct phenomena. The first, earlier in the evening, was a huge V-shaped or triangular formation of lights that moved slowly and silently southward across the sky; many witnesses insisted it was not a group of separate lights at all but a single, enormous solid craft, so large it blotted out the stars as it passed overhead. The second, later that night, was a row of brilliant lights that appeared to hover over the Phoenix area and then winked out one by one. Together these became known as the Phoenix Lights, one of the largest mass UFO sightings in modern history. In the years since, the two events have followed very different paths. The later lights over Phoenix have a firm and well-supported explanation. The earlier V-formation does not, and remains genuinely debated to this day. And the story gained a strange twist when the state's governor, Fife Symington, who had at first responded to the sightings with a mocking joke, publicly reversed himself a decade later and admitted that he, too, had seen the craft that night — and believed it was something not of this world. This is the story of the Phoenix Lights, of what can be explained and what cannot, and of a governor's change of heart.
