It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by SwatMedic
Is there a way to verify that the reports of the first sighting ( the ones early in the night way before Snowbird) were called in as reports BEFORE the second snowbird lights appeared?
Can NUFORC verify a time?
The only reason I mention it is once a large sighting like the snowbird one is experienced by a large group, others then recollect earlier events and tie them into the former.
Its kind of like "There were these strange lights at 10:30 and gee, now I remember that at like 8:30 I saw something funny too."
If there is documented proof of reports coming in before the 10:30 then that adds a great deal more of credibility to the first sighting.
I also recall watching several shows regarding this case and on one there was a older couple (possibly the ones you mention who were former air force) that work or had worked in some sort of Psy-Ops program that had to do with reasearch in technology designed to trick the enemy into seeing things that werent really there. Kind of a "mirage projector" or something like that.
Do you recall seeing that program as well? If so, can you elaborate?
Originally posted by Gazrok
Video of first event!
These stills are from the only video I found of the first event (i.e. it takes place prior to the 10pm sightings). Unfortunately, this was from a documentary on the Travel Channel, that I cannot seem to find a reference to (and it has since deleted from my DVR). I believe it was simply called “The Phoenix Lights” and aired in Feb. of this year. The stills are from screenshots I took then of the documentary. On the 2nd, I drew in the lines to see the dots in question (which were much more evident on the video, and moving fast across the sky, about jet speed, though difficult to tell as few references in the vid.) It’s an excellent special, if you ever see it, or it makes its way to YouTube.
At 8:30 p.m. the cockpit crew of an American West 757 airliner at 17,000 feet near Lake Pleasant, Ariz., noticed the lights off to their right and just above them.
"There's a UFO!" co-pilot John Middleton said kiddingly to pilot Larry Campbell. They queried the regional air-traffic-control center in Albuquerque, N.M. A controller radioed back that it was a formation of CT-144s flying at 19,000 feet.
Overhearing the exchange, someone claiming to be a pilot in the formation radioed Middleton. "We're Canadian Snowbirds flying Tutors," a man said...
But Capt. Michael Perry, squadron logistics officer for the Snowbirds, denied that any planes were in Arizona that month. "We don't travel ina V-shaped formation, and we don't cruise with landing lights on," he told Readers Digest. (Fitzgerald)
Were Canadian Pilots Pulling a Hoax? In the radio exchange between the America West airline crew and a pilot claiming to be a part of the lights formation, which I detailed in Part One, the mystery pilot said “we’re Canadian Snowbirds flying Tutors.”
From their Canadian Forces Base in Saskatchewan, the Snowbirds, officially known as the 431st Air Demonstration Squadron, tour the North American continent from April through October performing at air shows. They fly the CT114 Tutor, a two-seat trainer. It has a single whitish-colored landing light in its nose that can be pointed downward.
To get more information, I had numerous contacts with Major Jeff Young, Chief Flying Instructor for the Snowbirds. He told me the following: “we could find no record of our jets going cross country in that time frame. We can’t find anybody in our operation who could have been responsible for the lights that people saw.” Major Young did concede that Tutor planes could have been in Arizona that night flown by pilots other than the Snowbirds performance team.
That view was echoed by Captain Mike Perry, squadron logistics officer for the Snowbirds, who mentioned that out of 100 Tutor planes at their base, it was possible that “some may have been flown to Arizona by pilots from our training school, but it was not our performance team. We don’t travel in a v-shaped formation. We travel in threes and we never fly with our landing lights on.”
Major Young also gave me these characteristics of the Tutor aircraft. Its maximum cross country speed is 420 miles per hour, but it can travel as slow as 100 mph before the engine stalls. The fuel tank range is 450 miles, with another 100 miles available by using an extra tank.
Is it a coincidence that the lights over Arizona traveled the state from northwest to southeast at an average speed of about 400 miles per hour, within the Tutor cruising speed range? Is it a coincidence that the maximum fuel tank range for the Tutor is 550 miles and that distance covers a non-stop flight from the Area 51 military facility in Nevada to the Fort Huachcua military airfield in southern Arizona, south of Tucson? I’ll delve more into that angle in a moment.
One other thing worth noting: Snowbird isn’t just the name of the Canadian air team.
Operation Snowbird was the name given a military flare drop exercise conducted later that night, after the main sighting event, over the Barry Goldwater Gunnery Range southwest of Phoenix.
Could the mysterious formation of planes have been communicating to the America West crew that they were from Canada and were participating in the Operation Snowbird exercise, if not on that night, then on subsequent nights? Rather than Tutors, might the Canadian military pilots have been flying A-10s, which was the primary aircraft being used in the Operation Snowbird exercise? Did the mystery pilots have their landing lights on and pointed down as a joke, a hoax, just to see what the American reaction would be? Or did they have another motive?
from tim printy's research....
home.comcast.net...
The lack of radar confirmation is the big question. Why didn't anyone identify these aircraft? 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. (Ortega Great)
> Any large commercial airport will have both primary and secondary
> (transponder) radar. Planes which do not generate transponder
> signals will still show up as radar blips but without IDs next to
> them. There are are ways to filter out some of the stuff picked
> up by primary radar, such as things that are not moving (ground
> clutter) or already-identified aircraft, but full radar would
> always be turned back on in case an aircraft has a transponder
> malfunction, and particularly if it was suspected that an
> unauthorized aircraft without a transponder might be nearby.
The Air Traffic System is designed to identify aircraft who want to be identified. I have been aware of instances where the transponder of a medium sized aircraft failed and we flat never saw the guy on the digitized radar. It is very easy to elude FAA radar... (McIntosh)
Originally posted by JFraser
If it's an alien craft, why would it have lights? Where did it go? Did it switch it's lights off and fly away?
I don't mean to mock but these are logical questions.