(Part 1) The Phoenix Lights - Laying To Rest The Myth

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: SpartanStoic
An eyewitness here...

They were flares.

However many people incorrectly focus on that and not the giant black triangles many of us saw in the desert north of Phoenix.

I remember it distinctly to this day.

There are two opening posts, the first one talks about the flares.

If you read the second post you can find out what the triangles were. This guy got a look through his telescope so he had a much better view than other witnesses.

I will post the same thing as i posted in the other thread.

This just does not make any logical sense at all. The witnesses said it was a huge craft travelling slow and low. These jets would have been fast. If they were high up, the formation would have been small. If they were low, the noise would be loud and they would fly by quickly.

Goes completely against what the witnesses saw. I do not believe the witnesses are talking about the same thing this guy saw. Just does not make sense.

a reply to: Jay-morris
Of course some witnesses reported the V-shaped object low and slow, barely overhead, and others reported it much higher, so there was quite a bit of variability in the witness sightings, but this is not unusual and is pretty normal.

www.phoenixnewtimes.com...

The witnesses included New Times writers. David Holthouse and Michael Kiefer both saw the pattern of five lights move slowly overhead. Holthouse says he perceived that something connected the lights in a boomerang shape; Kiefer disagrees, saying they didn't seem connected. Like other witnesses, both reported that the vee made no sound, and each saw slightly different colors in the lights. Both watched as the lights gradually made their way south and faded from view.

The many eyewitnesses have elaborated on this basic model: Some saw that the lights were not connected, others swear they saw a giant triangular craft joining them, some felt it was at high altitude, others claim it was barely over their heads and moving very slowly. All seem to be describing the same lights at the same time: About 8:15 the lights passed over the Prescott area, about 15 minutes later the vee moved over Phoenix, and at 8:45 it passed south of Tucson.

That's about 200 miles in 30 minutes, which indicates that the lights were traveling about 400 miles per hour.

So when "some felt it was at high altitude, others claim it was barely over their heads and moving very slowly. All seem to be describing the same lights at the same time" what we have is a case of variability in witness reports.

No witnesses saw both a low V-shaped object and a high V-shaped object yet both were reported in the same places at the same time, so the only way to make sense out of this variation is to conclude that some perceptions were off. Fortunately we have a video to calibrate which observers descriptions most closely match the video V-formation, and which observer descriptions don't. In addition to this, we also know that of the people who saw the V-shape though magnification (telescope or binoculars), every one saw planes, and none saw a giant V or triangle craft, rather everyone who saw the large craft was not using any magnification. We can also plot the V-formation sightings on a map and see they covered approximately 200 miles in approximately 30 minutes so we have a speed estimate of the V-formation from that information, which is more quantitative than an unspecific characterization of "slow".

What doesn't make any sense is to expect that every witness who sees an event is going to report exactly the same thing...that would be so highly unusual that it rarely ever happens. Alan Hendry didn't find it unusual that witnesses couldn't identify planes at night but he admitted some might find that shocking, but he documented one such case where three planes were seen by one witness as a large object and other witnesses saw the event differently, including seeing the planes "hover":

Here are some excerpts from Allan Hendry's 1979 book "The UFO Handbook" pages 38-39:

"One of the leading causes of surprise is the inability of the witness to hear any noise from the aircraft"

"An aircraft explanation was ruled out by the witness simply because no noise was heard" but that sighting was confirmed to be a plane. Planes aren't completely silent, but you can't always hear them and I'm endlessly amazed that so many people don't seem to realize this.

"Does it seem shocking that so many people could be surprised by the sight of conventional aircraft flying at night? Here is an example of a case I investigated: The Air National Guard in Grand Rapids Michigan decided to fly three Cessna skymasters in formation around the suburbs. The planes, outfitted with bright white lights in the front and red and green lights in the back, flew at 2500 feet altitude at 160 mph. I got three "UFO" calls based on these planes, which represented a mere fraction of the ones received by the Grand Rapids airport...

Ten miles away and 15 minutes later, other witnesses caught sight of the planes and provided these descriptions:
***One large round object with lights
***Three lights that whipped across the road almost instantly--"much too fast for aircraft".
***Three white lights followed by red lights that moved all over very quickly, converged, and hovered over a woods.

What does it mean when independent witnesses can be equally excited over these Cessna planes and offer inconsistent accounts of their appearance and behavior?"

It means we shouldn't be surprised if people can't always identify planes and night and may offer inconsistent accounts of them in other cases too, such as the V-formation in Phoenix.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

It means we shouldn't be surprised if people can't always identify planes and night and may offer inconsistent accounts of them in other cases too, such as the V-formation in Phoenix.

There was an initial report of a small private plane that was on approach to Phoenix airport and reported a very bright unusual craft strangely close the airport. They radioed it in but radar had no hits.

Recently it came out that that was Kurt Russell and his son. He tells an interesting story.

If nothing else it offers corroboration that there was a strange craft flying near the airport that didn't show up on radar. Also the brightness was too much for a conventional plane. So that adds something to the idea that something weird was going on.

originally posted by: joelr

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

It means we shouldn't be surprised if people can't always identify planes and night and may offer inconsistent accounts of them in other cases too, such as the V-formation in Phoenix.

There was an initial report of a small private plane that was on approach to Phoenix airport and reported a very bright unusual craft strangely close the airport. They radioed it in but radar had no hits.

Recently it came out that that was Kurt Russell and his son. He tells an interesting story.

If nothing else it offers corroboration that there was a strange craft flying near the airport that didn't show up on radar.

I don't know if your misrepresentation is intentional, but unintentional or not I find it annoying. Russell didn't mention "craft" as in singular, he mentioned "lights" as in plural, and we have a video of the lights showing they moved independently verifying they were not part of a giant craft.

1:08 "I saw six lights over the airport"
1:35 "I'm going to declare it's unidentified, it's flying, and it's six objects"

Your substitution of the singular word "craft" for his description of "six lights" and "six objects" shows a complete disregard for factual accuracy and had you instead referred to what Russell actually said you would find it's more consistent with the video tape showing multiple objects, and not one large craft.

Military planes have no requirement to fly with their transponders on at certain altitudes, so why would they show up on radar if there's no transponder active?

The V- formation of lights

In the "Great UFO Coverup", Tony Ortega has a few key points to add on this matter.

"Air traffic controller Bill Grava was on duty on March 13 at Sky Harbor International Airport. He, too, saw the lights, but not until they were on the southern horizon, slowly disappearing behind South Mountain. The lights were so bright that he thought they might have been flares.

He confirms that the object or objects did not register on radar as they passed overhead, a fact seconded by Captain Stacey Cotton of Luke Air Force Base. But both admitted that that doesn't rule out the possibility of a group of airplanes. Cotton says that the radar used by air traffic controllers reads signals emitted by transponders in the airplanes themselves.

Normally, in a formation of seven planes, only the lead plane would turn on its transponder so air traffic controllers could track it. If the lead plane's transponder was turned off, however, the seven planes could have passed by without detection.

Grava says that depending on the planes' altitude, that may have been perfectly legal."

If the aircraft were above the 18,000-foot ceiling, which defines the controlled airspace for the airport, then the Air Traffic Controllers would not be interested in tracking them. Instead it would have been the enroute flight controllers job to track these aircraft. The enroute controller is at a completely different location than the airport! ...

"Whether the 8:30 vee formation did register on the FAA's radar monitored in Albuquerque will apparently never be known. Despite the fervent activities of UFO investigators in the days following the sightings, no one bothered to make a formal request with the Federal Aviation Administration's regional office for radar tapes of the Phoenix area for March 13. If anyone had made such a request by March 28, there would be a permanent record for the public to examine, says the FAA's Gary Perrin."

Also the brightness was too much for a conventional plane. So that adds something to the idea that something weird was going on.

How did you come up with that claim? I didn't hear Russell say that. We have the video tape of the Vee formation but there doesn't seem to be any exceptional amount of bloom in the video as might be expected with particularly bright lights. See the following clip, showing what doesn't appear to be exceptional brightness to me.

At Last... At Last !


it took 22 years for a visual proof-of-fact to be recorded...
but here's the link to a 'Daily' article and video of a UFO (daytime sighting) decoupling into 6 or so separate units...

exactly what I proposed long ago, in association with the 'Drone' sighting I had in Phoenix... not more than 50' above my head some 3 months before the Phoenix Lights event in March 1997



here's the immediate notes and linked article I made this morning when I seen the authentic UFO "decoupling-phase" unfold while being recorded by a passenger aboard a commercial passenger plane...

its 2019 now, I am sure the black-ops/skunk works had drone, anti-grav, autonomous crafts with onboard 'Artifical Intelligence' piloting capabilities at that unforgetable event date-in-Phoenix

www.dailymail.co.uk...


this article & video is the concept i suggested happened with the phoenix lights incident...

a group of 12 smaller UFOs linking up in a flying wing formation then separating so the larger craft seems to have Disappeared into thin air...

the phoenix lights event was just one exercise in a 12 to 16 hour programmed demonstration of 'autonomous drone UFOs' linking and reconfiguring in a continual all day experiment of up to 12 drone crafts that can be made into several different airborne 'platforms' and be sighted by individuals but still be invisible to radar or other detection as operating stealth platforms that seem to morph into triangles/wings/orbs/cigars/saucers to confuse the witness public & enemy intel.

the phoenix lights crafts were begun in early 7-8AM around North of Vegas Nevada and projected southward to Tuscon AZ before returning to Phoenix for a grand finale' in public deception exercises... a 12+ hour experimental exercise...
of interest...

some 90+ days earlier on ~Dec 3 1996 or thereabouts.
i witnessed a 12' drone craft with triangle array of round underbelly dome-lights, navigate the Camelback Avenue traffic lanes @ 11:00PM going E to W then return 25 minutes later from W to E at the same height and speed...

needless to say I decided against shining a spotlight on the Drone UFO as the black-ops/government would trace the spotlight to my place at 7th Avenue & Camelback & silence me as a witness to the capability of 'Autonomous Drones' that pilot themselves and have the ability to evade/elude detection or destruction when on a preprogrammed mission or flight pattern

~~~~~~~~

glad I have some sort of back-up evidence that my ideas were valid....

no wonder the 'boomerang/triangle craft was translucent as a few witnesses said about the 8-9 PM sightings in the Chandler area... the frameworks was only like scaffolding instead of a fuselage structure....


close to 100% sure the sighting is of dark ops technology of a secret arm of the secret space forces which now Trump wants to reveal

a reply to: St Udio
Seriously?

www.dailymail.co.uk...

Most likely explanation is sunlight reflected off the aircraft's wing and window

They sure look like reflections to me.

The people of Phoenix should demand that the military drop flares exactly like they say they did on that night.

Then everyone could film them and see if the military was lying or not.

But even If they were flares, they were dropped to help cover-up the fact that an alien craft flew over the state earlier that night.

originally posted by: spiritualarchitect
The people of Phoenix should demand that the military drop flares exactly like they say they did on that night.

Then everyone could film them and see if the military was lying or not.

But even If they were flares, they were dropped to help cover-up the fact that an alien craft flew over the state earlier that night.

Those were definitely flares (or a super ginormous, 40ish mile long UFO), as the lights matched up perfectly as they disappeared behind the mountainous skyline. So 100% flares. Which strengthens the case actually, instead of weakening it.

As far as it being a flight of planes, one has to ask, does this NEVER happen? Are flights of planes, like these, simply never flown in the U.S.? Because if so, we'd have these mass UFO sightings quite more regularly. They just flew at a particular angle - distance - and were a certain type of plane, that hundreds mistook them for a giant UFO.. for hours? Hmm..

originally posted by: Jay-morris
... This just does not make any logical sense at all. The witnesses said it was a huge craft travelling slow and low. These jets would have been fast. If they were high up, the formation would have been small. If they were low, the noise would be loud and they would fly by quickly. Goes completely against what the witnesses saw. I do not believe the witnesses are talking about the same thing this guy saw. Just does not make sense.

It is indeed initially 'inconceivable' that people could see a formation of bright lights in a dark sky and misinterpret them as lights mounted on a large structure. As inconcievable as in 'Princess Bride'.

Quite by occasional once-in-a-lifetime accidents, other witnesses around the world were indeed watching formations of bright lights in the night sky -- but in these times they were burning fragments of reentering spacecraft traversing the sky in near-horizontal paths . We know that identification because the path of the falling satellite could be calculated with precision in timing and direction.

And many of those witnesses perceived and reported an extraordinary over-interpretation of the spectacle. They saw, and described and drew in detail, large structures with mounted lights and flames, structures with sharp edges that blocked out starlight 'behind' them. People of all ages, professions, cultures, educationl backgrounds, these descriptions bore uncanny similarity to each other, and to OTHER 'classic' reports.

Here are some examples. The implication to other reports of similar large slow-moving light-bearing 'motherships, with grouped lights from other causes such as meteors and aircraft, is profound.

It is NOT 'inconceivable' that such a misperceptions COULD happen, because there are dozens of documented examples where it HAS already happened.

www.jamesoberg.com...

originally posted by: fleabit
Those were definitely flares (or a super ginormous, 40ish mile long UFO), as the lights matched up perfectly as they disappeared behind the mountainous skyline. So 100% flares. Which strengthens the case actually, instead of weakening it.

As far as it being a flight of planes, one has to ask, does this NEVER happen? Are flights of planes, like these, simply never flown in the U.S.? Because if so, we'd have these mass UFO sightings quite more regularly. They just flew at a particular angle - distance - and were a certain type of plane, that hundreds mistook them for a giant UFO.. for hours? Hmm..

At least you know flares when you see them, but your question about what was unusual seems to ignore the facts of the case. This wasn't a usual night was it? Or did you miss the part of this case about what was unusual that night, aside from the Vee formation of planes and the flare dropping exercise neither of which were that unusual?

a reply to: JimOberg
Yes, the Kiev sighting is noteworthy for its relevance, as is the Yukon "UFO" sighting where some witnesses also claim it looked like a large object which blocked out the stars (when it didn't really block any stars), and the same types of errors in estimating distance to the object and its size occurred, sometimes off by more than a factor of 100 from the actual distance and or actual size.

Or did you miss the part of this case about what was unusual that night, aside from the Vee formation of planes and the flare dropping exercise neither of which were that unusual?

So a flight of planes is not unusual at all. Not common perhaps, but not unusual. Certainly not rare. And happens well often enough that if it was that easily to mistake them for a V shaped craft, this event would have been repeated.. repeatedly. Has there been any other record of a UFO sighting lasting hours that was proven to be just a flight of planes?

Dropping flares in a V formation near the edge of a military installation, in sight of the city for the first and only time IS very unusual. Unique in fact. Why drop them there? Why on that particular night? Why in a V shape? While I think coincidences can occur, I don't think that was the case at all. There had been hundreds of calls in about a V shaped craft, including to the airbase, prior to the V flares. The reports were from the north, moving south, towards Phoenix. But the military just happened to have a V shaped flare dropping exercise at the most visible point from their base to the city of Phoenix during this event? Naw.. I'm thinking not.

That "exercise" certainly had the desired effect though; people are still confused about the flares in conjunction with the sightings to this day.

originally posted by: fleabit

Or did you miss the part of this case about what was unusual that night, aside from the Vee formation of planes and the flare dropping exercise neither of which were that unusual?

So a flight of planes is not unusual at all. Not common perhaps, but not unusual. Certainly not rare. And happens well often enough that if it was that easily to mistake them for a V shaped craft, this event would have been repeated.. repeatedly. Has there been any other record of a UFO sighting lasting hours that was proven to be just a flight of planes?....

The overhead passage of the 'mother ship' didn't last 'hours', where did you get that idea? It lasted about as long as an overflight of aircraft would have.

"this event would have been repeated.. repeatedly. Has there been any other record ..." -- The candidate effect HAS been reported, repetedly, all over the world.

France, Nov 1990,
satobs.org...

Eastern US, March 1968
satobs.org...

Bahamas, Jan 1985
satobs.org...


Baltic, Feb 1976
satobs.org...

Zimbabwe, 1994
satobs.org...

Chile-Argentina Apr 2013
www.slate.com...


Yukon, Dec 1996
badufos.blogspot.com...

landing lights
www.metabunk.org...

The overhead passage of the 'mother ship' didn't last 'hours', where did you get that idea? It lasted about as long as an overflight of aircraft would have.

I'm talking about the entirety of the sighting, from start (in Henderson NV) to finish (south of Phoenix). Which was hours. And seen by thousands of witnesses.

I appreciate the links, but literally none of them are regarding a sighting involving a flight of planes. They are all either debris or meteors going through our atmosphere. Which of course, would be seen by a larger number of witnesses, and is quite different from the Phoenix lights. Unless you are suggesting that this sighting was something entering our atmosphere?

Has there been a flight of 5 planes traveling for hours, that thousands have mistaken for a V shaped UFO? I don't think so. And the reason is because it's actually not -that- difficult to tell, usually within seconds, that an object in the sky is a plane. Instead, we have witnesses that include a police officer who saw the lights, drove home, and then continued to watch them through binoculars until they disappeared. What sorts of huge orange glowy lights were on those planes anyway, to be seen from all angles? Weird. And no blinking lights either. Seriously odd planes!

originally posted by: fleabit...
I appreciate the links, but literally none of them are regarding a sighting involving a flight of planes. They are all either debris or meteors going through our atmosphere. Which of course, would be seen by a larger number of witnesses, and is quite different from the Phoenix lights. Unless you are suggesting that this sighting was something entering our atmosphere?

Sorry it wasn't clear. What was the slide in the Kiev report that gave you the impression I suggested the Phoenix lights part 1 was something entering the atmosphere? I may need to clarify it.

The commonality I was suggesting was the nature of the original visual stimulus, which was bright lights moving in apparent formation across the dark sky. The altitude of those lights would indeed influence the range from which people would be able to see them, but not what they looked like to the people that DID see them, since they would have no way of judging the actual range to the causative phenomenon.

You didn't address the central thrust of the argument. People were looking at bright lights moving across the night sky, caused by a number of separate flaming objects moving in parallel. What many of them SAW was a unified large object with lights mounted ON it. That perception was incorrect in those cases. In those cases that I cited, do you find such a conclusion plausible?

originally posted by: fleabit

The overhead passage of the 'mother ship' didn't last 'hours', where did you get that idea? It lasted about as long as an overflight of aircraft would have.

I'm talking about the entirety of the sighting, from start (in Henderson NV) to finish (south of Phoenix). Which was hours. And seen by thousands of witnesses.

And not one of those thousands of witnesses had a camera, right? If you think the "thousands" makes the case more believable, it actually has the opposite effect since many of them were at home and it's not possible for me to believe none of them had a camera, which they had plenty of time to get for an event lasting, as you put it, "hours". One person did have a camera, and that video clearly shows it's not one solid object but multiple objects that can move relative to each other (such as planes can do).

Has there been a flight of 5 planes traveling for hours, that thousands have mistaken for a V shaped UFO? I don't think so. And the reason is because it's actually not -that- difficult to tell, usually within seconds, that an object in the sky is a plane.

I could write about 20 pages on all the ways you are misinformed but I don't have that much space or time. Do you think these are UFOs? Lots of people did.

UFO Fleet Over Chile December 16, 2009


So you're wrong about " it's actually not -that- difficult to tell, usually within seconds, that an object in the sky is a plane". Maybe sometimes it's easy to tell, but in the right conditions it's not so obvious. From what I recall in the Phoenix lights case the airplanes were heard by some and not by others, and the people that didn't hear them in the most densely populated areas may simply have not heard them over the background sound of traffic in the area, and there can be other reasons why the engine noise is easier to hear in some cases than others, like which way the wind is blowing, and so on. I see plenty of planes that I can hear and plenty more that I can't if conditions are right so it cracks me up when people refer to the lack of audible noise as some kind of evidence it wasn't a plane.

It seems like there's some background noise in the UFO fleet over Chile video, so I'm not sure I can hear any engine noise from those planes on the video, maybe that's part of the reason why people think they are UFOs. Many UFO enthusiasts have huge misunderstandings about always expecting to hear noise when they see a plane. In that video there's a a whole fleet of them so there should be lots of engine noise from lots of planes, but can you hear any plane engine noises? I hear many other noises but not that.

Instead, we have witnesses that include a police officer who saw the lights, drove home, and then continued to watch them through binoculars until they disappeared. What sorts of huge orange glowy lights were on those planes anyway, to be seen from all angles? Weird. And no blinking lights either. Seriously odd planes!

We also have an unidentified professor discussing with Neil Armstrong how he was "warned off" the moon:

What Did NASA Really Discover on the Moon During the Apollo Missions?

Professor: What really happened out there with Apollo 11?

Armstrong: It was incredible … of course, we had always known there was a possibility … the fact is, we were warned off. There was never any questions then of a space station or a moon city.

Professor: How do you mean “warned off”?

Are you really that credulous that you would take anything at face value from an unidentified source that can't be verified or otherwise vetted? I don't have any reason to believe either the unidentified source you cited nor the unidentified source who said Armstrong was "warned off" the moon but you can believe any nonsense you want.

From my research on verifiable sources, the people who actually did use binoculars or a telescope to view the planes could tell they were planes, and all the people who thought it was a giant object did not use magnification. So I suspect the "unidentified policeman" is a made up story to try to bolster the case for it not being planes because without that "unidentified policeman" every other person who saw the magnified objects saw planes, like this this witness which can be easily verified (including a photo of him with the telescope he used) and he saw them so well that he could tell that each light was two lights, not one light as people using only their eyes thought:

originally posted by: _BoneZ_
What is little-known are the witnesses that saw the "vee" formation, but saw that it was planes and not a solid object. One such witness is Mitch Stanley. A 21-year-old amateur astronomer who spends several nights a week in his backyard looking at the sky with his 10-inch Dobsonian, F 5.5 TELEVUE 32mm Plossl, which produces 43X magnification.

Here's Mitch with his telescope:

And Mitch's words:

"It was plain to see. What looked like individual lights to the naked eye actually split into two under the resolving power of the telescope. The lights were located on the undersides of squarish wings."

"They were planes. There's no way I could have mistaken that."

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

".. We also have an unidentified professor discussing with Niel Armstrong how he was "warned off" the moon:

Are you really that credulous that you would take anything at face value from an unidentified source that can't be verified or otherwise vetted? I don't have any reason to believe either the unidentified source you cited nor the unidentified source who said Armstrong was "warned off" the moon but you can believe any nonsense you want.]"

I overlooked the reference to that triply-unsourced Neil Armstrong fairy tale, and then I took awhile to stop laughing. Some unnamed guy heard an unnamed professor's college roommate's first girlfriend tell him that Armstrong at some date in some undisclosed location under some undescribed situation told him 'X'.....

The original version of that story can be found in a grocery store weekly tabloid newspaper a few months after the mission, based on an imaginative elaboration of a misunderstood comment during the moonwalk. Here's the full pathetically amazing story of how the story was fabricated as fodder for eager-believer target audiences, with full citations of ALL evidence. See www.jamesoberg.com...

a reply to: JimOberg
Thanks, that was an interesting read, and good research as usual for you.

I was thinking that all else being equal an unidentified professor should be more credible than an unidentified policeman since professors are supposed to be smart, but after reading your link, I have even more doubts about the unidentified professor.

a reply to: Arbitrageur


What I find interesting is this thread was started a few years back by someone trying to figure out what happened or even go so far as attempt to debunk the Phoenix Lights as either flares, aircraft maneuvers, or other assorted variety of swamp gas and now we have Big Jim and Arb chiming in with other assorted assessment of what constitutes observable reality. Kind of reminds me of Bill Nye on the Larry King show talking to these Air Force Officers whose job it was to launch siloed ICBMs. Remember, the baking soda and vinegar comment? LMAO.

a reply to: play4keeps

Play; what do you think of the documented cases of people seeing random lights in formation in a night sky and misinterpretating them as lights ON a single large structure? How often does THAT have to happen, before you concede it CAN happen?

a reply to: JimOberg


Big Jim, I wasn't there. I read the reports, which support distinct incidents, of course. This is interesting:

But in March 2007, Symington said that he had witnessed one of the "crafts of unknown origin" during the 1997 event, although he did not go public with the information.[27][28][29][30] In an interview with The Daily Courier in Prescott, Arizona, Symington said, "I'm a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I've ever seen. It remains a great mystery. Other people saw it, responsible people. I don't know why people would ridicule it".[31] Symington had earlier said, "It was enormous and inexplicable. Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too. It was dramatic. And it couldn't have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape.[32]
Symington also noted that he requested information from the commander of Luke Air Force Base, the general of the National Guard, and the head of the Department of Public Safety. But none of the officials he contacted had an answer for what had happened, and were also perplexed.[32] Later, he responded to an Air Force explanation that the lights were flares: "As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man made object I'd ever seen. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don't fly in formation".[2] In an episode of the television show UFO Hunters called "The Arizona Lights", Symington said that he contacted the military asking what the lights were. The response was "no comment". He pointed out that he was the governor of Arizona at the time, not just some ordinary civilian.[33]
Frances Barwood, the 1997 Phoenix city councilwoman who launched an investigation into the event, said that of the over 700 witnesses she interviewed, "The government never interviewed even one.

Regardless, IMO, you and the other guy are talking yourself into a skeptics' cardboard box.

BTW, for what its worth is it was what had a working name as a NG Telos or TR-6 that was "lofted" that evening. the programs changed names a few times but still the similar platform.

www.youtube.com... I love this IR video capture, so you guys can compare it to flares and airplanes for reference.