0
With the 13th anniversary at hand of what was arguably the most widely witnessed UFO event in U.S. history, coupled with this week’s airing of a documentary about the Arizona Lights incident on The National Geographic Channel, it seems time for me to revisit the evidence for what happened based on my own investigation. These are findings that were mostly shunted aside and overlooked in the rush to judgment that the event must be either extraterrestrial in origin, or a simple misidentification of aircraft.
Some months after the sightings occurred in 1997, Reader’s Digest magazine, at that time the most widely read publication in the world, financed my two-month fulltime investigation of the sighting in my role as a Roving Editor. Their support enabled me to travel around Arizona and interview in person, or by phone, more than 50 witnesses, including many who would later become fixtures in the media as commentators on the incident, such as Mike Fortson, former airline pilot Trig Johnston, and Tim Ley.
During the interview process, I was particularly interested in finding three categories of witnesses: airline pilots who were flying that night and flew close to the formation of lights, or even communicated with them; air traffic controllers on duty that night; and observers who used binoculars to get close-up views of the lights from the ground. I found numerous witnesses from all three categories.
When my resulting article was published in Reader’s Digest it appeared, as all articles in that magazine do, in a greatly abridged form. I have kept all of my notes from interviews done more than a dozen years ago and would like to share my findings with you.
Here is a chronology of the sightings that night using a few of the interview accounts that best represent the widely divergent points of view on what really happened. In Part Two, I will discuss the many ‘coincidences’ that, taken together, make this incident a possible psychological warfare experiment.
A Rohrschach Test In The Sky
A crystal clear night sky over Arizona revealed the panorama of the Milky Way, its multitude of stars visible as a shimmering smudge brushed from one horizon to the other. Against this backdrop on March 13, 1997, the Hale-Bopp comet appeared at the peak of its brilliance, an arc glowing low in the northwestern sky. People not normally curious or prone to sky-watching ventured outside by the thousands, peering up at this awe-inspiring celestial display. The stage was now set for one of the more unusual and widely witnessed UFO events in human history.
To James and Fawn Clemens of Kingman, Az. the fuzzy but bright amber light hanging in the northwest, just to the right of Hale-Bopp, seemed odd and out of place, as if a second comet had materialized. It was 8 p.m. and the couple, both 42 years old, stood in the yard between their house and the taxidermy shop they operate, training their binoculars on the light.
It seemed to be over Nevada’s Lake Mead and heading southeast. Instead of one light, magnification from their binoculars enabled them to discern five intense orange orbs flying in a v-shaped formation. In all their years of stargazing they had never seen anything so mystifying before.
They were not alone. As the formation of lights passed near Chino Valley and then over Prescott Valley, sighting reports began streaming into local law enforcement agencies, media outlets, the National UFO Reporting Center phone line in Seattle, Wash., and hotlines throughout Arizona maintained by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).
At 8:13 p.m. Dennis Monroe and his wife stopped their car along a residential street in Paulden, Az. when the brightness of the approaching lights attracted their attention. They got out and watched the five peach or light orange-colored orbs fly overhead, traveling south in a kite-shaped formation. Monroe, 47, a former police officer, estimated the entire formation covered a part of the sky about the size of his fist if he held it at arm’s length.
“They were the speed of helicopters and soundless. The lights were large and soft, not focused or concentrated. I thought I saw stars between the lights. We had them in sight for five minutes. Over the southern horizon they went out a few at a time, like they weren’t 360 degree lights. As a police officer I learned to control my emotions, but this got me pretty excited.”
Along Highway 89 about 90 miles north of Phoenix, Mr. and Mrs. Ross Nickle and their three children were driving north as the formation came into view. “They looked like five stars coming toward us,” Nickle related. “They changed colors from white to red. There was no sound. I’m guessing they were 1,000 feet off the ground.”
Not far away in Chino Valley, John Widener observed five white lights in a triangular pattern slowly pass to the north and east of Prescott airport, in the direction of Phoenix. Over Prescott Valley the lights were scrutinized through binoculars by at least two separate groups of comet-watchers. Ann Baker peered directly up at them passing silently above her and could see stars between the lights. “I did not see any solid mass. There were five bright, white lights in a v-shape formation. Then it actually changed formation. It was now in a half-circle with five red, bright lights.”
Michael Rainwater and three friends noticed that once they focused their binoculars on the v-formation, “what looked like white lights were actually two lights, red and green, forming one. They appeared to be about1,000 feet in the air.”
Once the formation of lights intersected Interstate 17 they followed the heavily trafficked roadway south, a procedure often used by pilots who fly unfamiliar territory at night and navigate using Interstate highways. By 8:28 p.m., when the only known video of the formation was taped, the lights had traveled 184 miles from Kingman to the northern suburbs of Phoenix and Scottsdale, which translates to a speed of about 400 miles per hour. A contract employee with the U.S. Department of Defense caught the formation on tape for 43 seconds from his backyard in north Scottsdale. Though poor in quality, the tape does clearly show five white lights in a v-formation, with one light gradually trailing behind the others.
Simultaneous with this video recording, three other clusters of witness reports helped to establish that this formation was composed of five or more independent aircraft. MUFON investigator Alan Morey, a 36-year-old machinist, sat on the patio of his Scottsdale home with Pan Am pilot Steve LaChance. As the formation passed overhead they watched through high-powered binoculars.
“At first the lights appeared pale orange in color, but through the binoculars we could see a little red light on the port side of each of the five larger orange lights,” Morey told me. “They were five independent objects because we could see stars between them. One light was behind the others in a delta wing configuration. But then the formation tightened. The lights covered an area twice the size of my fist if I extended my arm to the sky.”
A few miles away Mitch Stanley, a 20-year-old amateur astronomer, aimed his 10-inch telescope at the v-formation and discerned that each light was actually two lights on aircraft with squared wings. “They were planes,” he would tell the Arizona Republic. “There’s no way I could have mistaken that.”
Source
