The first event
Around 7:30 p.m. on March 13, 1997, the reports began. Henderson, Nevada, first. Then Paulden. Then Prescott. Then down through the Phoenix metropolitan area. A V-shaped set of lights, moving slowly southeast.
Witnesses across a roughly 300-mile track described five to seven lights in a boomerang or chevron arrangement. Many, including a pilot and an air traffic controller, insisted the lights were attached to something. A single dark, silent object. Enormous. Some estimated a mile across. They knew because it occluded the stars as it passed.
The second event
Around 10 p.m., a row of bright amber lights appeared over the southwest of Phoenix. It hung above the Estrella Mountains for several minutes. Then the lights winked out, one by one.
Multiple residents filmed it. That footage became the iconic image of the night.
Explanations
The Arizona Air National Guard later confirmed that A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft from the Maryland Air National Guard had dropped LUU-2 illumination flares over the Goldwater Range at about 10 p.m. Analysis of the videos showed the lights disappearing behind the Estrella range, consistent with descending flares.
The earlier V-formation has been attributed by skeptics to a formation of aircraft, an explanation supported by an amateur astronomer who viewed the lights through a telescope and identified them as planes. The identity of that flight has never been officially confirmed.
Aftermath
June 1997. Governor Symington held a press conference at which an aide appeared in an alien costume. A stunt, he later said, meant to calm public anxiety.
In 2007 he told the press something else. He had personally seen a large craft. The flare explanation did not cover it.
The event remains the most-witnessed UFO sighting in U.S. history, and a fixture of documentaries.
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