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Fife Symington didn't believe in UFOs or any other supernatural nonsense for that matter. He was a realist, a former Air Force captain, and the 19th governor of Arizona. But on March 13th, 1997, his whole worldview changed. Around 8:30 p.m., he heard over the radio people were seeing odd lights over Phoenix. No one knew what they were.
As a supernatural skeptic, Symington probably thought it was some kind of hoax or maybe a misidentified military aircraft. Still, he turned to his wife and told her he'd be back in a few minutes. He drove to the top of a nearby mountain, which offered a clear view of the Phoenix skyline. To his surprise, the parking lot at the lookout was packed with other people looking for UFOs. Before long,
Symington saw it. A huge, boomerang-shaped object with an iridescent sheen. It passed overhead without making a sound. His heart raced. This wasn't a plane or some kind of hoax. It was otherworldly, and it was passing right over his head. Standing in its shadow, the governor suddenly felt very small. He was in charge of the entire state.
But he had no idea what to do next. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
This is our second episode on the Phoenix Lights, a wave of UFO sightings on March 13th, 1997. The last time we examined the many witness statements and reactions from journalists, lawmakers, and the public. We also traced Dr. Lynn Kitai's journey from passive observer to committed ufologist. Today, we'll pick apart the government's official story.
The Phoenix Lights were military flares. Then we'll look at experimental aircraft and a possible connection to Area 51. Before we get into today's episode, among the many sources we used, we found The Phoenix Lights by Dr. Lynn Katai and The Phoenix Lights Mystery by William Hamilton to be extremely helpful to our research. Stay with us.
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Hello there, I'm Mike Flanagan, and welcome to Spectre Vision Radio's production of Director's Commentary. Director's Commentary is a deep dive into a film through the eyes of the filmmaker or filmmakers who made it. It combines an in-depth interview format with a classic Director's Commentary track, the likes of which used to be common on physical media releases, but sadly are becoming more and more rare these days. Filmmakers talking about film with filmmakers. For people who love film.
and filmmakers. For four months after March 13th, 1997, Governor Fife Symington tried to make sense of what he'd seen. He had his staff reach out to various government sources, but they didn't get very far. In lieu of any real answers, he kept his personal sighting to himself.
He felt a responsibility to project a calm facade. Then, USA Today reported on the Phoenix Lights on June 18th, 1997. Afterward, swarms of reporters descended on the city. The news coverage was relentless. And Symington sensed the situation was getting out of hand. Now, people were demanding answers. He had a choice to make.
He could come clean and demand more accountability from the government, or he could lie. Symington chose the latter. On July 19th, 1997, he called an emergency press conference. He took his place at the podium. Then he announced with grave solemnity the Arizona Department of Public Safety had completed an investigation into the Phoenix Lights. And at long last,
they'd found the culprit. On cue, a six-foot alien with huge black eyes and long, spindly fingers creeped into the room. The crowd erupted with laughter and applause as Symington said, "This just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious." Then he removed the alien's giant rubber head and patted his supposed captive on the back.
Of course, it was actually his chief of staff in a Halloween costume. The stunt eased the tension, exactly as Symington had hoped it would, but it also sent a clear message to everyone who'd seen the lights: If you believe this event was supernatural, prepare to be ridiculed. His timing couldn't have been better.
Only a few days later, Captain Eileen Bienz of the National Guard declared she'd solve the Phoenix Lights mystery. She revealed on the night of March 13th, visiting pilots from the Maryland Air National Guard conducted a training exercise near Phoenix. Eight A-10 Thunderbolt fighter bombers took off from Tucson at 8.15 p.m. and returned at 10.30 p.m.
According to Biennes, the pilots flew in a tight formation over a bombing range southwest of Phoenix. Then, one after another, they peeled off in a mock bombing run, dropping high-intensity illumination flares as they swooped low. These particular flares were equipped with parachutes that were nearly invisible at night. So, from a distance,
the flares would have looked like white orbs hovering in midair. When the pilots finished their training run around 10:00 PM, they dumped the remaining flares over the mountains west of Phoenix. These were the lights that made headlines, or at least that's the story Bienz was pushing. And to be fair, a lot of evidence does support the National Guard story.
One ufologist analyzed several videos of the lights and calculated their location based on nearby landmarks. Using this method, he placed them at the same spot where the flares were supposed to be. But many who actually saw the lights were unconvinced. Flares tend to move a lot as they descend. Not only are they falling toward the ground, but the wind pushes them around.
In contrast, the lights Dr. Lin Ke Tai and others saw were frozen in midair. Ke Tai knew she wasn't mistaken because she had a very sensitive telescope. Even when she'd looked at a fairly stationary object like the moon, she had to adjust her telescope every minute to keep it in frame. However, she never had to reset the viewer when she saw the orbs, even after several minutes.
She also insisted the lights simply didn't look like flares. And a number of witnesses agreed with her, even a few with military backgrounds who would know about flares. To prove their claims, they needed to recreate the flare experiment and show how little it resembled the Phoenix lights. In 2008, a documentary team invited three witnesses to Long Beach, California.
Equipped with flares, parachutes, and a rental boat, the team planned to recreate the phenomenon. They arrived at the marina after dark. The filmmakers boarded a boat and motored a few thousand feet into the Pacific Ocean, then lowered the anchor. It was go time. The group launched the flares into the sky. Purple orbs lit up the black abyss, and then around a thousand feet,
Parachutes deployed to slow their descent. The lights hovered for some time, but they soon drifted apart, eventually falling lazily into the ocean. The scene was breathtaking and looked nothing like what the witnesses remembered. This must have thrilled and validated the Phoenix residents who'd traveled to Long Beach. It seemingly proved they'd seen something stranger than a flare.
But there was one glaring problem with the experiment. It was very unscientific. First, the documentary crew didn't have access to the Lu-2 illumination flares the National Guard supposedly used. So instead they improvised with civilian maritime flares.
The two couldn't be more different. The civilian flares weighed less than a pound, and by contrast, the military ones weighed 30 pounds. In other words, it was apples and oranges as far as how they'd be affected by the wind or how they'd fall. In addition, Captain Eileen Bienz claimed the National Guard's flares were dropped from an altitude at least six times higher than in the Marina experiment.
And the witnesses in Long Beach were a whole lot closer than they were in Phoenix. From their vantage point, they would have noticed the light's movement a lot more easily. Still, this experiment was the closest anyone ever came to a proper test of the flare theory. And even though it had its flaws, it does cast some doubt on the official story. As do the discrepancies in the National Guard's timeline.
Reportedly, at 10 p.m. on the night of the sightings, eight A-10 Thunderbolts dumped their flares before returning to the base. But the very earliest witness saw the object around 8 p.m., before the plane supposedly even took off. Between 8 and 9 p.m., many people saw V-shaped lights and other objects between Las Vegas and Phoenix.
And even if they were dropping flares early, the initial sightings were scattered geographically across half of Arizona. This would mean the National Guard's tests were much larger in scope than they claimed. The base where the planes took off and the bombing range are both south of Phoenix, but most of the UFOs appeared to come from the north. So either the planes weren't where the guards said they were, or the lights weren't flares at all.
To muddy the waters further, UFO aficionado Dr. Kitai photographed the lights when they reappeared on January 12th, 1998, nearly one year after the famous Phoenix Lights incident. Her photo showed luminous orbs surrounded by a thick fog, identical to the lights from the year before. The next few days she called the Air National Guard. If the first sightings were actually flares, then these should be too.
But the person she spoke with informed her that because of the fog, all of their fighter planes had been grounded the night before. For Kitai, this meant the lights couldn't have come from flares. Plus, we can't forget, many people saw actual physical objects. Black triangles, shimmering Vs, and planes so big you could park 10 aircraft carriers on them end to end. Whatever these things were,
The military was clearly in no hurry to explain them. Perhaps there was a reason for that. Maybe the government already knew what the unidentified objects were because they'd built them. When the National Guard announced the Phoenix Lights were part of a training exercise, many witnesses felt betrayed. Several were pilots with thousands of hours of flight experience and years of military service.
And they all agreed the Phoenix lights were too bizarre, too astounding to be run-of-the-mill flares. Some suggested the National Guard story was part of a cover-up. Nobody knew for sure what the government was hiding. But many speculated the glowing orbs were actually top-secret military aircraft. The floating lights didn't look much like landing lights, at least from a distance.
But the human eye is very bad at resolving two different far-off lights. For example, if you saw the headlights on a car two miles away, you might mistake them for a single flashlight. Perhaps each orb the witnesses saw was actually two or more bulbs on an ordinary aircraft. That's what 21-year-old Mitch Stanley discovered when he witnessed the Phoenix Lights.
In 1997, the amateur astronomer had spent the better part of a year observing stars through a telescope. On March 13th, he saw the floating lights over Phoenix. But when he viewed them through his scope, each light split into two. He thought they looked like the undersides of seven distant planes that were very small and traveling at a high altitude.
Stanley could see the rectangular shape of their wings, reminiscent of A-10 Thunderbolts, the same models used by the National Guard.
Additionally, an air traffic controller later admitted the lights could have been planes, even though they didn't show up on radar. Civilian radar works by tracking transponder signals. These are communications devices that continually transmit information about the plane, like its identity and location. But if the transponders are turned off, the plane would be invisible to radar.
Obviously, turning off your transponder is a big no-no in aviation, especially when flying near military bases. So it makes sense Luke Air Force Base would scramble jets to intercept. However, if the lights were planes, it doesn't make sense the Air Force would tell a wild story about a flare exercise. Unless, of course, the aircraft were classified.
As we mentioned last time, the Southwest is home to the largest nuclear testing facilities in the country, like the Range. But they weren't only testing nukes. Within the vast desert expanse of the Range, a special zone was designated for testing the latest experimental aircraft—
Access to this area requires a top-secret security clearance, an invitation from the military's top brass, and an oath of eternal secrecy. Welcome to Area 51. Area 51 was created in 1955 by two CIA officers who wanted to test a spy plane called the U-2.
Back then, it wasn't much more than a stretch of desert with a few camouflaged warehouses. But it quickly grew into one of the most valuable pieces of military real estate. If the CIA, the Air Force, or any other service wanted to test a next-generation airplane away from prying eyes, Area 51 was their go-to destination. However, it wasn't as isolated as they'd hoped.
Almost immediately after the first flight tests at Area 51, civilians began reporting UFO sightings. This is because the planes flown out of Area 51 were so unusual, many people believed they were extraterrestrial. This included the SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest stealth spy plane, and the F-117 Nighthawk.
The Nighthawk was the world's first stealth fighter, and it looked nothing like any conventional aircraft. Instead, it had a triangular frame with swept-back wings. From a distance, it looked like an arrowhead, exactly like Phoenix Lights witness Tim Lee described. It could be invisible when it wanted to be, but it had landing lights that could be turned on.
If, for whatever reason, these lights were activated mid-flight, they would look like orbs arranged in the shape of a boomerang. It's tempting to think on March 13th people simply saw several Nighthawks with their lights on. Except these 40-foot wide planes weren't big enough to match what witnesses observed. Remember, some claimed the object was a mile long. Even if they were some other large aircraft,
There's simply no way it could have been that huge. The physics simply don't hold up. The heavier the object, the more power you need to keep it afloat. The largest jet plane ever built is almost 300 feet wide, and it burns 16 tons of liquid fuel every hour. And it's practically a miracle it ever got off the ground.
If we extrapolate that math to a plane one mile wide, it would be like trying to keep a small skyscraper afloat. Human technology simply isn't there yet. So perhaps some witnesses were mistaken about the object's size. This would be the most likely explanation if only one or two people testified it was so huge. But a half a dozen people corroborated this claim.
Setting aside the size issues, the witnesses could have seen some other vehicle. We don't know of any that fit the Phoenix Lights description, but the flying object could still be classified as top secret today. After all, seven years before the Phoenix Lights were spotted, the U.S. Air Force officially retired the SR-71 Blackbird, claiming its spy work could be done cheaper with satellites.
But this doesn't make much sense. Satellites can't zoom from place to place like a plane can, and the Blackbird had been the jewel of the Air Force for three decades. Many suspected the SR-71s were replaced by something even more advanced. In March 1990, an aviation journal uncovered a budget item from 1987
allocating almost $500 million for a secret Air Force project called Aurora. According to one witness who supposedly saw the plane, it was hypersonic, meaning it could fly at five times the speed of sound. This would be about 1,400 miles per hour faster than the SR-71.
which is otherwise considered the fastest plane in existence. At that speed, it could travel the 330 miles from Area 51 to Phoenix in about five minutes. Perhaps it could also hover or accelerate rapidly. This would explain some of the strange behaviors the March 13th UFOs exhibited. Now, the Air Force has repeatedly denied the Aurora existed.
And Ben Rich, a former Lockheed Martin director who helped design the SR-71, said the codename Aurora was just a random reference to the B-2 bomber. But perhaps that was a smokescreen too. Something as powerful as the Aurora would have to be classified.
And in 2019, after decades of silence, the Department of Defense released a statement claiming they had used an ultra-fast spy plane during the 1990s. Without giving too many details, the DoD said it used special technologies to make it nearly invisible, even to the naked eye. Remember,
Several March 13th witnesses said they saw a dark triangular object that seemed almost translucent. One of them thought he could see stars on the other side. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of the aurora to back this up. If the jet actually exists, then the military has done a remarkable job of keeping it hidden, which makes it impossible for us to directly compare it with the Phoenix objects.
But even if the claims about Aurora are true, this explanation has a big hole in it. Yes, experimental planes have been called UFOs in the past, and perhaps the Aurora bore a striking resemblance to the orbs from March 13th, 1997. But if Aurora was so secret, so vital to national security, then it's not a secret.
Why would anyone fly it over Phoenix, a city of two and a half million people? There are too many inconsistencies to accept the lights were man-made aircraft. Which leaves us one more explanation. Aliens. The National Guard's flare story couldn't explain all or even most of the UFO sightings on March 13th, 1997.
The next best explanation that the lights belonged to a top secret aircraft had plenty of holes too. To many, the unidentified flying objects displayed a level of technological sophistication humans hadn't achieved yet. Therefore, they must have been extraterrestrial.
Exactly what qualifies as "too advanced" will depend on who you ask, but generally there are a few key features: agility, speed, silence, and the ability to hover. Any one of these features on its own wouldn't mean much. For example, a blimp can turn its engines off and glide silently, but it would be slow and cumbersome in the air.
And a helicopter can make sharp turns or hover in place, but it's nowhere near as fast as a plane. In the speed category, a fighter jet can fly more than a thousand miles per hour, but it would rattle the windows of your house if you were beneath it. The March 13th UFOs were special because they appear to do all these things extremely well.
One witness claimed the triangular figure vanished before his eyes when two fighter jets approached it. This is an incredible feat. At the time, Air Force F-16s were the cutting edge of American military aviation. They were capable of flying at twice the speed of sound and reaching heights of 50,000 feet. That's about double the top speed and altitude of most commercial airliners.
These military jets were so well built, more than a thousand are still in service today, more than two decades later. But the UFOs weren't only faster, they could also accelerate from a dead stop in midair without making a sound. An anonymous witness stationed at the base confirmed they scrambled jets to intercept something over Phoenix, and the pilots had no idea what it was. According to him,
The pilots even recorded it from their gun cameras. When the planes landed, the base went into lockdown. And as for the pilots' footage, no one knows what happened to it. The Air Force never officially acknowledged the lockdown or the reason for it. However, multiple reports seem to suggest it happened.
UFO literature is filled with stories like this, of strange flying objects leaving fighter jets in the dust. Taken together, they suggest the Phoenix Lights may have been merely one episode in a long history of alien encounters. One example that mirrored the Phoenix Lights incident was the so-called Belgian wave of UFO sightings in 1989 and 1990.
These were particularly notable because, like the Phoenix Lights, they were witnessed by thousands of people. It started on November 29th, 1989, near the German-Belgium border. Half a dozen cops and more than 50 civilians saw a large triangular object with orb-like spotlights floating overhead. It appeared to search for something, then sped off.
As a one-time event, it was peculiar, but this wasn't the end of the story. Hundreds more strange aircraft appeared over Belgium during the next several months. Some were seen only from a distance, while others were much closer to the witnesses. One even followed alongside a car.
Like the Phoenix Lights incident, there was some variety in what people saw. Most of the UFOs in both waves involved triangles and orbs, but there were scattered reports of other shapes, like floating rectangles and trapezoids. The fact these objects could fly without making noise and then quickly disappear suggested a very high level of technology.
But the most impressive display was yet to come. More than four months after the first sighting, at 11 p.m. on March 30, 1990, a Belgian soldier called his base to report glowing orbs flying over his house. The army dispatched a patrol unit, which observed multiple sets of lights arranged in triangles.
Around the same time, two military radar stations detected unusual activity in the area. Shortly after midnight, the Belgian Air Force scrambled F-16 fighter jets to intercept. But as they got close, the UFOs went berserk. The lights they now recognized as solid aircraft accelerated from a dead stop, seemingly in an instant.
From the ground, flabbergasted witnesses watched the F-16s chase the mysterious objects, but it was no use. The pilots attempted to catch them nine times before finally giving up. Soon after, a Belgian Air Force major asked the U.S. Embassy if the triangles were some kind of secret warplane prototype, but the Americans were just as stumped as he was. Whatever these objects were,
Their abilities were clearly beyond anything the Belgian Air Force had ever built. And that's perhaps the best measuring stick we have to evaluate whether any aircraft is extraterrestrial or not. Whether it outperforms man-made systems. Some of the most compelling evidence for such technology comes from the U.S. military. Consider the encounter known as the Tic-Tac UFO.
On November 10th, 2004, a Navy radar operator clocked several unknown objects flying off the coast of San Diego. The objects moved in ways that should have been impossible, rising up to 60,000 feet before plummeting and stopping just above the water. At first, the radar operator thought it was a computer glitch.
But four days later, an aircraft carrier commander dispatched two fighter planes to investigate another strange radar signature. As they searched the area, they saw the figure hovering above the water. It resembled a smooth, white, 40-foot-long oval. It looked like a gigantic tic-tac. It had no wings, engines, or rotors, but stayed aloft with ease.
The object jerked erratically, zipping back and forth over the water like a ping pong ball without losing any speed at all. As they angled to get a closer look, the colossal tic-tac suddenly rotated and rose upwards to the same height as the planes. Then it rocketed past the bewildered pilots and vanished in an instant. Unlike the Belgian UFO wave,
This encounter was only witnessed by a handful of people, but it's even more credible because the pilots managed to capture the object on now public video. Now, over the years the government has brushed off cases like these, but there's no shortage of opinions on what the objects might be. For example, Dr. Kitai believed they were made by interdimensional beings.
She thought this explained how the Phoenix lights simply faded away. However, the existence of extra dimensions is just a mathematical theory. Even if another dimension turns out to be real, there's nothing to suggest anything actually lives there. Others have suggested there's a hidden UFO base somewhere beneath the ocean. This might explain why many sightings occur over water.
The most popular theory is simply UFOs come from outer space. Now, there's no convincing evidence to support any one explanation over another. Unidentified flying objects remain unidentified. Even if we believe aliens or extra-dimensional beings possess superior technology, there's no way to prove anything definitive.
At least not until someone actually captures one and publicizes what they find. Furthermore, it's very easy to debunk many UFO sightings, and several can be explained via natural phenomena. For example, weather patterns can generate orbs of light and wreak havoc on radar systems. The lights over Phoenix could have been related to the weather.
They may have been extraterrestrial vehicles, as Dr. Kitai claims. It's also possible the orbs were, in fact, flares. And the V-shaped objects could very well have been planes in formation, as Mitch Stanley reported. Or they may have been lights from a secret stealth aircraft. Or perhaps they really were part of an alien armada.
Unfortunately, we can't completely rule out any of these possibilities. For all we know, it could have been a combination of all three. Now, normally we don't like to leave our audience hanging with unanswered questions. When something remarkable like the Phoenix Lights happens, our instinct is to pick it apart and find some kind of logic underneath. But the universe is a vast place.
and we're just tiny players in it. Perhaps all we can do is admit we may never know all of its secrets. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday.
Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story and the official story isn't always the truth.
Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Xander Bernstein with writing assistance by Amber Hurley and Angela Jorgensen. Fact checking by Kara Mackerlein and research by Chelsea Wood and sound design by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor.
I'm your host, Carter Roy. This episode is brought to you by Hills Pet Nutrition. When you feed your pet Hills, you help feed a shelter pet, providing dogs and cats in need with science-led nutrition that helps make them happy, healthy, and ready to be adopted.
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