The Full Story Of The Phoenix Lights UFO That Shook The Southwest 1997

The sun had just set on March 13, 1997, when hundreds of people across Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico witnessed a collection of UFOs puncture the night sky. The phenomenon has become known as the Phoenix lights, and its authenticity has been hotly debated ever since.

From 7:30 until approximately 10:30 p.m., dozens of concerned citizens flooded their local police department phone lines with urgent calls for clarity. They reported floating orbs and a V-shaped craft the size of several football fields hovering above the city of Phoenix. While the glowing orbs remained stationary, the V-shaped object hovered south.

But even though pilots in the Phoenix area notified air-traffic controllers of what they were seeing, none of them saw anything out of the ordinary on their radars. Then, just as suddenly as they appeared, the Phoenix lights went out.

Government officials later claimed these orbs were nothing more than flares deployed as part of a military training exercise. The V-shaped craft was explained away as a series of planes flying in formation.

Then-Arizona governor Fife Symington initially mocked the state-wide concerns, but later revealed that he, too, had seen the enormous objects — and felt they were not of this world.

The first person to report seeing the Phoenix lights did so at about 6:55 p.m. The man, whose identity remains unconfirmed, said that he saw a “V-shaped formation” in the skies near Henderson, Nevada.

Then at about 8:15 p.m., a former police officer in Paulden, Arizona, reported seeing “a cluster of orange lights.” He followed them through the sky with his binoculars until they disappeared. These were referred to by many as “fireballs.”

Two minutes later, other calls came in about a group of white and reddish orbs hovering above Prescott, Arizona. It was now clear that there were two distinct groups of UFOs in the sky: one a collection of individual orbs and the other a V-shaped craft.

According to the National UFO Reporting Center, the V-shaped formation contained anywhere from five to seven lights that slowly soared in unison from the northwest before turning almost south. As the formation moved, one of the lights toward the back allegedly moved up to the front before falling back again.

The V-shape was famously caught on tape, and it seemed to feature had three lights on each prong and a seventh at the tip. Conservative estimates gauged it to span the length of three football fields — while others said it was more than a mile long.

“We don’t have anything that big,” one witness said. “It was totally silent. I’ve never seen anything even close to the colors from the exhaust that propelled that thing. It was as big as downtown Prescott and completely blocked out the stars.”

Thirty-one-year-old Dana Valentine spotted the Phoenix lights from his backyard that night. He hurriedly called his father, an aeronautics engineer, outside to see it. Together, they watched what appeared to be a V-shaped craft hover at 500 feet and pass them.

“We could see the outline of a mass behind the lights, but you couldn’t actually see the mass,” said Valentine. “It was more like a gray distortion of the night sky, wavy. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I know it’s not a technology the public has heard of before.”

“It was astonishing, and a little frightening,” said 54-year-old Tim Ley, who got out of his car to marvel at the sight. “It was so big and so strange. You couldn’t actually see the object. All you could see was the outline, as though something was blotting out the stars.”