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Phoenix Lights

A old but “ goody “ is in March 13, 1997, the Phoenix Lights appeared.

The only pilot in the air on approach to land was actor Kurt Russell and his son Oliver.

Kurt is a long time pilot, and he called the UFO into the tower who informed him that was nothing on radar.

Kurt landed with no problem, and thousands of people witnessed this UFO.

I think the official explanation was Army flares, but after seeing all the video on TV, I don’t think anyone believed this excuse.

We are talking about thousands seeing this UFO !

Yet over time people forget and don’t remember.
 
charliebrown said:
A old but “ goody “ is in March 13, 1997, the Phoenix Lights appeared.

The only pilot in the air on approach to land was actor Kurt Russell and his son Oliver.

Kurt is a long time pilot, and he called the UFO into the tower who informed him that was nothing on radar.

Kurt landed with no problem, and thousands of people witnessed this UFO.

I think the official explanation was Army flares, but after seeing all the video on TV, I don’t think anyone believed this excuse.

We are talking about thousands seeing this UFO !

Yet over time people forget and don’t remember.
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Goldie too, apparently. More celebrities and UFOs.....
 
Well 24 years later ( March 13, 1997 ), nobody knows what the heck happened !
 
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feinman said:
Some will try to confuse them with flares or planes; they tried hard to obfuscate this one, with pointless flares after the event, etc.
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This has it exactly backwards. The main reason the Phoenix Lights became famous is that two witnesses (Rairdon and Krysten) independently filmed the later (22:00) event, and these movies analysed in detail by the UFO proponent Bruce Maccabee and explained quite comprehensively by him.
They were flares, without a doubt.

Here's a short extract from his analysis, which is available online;
These puzzles can be resolved by assuming (1) that the lights were falling downward and each was cut off quickly (1 sec or less) from K's view as they dropped behind (i.e., south of) the jagged ridgeline of the Estrella range, and (2) that the lights seen by R were also falling downward but were not cut off by the ridgeline but rather burned out over several seconds before they fell to an an altitude where they would be blocked by the mountains. (R was not looking over the Estrella range. His sighting line passed south of the “Montezuma's Head” at the south end of the Estrella range.)
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Over time the earlier event has taken on more importance since the later event has been so comprehensively explained. One witness managed to observe the lights through a telescope and could see that they were a formation of planes
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/1997-06-26/news/the-great-ufo-cover-up/

Linda asked what they were.
"Planes," Mitch said.
It was plain to see, he says. What looked like individual lights to the naked eye actually split into two under the resolving power of the telescope. The lights were located on the undersides of squarish wings, Mitch says. And the planes themselves seemed small, like light private planes.
Stanley watched them for about a minute, and then turned away. It was the last thing the amateur astronomer wanted to look at.
"They were just planes, I didn't want to look at them," Stanley says when he's asked why he didn't stare at them longer. He is certain about what he saw: "They were planes. There's no way I could have mistaken that."
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As time goes on, more people have claimed to have seen the earlier event, including the then Governor, Fyfe Symington. This character does not seem to be a very reliable witness- shortly after the lights, he held a press conference to mock the event, saying that "they found who was responsible", at which point a member of his staff appeared on stage dressed in as a Grey alien. It was not until ten years later in 2007 that he finally stated that he had seen the lights too.

Some of these so-called witnesses are mis-remembering and confabulating these events, others are deliberately lying. In short, the Phoenix Lights were an overblown non-event.
 
The earlier event was filmed as well, by Terry Proctor; an analysis of this movie shows that the earlier event could not have been a single large object, but it was a flight of individual planes- because the positions of the planes change over time with respect to each other.
Vshift.jpg

Once again, analysis of the actual evidence shows that the event was completely mundane.
 
That's possible. However multiple ground witnesses who experienced the event were adamant that it was not a flight of planes, though planes were flown over later for some reason. Symington was trying to play things down because so many folks were hysterical. Witnesses and Symington at beginning here:
Some folks seemed to get a clear view of it, including the mother and son.

From Wiki:
Lights of varying descriptions were seen by thousands of people between 7:30pm and 10:30pm MST, in a space of about 300 miles (480 km), from the Nevada line, through Phoenix, to the edge of Tucson. There were two distinct events involved in the incident: a triangular formation of lights seen to pass over the state, and a series of stationary lights seen in the Phoenix area. Allegedly the United States Air Force identified the second group of lights as flares dropped by A-10 Warthog aircraft that were on training exercises at the Barry Goldwater Range in southwest Arizona. Witnesses claim to have observed a huge carpenter's square-shaped UFO, containing five spherical lights or possibly light-emitting engines. Fife Symington,[3] the governor at the time, was one witness to this incident; he later called the object "otherworldly."[4
 
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I don't believe these large objects are single craft --but modular craft that appear to be a single large craft when flying together.
All of the videos are of the flares. It's odd that the planes were flown out to drop flares after what some reported to be an anomalous event might have happened. Why? I am open thte possibilityh that it might have been some kind of military test of a new capability --and even that they might have been planes flying in formation, but I think it is unlikely.
 
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There is no real difference between 'modular craft that appear to be a single large craft when flying together' and 'a flight of aircraft flying in formation'. It is a distinction without a difference. If you hear hoofbeats, don't think of zebras.
The Proctor film is alleged to have been taken at about 0815, so is apparently connected to the earlier event; I've just watched a short section of it online, which is all I can find - it is very poor quality, and this is the clearest frame I could isolate- but even from this frame you can see that this is not a bilaterally symmetrical formation by any means.

PROCTOR.png
 
That' true! There is no difference, and could support the conventional aircraft explanation. Some UFO sightings seem to be made of individual objects that are entrained in some kind of formation where they fly as a unit, then they can fly off in different directions and come back together and when together can block out stars in such a manner that they appear to be one large craft. Perhaps it is some kind of hyperdimensional technology that creates the appearance.. It would make sense to send off a bunch of objects that can fly as a unit and conserve energy etc. and also function independently.
 
Things like this pic below from the object scanning smelters, below,
This one happens to closely match one description of the Phoenix Lights:

"Lights were also reportedly seen in the areas of Prescott and Prescott Valley. At approximately 20:17 MST, callers began reporting the object was definitely solid, because it blocked out much of the starry sky as it passed over.[9]
--This doesn't mean it was completely solid as we understand it...

Devon Lorenz and his Aunt Jamie Lorenz were standing outside on his porch. in Prescott Valley when they noticed a cluster of lights to the west-northwest of their position. The lights formed a triangular pattern, but all of them appeared to be red, except the light at the nose of the object, which was distinctly white. The object, or objects, which had been observed for approximately 2 to 3 minutes with binoculars, then passed directly over the observers, were seen to "Bank to the right", and then disappeared in the night sky to the southeast of Prescott Valley. The altitude could not be determined; however, the object was fairly low and made no sound whatsoever.[10]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights


Notice the asymmetry; part of a "wing" isn't there. (Object scanning smelters):

Smelterpic1 (1).jpg


There are also a number of airship sightings from 19th century where they are described as great eagles covered with lights..

This is the same kind of thing (Lubbock Lights):

271cc6a020b5f23873669b1c4ffbf118.jpg
 
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Even though Fife Symington, also a retired jet fighter pilot, made fun of the Phoenix Lights at first, he later went on talk shows

claiming this was a off world event.

His first talk show was Larry King in 2007, in which he put his reputation behind that this was a craft not from earth.

He claims he saw the craft in the sky.

He commented that maybe Earth was a vacation spot, like the Garden of Eden, a must see in the solar system ?
 
Four reasons to doubt Symington's account;
1/ he consistently made fun of the Lights for ten years, then suddenly in 2007 he came out as a witness.
2/ he claims that he heard about the sighting on the TV, before he went out to look for the lights. There was no TV coverage of the 20:00 event on the TV.
3/ he claims there were film crews out filming the lights; this didn't happen until 22:00. So if he saw anything, he saw the 22:00 event, which has been demonstrated to be flares (by the UFO proponent Bruce Maccabee, no less).
4/ he was convicted of fraud but pardoned by President Clinton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fife_Symington#Second_term,_conviction,_and_resignation_(1995–1997)
 
New post on the Phoenix "Lights" from Kevin Randle:
http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/03/coast-to-coast-phoenix-lights.html

"A second group of witnesses, a mother and four daughters near the intersection of Indian School Road and 7th Avenue [in Phoenix], were shocked to witness an object, shaped somewhat like a sergeant’s stripes, approach from over Camelback Mountain to the north. They report that it stopped directly above them, where it hovered for an estimated 5 minutes. They described how it filled at least 30 – 40 degrees of sky, and how it exhibited a faint glow along its trailing edge. The witnesses felt they could see individual features on the ventral surface of the object, and they were certain that they were looking at a very large, solid object."

"Had this been the only sighting in that area that night, it would have been just another UFO report. A little over an hour later, at 8:15 p.m., a former police officer said that he and his family saw a cluster of lights in a “V” formation near Paulden, Arizona. He described them as red-orange balls of light. He said that there were four lights traveling together with a fifth bringing up the rear. He said that the lights were in sight for about two minutes and that they made no sound. He thought that each of the lights consisted of two parts. When he returned home, he watched them through binoculars until they vanished over the horizon."

Those sound a lot like the ones that showed up for me.
 
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feinman said:
-A little over an hour later-
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This is taken out of context, and may be misleading. In fact both sightings occurred at the same time. The apparently earlier sighting occurred in Las Vegas.

All of which can be explained by a flight of conventional aircraft. As well as Mitch Stanley, another witness (Rich Contry) also claims to have seen individual planes in the first event. Randle confirms that there were planes in the air firing flares throughout this period, so I have no doubt these sightings have been solved.
 
That is certainly shaving it with Occam's razor. I am on the fence about this one because many witness decryptions don't tally with the individual planes explantion (the quality of the lights, for example, or the mother and son who had a good look at "it". And I don't know why Fife would lie to everyone --he seems honest to me, although I know you have issues with his background. What purpose was the flare drop?
 
"One of the earliest of those reports came from Albuquerque on August 25, 1951. This report was made 90 minutes before the first of the Lubbock Lights sighting. The witnesses described a flying wing like aircraft, with a series of lights along the edge of the wing"
https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/
I found this sighting myself some years ago and then lost it!
The large "solid" craft are often seen to block out or distort the stars above them, but suggest perhaps that the body of the craft is not solid as we know it but perhaps some sort of gravitic train bending or distorting the starlight. This happened somewhat with my own sighting, as others who saw the the craft later always catalogued it as having a rectangular shape, i.e. they assumes the lights were connected to a rigid craft. I of course saw the end light not aligned with the rest as they flew in the check-mark formation, as they did when they flew by the ISS.
 
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Happy 25th birthday Phoenix Lights on March 13th.

All kinds of ideas have tried to describe what took place, but ufologists claim after much study, about 10% of the the population of Arizona in 1997 saw this UFO as it came out of Nevada through Arizona into the state of Sonora, Mexico.

This is the most important UFO sighting of all times and extremely well documented.
 
So how can flares travel this distance into Mexico?

The first to alert something was wrong was actor Kurt Russell with his son flying his plane near the Phoenix Lights telling his son they were going to be alright and asking the tower for an explanation.

Kurt said the lights were absolutely uniform in a V-shape.
 
There were two separate events on that night. The first one was caused by a flight of aircraft flying in formation, and they were mistaken for a single V-shaped vessel. Two separate witnesses identified the individual planes in this flight, as described upthread.

The second event was a couple of hours later, and involved flares in the distance; this event was filmed. Analysis of the films has confirmed that the second event was flares, and this is also described upthread. Many witnesses conflate these two events, and mix up the various characteristics of the two, but they were very different from each other.
 
I know that there are many documentaries about the Phoenix Lights, but what has never been discussed and the key to it all is Kurt Russell.

Kurt filed a formal report about the Phoenix Lights, but when he and his son first saw the lights in his plane on approach to the airport, Kurt told the tower what he saw, but the tower didn’t respond with an answer.

Why did not the airport respond ?

They would have known if other planes were near the airport ?

My opinion is something was weird.
 
The most likely reason Russell did not get an answer to his query is that the flight of planes was much further away than they looked. If Russell asked for information about traffic in his vicinity, the ATC would have failed to find any such traffic. The planes were probably more than twice as high, and twice as far away, than most people thought.

Here's Tim Printy's detailed analysis.
http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/azconc.htm
The main point is that an altitude range of 19,000-40,000 feet is very high and can explain a lot:
* Objects at high altitude would not be heard by ground based observers.
* Bright lights at high altitude would not illuminate Tim Ley's neighborhood.
* Objects at high altitude would be seen from long distances away. Observers, separated by as much as 50 miles, could view these objects at the same time.
* The lights would appear "star-like" for most observers who were not directly underneath the flight path..
* How the lights moving at 300 mph could appear to move at "blimp speed" to observers on the ground.
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