The Phoenix Lights
Thousands watched a mile-wide craft drift over a major city in silence.
On 13 March 1997, an estimated thousands of people — including the sitting Governor of Arizona — watched a vast V-shaped formation of lights pass silently over Phoenix. It remains the most-witnessed UFO event in modern history.
It was not a blurry photo or a single witness. On the evening of 13 March 1997, thousands of Arizonans across a 300-mile corridor reported the same thing: an enormous, silent, V-shaped craft — or formation — passing slowly overhead, its lights blotting out the stars behind it.
The military explanation was flares dropped during a training exercise. That accounts for a later set of stationary lights — but witnesses, including pilots and a former governor, insist the earlier object was a single solid structure that occluded the stars as it moved, something flares cannot do.
Years later, Governor Fife Symington — who had publicly mocked the sightings at the time, even staging a press conference with an aide in an alien costume — admitted he had personally witnessed the craft and believed it was 'not of this world.' He had ridiculed it, he said, to keep the public calm.
- ■Thousands of independent civilian reports across 300 miles
- ■Gov. Fife Symington's later admission as an eyewitness
- ■Video showing lights occulting background stars
Partly flares, mostly unexplained. The most-witnessed UFO event on record — and a governor who laughed in public and believed in private.