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Are "The Phoenix Lights" back?

M

meowfur

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Mystery lights reported over Phoenix
April 22nd, 2008 @ 8:46am
by Kevin Tripp/KTAR

People are looking for an explanation for mysterious red lights that appeared in the north Phoenix sky Monday night, reminiscent of a similar event 11 years ago.

Dozens of listeners called News/Talk 92-3 KTAR just after 8 p.m. reporting they were watching the four mystery lights.

``From my position, it looked like they were just hanging, not moving at all," said one man, who called 92-3's ``Gaydos After Dark." He said he ``absolutely" saw something.

A woman caller said, ``It looked like four red tower lights, but it was pretty high up in the air. I called my husband and he said, `Get home, what's wrong with you?'"

A man in north Phoenix told CBS-5: ``They were about 3,000 feet high, approximately. They looked as though they were kind of hovering or floating from west to east, very slowly. They were up there for 15 or 20 minutes."

Those who saw them said the lights were visible about 13 minutes before moving off to the east.

Deer Valley Airport, which was the closest air field to the lights, had no explanation for them. Neither did Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport or Luke Air Force Base, which said it had no jets flying at the time.

Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said, ``A lot of people were reporting seeing some strange lights in the sky around Phoenix last night. Air traffic controllers at the control tower at Sky Harbor saw them. But, we have no idea what they were."

Gregor added, tongue-in-cheek, ``It could be aliens coming down to save us from ourselves, you never know. The only thing I do know is if they were coming down, they weren't talking to air traffic controllers."

On March 13, 1997, thousands of people reported seeing a v-shaped formation of lights over north Phoenix. They lasted about three hours. Some described them as forming a carpenter's square.

Among those who saw the lights in 1997 was former Gov. Fife Symington, who initially played down the episode. However, he said last year that he believes the lights came from ``crafts of unknown origin" and, ``It remains a great mystery."

http://www.ktar.com/?nid=6&sid=814826
 
Mystery Solved?

Someone has 'confessed':
UPDATE: Wednesday morning

PHOENIX -- Phoenix residents and the media still are abuzz over the mysterious four red lights that appeared in Monday night's sky in north Phoenix.
A man who lives on the north side of the city, however, claims he's responsible.

The man, who did not want to be identified, told 3TV that he used fishing line to attach road flares to helium-filled balloons, then lit the fares and launched them a minute apart from his back yard.

A Phoenix Police Department helicopter pilot who witnessed the lights said they appeared to be flares, possibly hanging from one or more helium balloons.

Witnesses said the lights initially appeared to be in a straight line, then formed a square and then a triangle before disappearing.

The man interviewed, who asked not to be identified, said he believed turbulence created by a passing jet caused the balloons to move around.
Click to expand...
http://www.azfamily.com/news/homepageto ... be60f.html

Who knows? Perhaps he's just a serial confessor or something...
 
Re: Mystery Solved?

The man, who did not want to be identified, told 3TV that he used fishing line to attach road flares to helium-filled balloons, then lit the fares and launched them a minute apart from his back yard.
Click to expand...

Greetings,

What a fkn idiot!

I have in the past flown a few lighted balloons. I wanted to see if any UFO reports were called in. One out of five flights.
I used a small battery and pen-light bulbs.

It takes a real special person to light something on fire and send it aloft at the mercy of the winds.
It is not like the south-west USA is a tinder-box.
I bet the Phoenix police know his name by now.

PEACE!
=^..^=217
 
I had to use Google to find out what a road flare is. AFAIK, pyrotechnic road flares have never been used in the UK (although I have sold such flares for marine distress purposes).
 
Greetings,

When I was a boy scout we used to each carry a flare, The thought was that you could start a fire on the ocean floor with one.

I like a joke/hoax as much as the next person, but launching a flare is insane.

The Phoenix lights were proved to be parachute flares from the air guard.

Road flares work underwater Rynner, very handy devices.

PEACE!
=^..^=217

P.S. Glad to see Terry Thomas back!
 
Just watching a programme - Close Encounters Investigated on Nat Geographic - that briefly touched on the Phoenix UFOs. They showed the night time footage of the lights apparently disappearing like dimming lights but failed to show the same view in daylight that shows the mountain range that the lights likely disappeared behind.

I've seen the programme that as good as proves that they were just lights disappearing behind the mountains - most likely the military flares. However, something the woman on it mentioned suddenly made me take note. She said that she had been out staring at the sky looking for a glimpse of Hale-Bopp.

I had no idea before that this sighting was at this point, but I experienced something very similar at that time and it suddenly struck me that my experience was very similar.

Sure I have posted this account before in the past, would be interesting to see if I could find it to see how my rememberance has changed. Basically me and my Mum were in our back yard looking at what we thought was Hale-Bopp. It was off in the distance, was very bright like a star and moving across the sky in quite an odd way. It would sort of dim and disappear, like someone turning down a light, then reappear a certain distance across the sky like a light being turned up again. Repeated several times moving across the sky.

Looked ood, but I hadn't seen a comet before so just assumed that was the norm. At that point my Dad came in and asked if we had seen the comet, we said yes but he pointed out that we were looking in the wrong place, we were in the back yard, the comet was visible out the front. We went round and sure enough a traditional comet with trail was visible high in the sky.

In the back yard we went back and watched the strange light we had been watching, now this is where my memory gets vague. The light we had been watching i remember being far off and on the horizon, but the last I remember is the light appearing higher in the sky and closer to where we were. I remember there being three in a triangle shape and again the dimmed light becoming brighter effect happened with the three points of the triangle slowly fading one by one. And then they were gone - never seen anything like it again since.

This was the late summer of 1997, as I remember it being about to head off to Uni. I live in the south east of England - obviously nowhere near Phoenix. I don't own a video recorder and this is before the dawn of camera-phones etc... No idea what on earth it was that I saw, highly doubt it was a UFO but I cannot fathom what it actually could have been. It was around 7-8pm in autumn so was not pitch black, more dusk, plus there are no mountain ranges nearby so the same explanation for the dimming disappearance of the light as Phoenix isn't plausible.

I can actually pin an exact date on it as I remember I had been out playing football with my mates but had come home to watch Newcastle-Barcelona which was on Sept, 17 1997 - just over six months after the Phoenix lights. I don't remember any reports of other people having seen the lights I saw, which I always thought odd given that I'm only 30 miles from London and surely others must have seen them.

EDIT:
Found my original posting from 6 years ago, fairly similar description of the same event. Don't know what that says about misremembering of such events etc...
http://www2.forteantimes.com/forum/view ... ight=comet
 
One strange thing about this story strikes me as slightly unlikely; you say it was dusk, but you also say that the (real) comet was visible at the front of the house, "moving slowly across the sky".

If I recall correctly (not guaranteed after all this time) Comet Hale-Bopp wasn't visible until the sky was almost completely dark. It was an impressive object, but the brightness of the comet wasn’t really distinct enough to be seen in twilight. Also the movement of the comet was more-or-less imperceptible (about as imperceptible as the movement of the Moon, or of any star).

Regarding the other, 'faux' comet; I have no theories. Very odd.
 
eburacum said:
One strange thing about this story strikes me as slightly unlikely; you say it was dusk, but you also say that the (real) comet was visible at the front of the house, "moving slowly across the sky".

If I recall correctly (not guaranteed after all this time) Comet Hale-Bopp wasn't visible until the sky was almost completely dark. It was an impressive object, but the brightness of the comet wasn’t really distinct enough to be seen in twilight. Also the movement of the comet was more-or-less imperceptible (about as imperceptible as the movement of the Moon, or of any star).

Regarding the other, 'faux' comet; I have no theories. Very odd.
Click to expand...

Hale-Bopp was splendid. It was certainly bright enough to see at dusk. Here is a picture of it from February, 1997, in morning twilight before it was at its brightest a month or so later:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap970227.html

The stated timeframe doesn't work though. Hale-Bobb was not naked-eye visible in "late summer", (unless it was viewed from the southern hemisphere). It would have been around the same brightness as the asteroid Pallas(~magnitude 6) by September, and definitely not visible without a fairly large aperture telescope.

You are correct about the issue of movement, however. Normally, cometary movement is as imperceptible as that of the moon, sun, and planets (the recent exception being Comet Lulin, the movement of which was perceptible in binoculars) It would drift slowly down to the western horizon, and if you noted the comet's position and checked it again in 20 minutes or so, that movement would be notable.

So I don't know what was seen for either object!
 
Hmm, maybe I never saw the comet after all. So that would be two unexplained sightings then!

It was definitely September and would have been around 7-45/8.30pm that I saw the strange lights out back as I remember that the first half of Newcastle-Barcelona was on TV - and as much as I wanted to watch the weird lights I was also keen to go in and watch the football.

Note to aliens - don't make contact while football is on.
 
nyarlathotepsub2 said:
Hale-Bopp was splendid. It was certainly bright enough to see at dusk. Here is a picture of it from February, 1997, in morning twilight before it was at its brightest a month or so later:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap970227.html
Click to expand...
That is interesting; thanks! I did not see the comet in twilight, near the sun, in the morning or the evening; I forget why, probably bad weather or light pollution. But a few weeks later it was quite bright in the evening sky.


The sightings made by McAvennie may have been unusual high-flying aircraft with condensation trails; human or alien, I can't be sure.
 
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