The Alien Invasion of Phoenix, Arizona
Yet another rehash of the infamous Phoenix Lights episode.
Filed under Aliens & UFOs, Conspiracies
| Skeptoid #41 April 26, 2007 Podcast transcript | Listen | Subscribe |
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Tonight we're going to grab our shotguns, jump into our rambling pickup truck, and chase a massive triangular UFO as it courses silently across the American southwest, for we are (once again) on the trail of the infamous Phoenix Lights.
Perhaps it's the recent 10-year anniversary of the event, or perhaps it's the former Arizona governor's recent confession that he believes they were actually an alien spacecraft, but the Phoenix Lights have been back in the news again. It was the night of March 13, 1997 when a slanting line of bright lights appeared one-by-one in the sky beyond Phoenix, Arizona. Hundreds of photographs and videos were taken by observers throughout the region, making it among the most documented UFO sightings ever. The incident came as no surprise to anyone at nearby Luke Air Force Base (named for World War I ace Lt. Frank Luke), which operates the Barry M. Goldwater Range where a flight of four A-10 ground attack aircraft were jettisoning leftover illumination flares. The flares are typically dropped at lower altitudes, where they are not visible from Phoenix, due to the intervening Sierra Estrella mountain range.
The Phoenix Lights episode is a running joke in the Air Force and especially at the 104th Fighter Squadron of the Maryland Air National Guard, whose aircraft were involved. They don't have desert bombing ranges in Maryland, so the pilots go to places like Arizona for some of their training. The Air National Guard is the Air Force's reserve unit, similar to the Army Reserve.
But the rest of us regular people didn't know anything about this. We all just looked up into the sky, and saw something unlike anything we'd ever seen before. I remember watching it on the news with my wife. I remember my sense of amazement at witnessing something truly unexplainable: Could this actually be alien spacecraft?
Over the next couple of weeks, corroborating reports flooded in, of triangle-shaped craft from as far away as Henderson, Nevada cruising over the southwest, to Prescott, over Phoenix, and off toward Tucson. UFO's are reported nearly every day in most areas by someone, so it's to be expected that the normal background noise of typical reports would be given special attention during a large-scale episode like the Phoenix Lights. And, obviously, such a furor offers an easy opportunity for any clown to go on the news to say that a triangle-shaped craft passed over his house on its way to Phoenix. What would have been truly unusual and shocking is if there had been no other reports from nearby areas. Too bad none of these people owned cameras.
Lots of people in the Phoenix area did own cameras, and they all filmed exactly the same thing. Hundreds of photographs, hours of video, and all of it showing a line of lights in the sky above the city lights of Phoenix, looking toward the Sierra Estrella mountains and the Goldwater Range. Not a single photograph or frame of video showed anything else. This was the most documented UFO sighting in American history, and every last photograph showed exactly the same thing. Plenty of verbal reports told very different stories over the weeks following the incident, but every single photograph showed a simple line of lights beyond the Sierra Estrella.
As has been thoroughly documented, including by a Fox television special, the moment that each light disappeared on the evidential videotapes corresponded exactly with the horizon line of the Sierra Estrella mountains, proving that the lights were behind the mountains, and not over Phoenix.
Here's a story that's typical of the many found on the Internet, from Jan Markham of Gilbert Arizona:
My husband and I were out flying that night in the vicinity of the Stanfield VOR. We clearly saw the flares to our west, over the Goldwater range - a familiar sight to my husband. However, there was a second set of lights that night - the V-shaped formation that was initially shown on film by the local TV networks. That formation, whatever it was, flew directly over us at a much higher altitude than the flares. At the time, we thought it was some sort of military flight, but that never appears to have been acknowledged. I am sure someone knows the truth about those lights, but, please, don't insult our intelligence by telling us they were flares.
Let's spend a moment examining the flare said to be used in the incident. The A-10 drops two different kinds of flare: a countermeasure flare, used to confuse heat-seeking missiles; and an illumination flare, used to light up the ground at night either for the benefit of troops on the ground or to light up a target so it can be visually targeted for weapons release. The illumination flare is the one we're talking about. It's called the LUU-2 air-deployed high intensity illumination flare. It's made by defense contractor ATK Thiokol. The variant in use at the time of the Phoenix Lights incident was the LUU-2B/B. It weights 30 pounds and its canister is three feet long and 5 inches in diameter. Once it ejects its parachute and ignites, it puts out 1.8 million candela for 4 minutes, or 1.6 million candela for 5 minutes. It falls in its parachute at 8.3 feet per second. At 1000 feet above the ground, it lights up an area half a kilometer wide at 5 lux. The LUU-2's pyrotechnic candle burns magnesium, which produces an intense white light. Because it burns so hot, it also ends up burning the aluminum canister, which adds an orange hue to the light for most of the burn. About halfway through the burn, enough of the canister has been burned away that it actually lightens the load and it falls more and more slowly. Once it's almost completely out, an explosive bolt disconnects the parachute and the flare drops, burning out completely sometime hopefully before landing on someone's wood shingle roof.
The Barry M. Goldwater Range is a big place — over 4,000 square miles — and the Phoenix metropolitan area is even larger, about 14,000 square miles. The distance between the two is usually cited at 60 to 80 miles, but as we can see, that's going to depend on a lot. We do know a little about where the A-10's were flying inside the Goldwater Range. The guy who was in the lead A-10, Lt. Col. Ed Jones, says they were near Gila Bend when they ejected the leftover flares, and Gila Bend is just about exactly 50 miles from downtown Phoenix. Mesa and Scottsdale are farther away, so let's take a super rough stab at it, be conservative, and say that the average observer of the Phoenix Lights was 70 miles away from the A-10's. The brightness of the LUU-2 seen from 70 miles away is roughly equal to a star with an apparent magnitude of somewhere between -3.2 and -4.3, which is significantly brighter than any stars visible in the sky, but not as bright as the full moon. The magnitude scale was developed by the astronomer Hipparchus, where +1 represents the brightest star in the sky, and +6 represents the faintest. -3.2 is quite a bit brighter than the brightest star. The noonday sun has an apparent magnitude of -26.7. Thanks to the guys on the Bad Astronomy and JREF forums who helped me with these calculations.
Yet another wrench in the machinery is that all of the above is dramatically affected by atmospheric conditions. It wouldn't take much haze for absorption and scatter to obscure flares completely at that distance, and in the clear conditions predominant over Phoenix, lights are often distorted by an inversion layer, an effect that you can sometimes see when the landing lights of aircraft approaching an airport appear much bigger than they actually are. So we have a computation based on multiple unknown variables, any of which could wildly throw off our results. The one thing we can say with certainty is that the approximate brightness of the Phoenix Lights as seen in the photographs and videos does fall well within the wide range of brightness that's possible from LUU-2B/B flares at 70 miles.
Here's one final fly in the ointment. The photographic evidence itself is not necessarily a valid representation of how the lights would have looked to the naked eye: Still and video cameras are of varying quality and need specific settings to capture lights in the night sky. We have little or no information about the settings used in most of the available photographic and video evidence. Much has been made of a ham-handed spectral analysis of Phoenix Lights photographs and videos by prominent UFO advocate Jim Dilletoso, whose conclusions have been widely discredited since you can't even remotely do a spectral analysis of lights in a photograph and expect there to be any useful similarity to the spectrum of the actual light source, any more than you could expect a photograph of an orange to smell like an orange. Dilletoso found that, based on the colors in photographs, the Phoenix Lights could not have been from any known earthly source. Note that among Dilletoso's other claims to fame is having spent six weeks at an underground alien base in Dulce, New Mexico. Judge his credibility for yourself.
The UFO crowd and conspiracy theorists point out other problems with the flare explanation, most notably that a public relations officer at Luke Air Force Base contacted that night didn't happen to know that flares had been dropped, and so had no explanation for the lights. For this to be a real problem, you have to assume that everyone involved in training exercises immediately communicates every tactical detail of what they do, and their own personal estimation of its possible consequences, to the base PR officer. The officer also said that the Air Force had no operations over Phoenix that night, which was of course completely true. The A-10's were a great distance away and well inside their Military Operating Area airspace. This statement has been taken by the conspiracy theorists as evidence of a conspiracy, so discussing it is just beating a dead horse. The only other dissenting evidence put forward is the mass of eyewitness accounts following the triangle shaped craft on its journey across the southwest. Unfortunately all such stories are in direct contradiction with all photographic evidence. These witnesses had as much opportunity to document their sightings as did the people in Phoenix. The fact that they did not must be met, unfortunately, with a shrug. There are simply too many other reasons they might be saying what they're saying, and their reports are precisely contradicted by a mountain of hard evidence.
The Phoenix Lights were flares. Deal with it.
You should follow me on twitter here.
© 2007 Skeptoid Media, Inc. Copyright information
References & Further Reading
Beal, Tom. "UFOs flew over Phoenix in '97, Symington says." Arizona Daily Star. 23 Mar. 2007, Daily Edition: A1.
Chequers, J., Joseph S., Diduca D. "Belief in extraterrestrial life, UFO-related beliefs, and schizotypal personality." Personality and Individual Differences. 1 Sep. 1997, Volume 23, Issue 3: 519-521.
Craven, Scott. "Intrigue persists over lights in sky." Arizona Republic. azcentral.com, 25 Feb. 2007. Web. 3 Dec. 2009. <http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0225phxlights0225.html>
Markham, Jan. "C'mon, guys, those lights in the sky weren't flares." Arizona Republic News. azcentral.com, 10 Feb. 2007. Web. 15 Mar. 2007. <http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/0210satlets2-101.html>
Ortega, Tony. "The Hack and the Quack." Phoenix New Times. New Times Inc., 5 Mar. 1998. Web. 26 Apr. 2007. <http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/1998-03-05/news/the-hack-and-the-quack/>
Pike, John. "LUU-2 Flare." GlobalSecurity.org. GlobalSecurity.org, 27 Apr. 2005. Web. 12 Dec. 2009. <http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/luu2.htm>
Randle, Kevin D., Estes, Russ. Spaceships of the visitors: an illustrated guide to alien spacecraft. New York: Fireside, 2000. 286-291.
Reference this article:
Dunning, Brian.
"The Alien Invasion of Phoenix, Arizona." Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, Inc.,
26 Apr 2007. Web.
6 Sep 2010. <http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4041>
Discuss!
Remember, you should always read with skepticism the comments of anyone too lame to put their real name & city.
Look folks I lived in Phoenix that night I was working at American Airlines curb-side check in. We didn't see the lights at T3,but the next hanger over from us at Fed-Ex Air they did. We were
experiencing flight delays as well that nite as the control towers right there.My friend worked at the AFB base in that area. He didnt see anything but he was in Vegas that day. Yes I
believe the community before the
others disbelief...
Kevin, San Diego
July 07, 2007 11:24pm
I was one of the first witnesses to come forth with film - not just for March 13 but also the same amber orbs sighted and filmend March 10-12.
My new book takes a look at the meaning of the lights www.groundingthelights.com if you still think they're flairs after reading the book then I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Steven Blonder, Grapevine, TX
August 27, 2007 7:57pm
if aleins are living things then how can they live with out air up in space unless the only reason that they come to earth is not to hurt us or laugh at us its to get air to hold up in outer space.....
rosa, chicago
October 26, 2007 8:11pm
This board shows exactly why you can never win an argument with a true believer. Regardless of how much solid information you provide them with they are still willing to ignore it or call it a cover up. Even when a perfectly logical explanation is given to them they still believe their brother/friend/friend's friend who saw it happen/was involved in the cover-up/knows the REAL truth.
I enjoy this podcast and find it informative and entertaining, but Brian is fighting an impossible battle. He is either preaching to the choir or to those who can't be convinced.
Steve Loeffelholz, Iowa City, IA
November 08, 2007 9:48am
...and the world is flat.
Eric Stohn, Petaluma CA
November 23, 2007 10:09pm
Ok they were flares Well than it should be quite a simple task for our military to duplicate the sequence exactly as it happened in 1997 and satisfy everyone. Let's see them do it and put this thing to rest once and for all. That is IF they can. My money says they can not.
R. Luca, WPB Florida
December 02, 2007 4:22pm
Luca -
This was done shortly after, with the local TV news on board.
Eric Shultheiss, Corona, CA
December 02, 2007 5:10pm
Those are flares. I've never even heard of these Phoenix lights before just now. Upon seeing that picture, my brain recognizes a pattern that it has seen several times before. Military flares. Do not underestimate the brightness of those things. Even the hand held flares will turn night into day.
C. Sherrill, Ft. Bragg, NC
December 05, 2007 5:57pm
the military tried to stage a flare drop in 2000 2 try 2 get everyone into believing those were flares, but it backfired.every1 clearly noticed the HUGE difference n knew that they were lying
diego rocha, wilmington delaware
January 19, 2008 5:46pm
How many accounts are there that there was a V shaped ufo before the flares? Ive read some news articles and found some pretty credible witnesses seeing a V shape of lights even before it got dark, then the military sent out some flares when the darkness set in. same day? i cant exactly remember but diego rocha has a point
Eddward, Anaheim
February 02, 2008 9:34pm
u say its flares ....but the person who was torcherd by the aliens and the red blooded robes that was tied up on him and the coma he had until they healed him all that do coculde that there is aliens in this place and the lights of phoenix are there until this second.. leave to u to decide there is aliens or not...one second there was a girl with him which he shooted her when the aliens where exploring her body...plz see the film(night skies)it is based on the story of that person and the video...he told people what happened and they made it a movie it is produced last year(2007)try to watch it
omar aboseriee, giza,egypt
February 05, 2008 4:21pm
do you belive in u.f.o. and have you ever had like visins of them.
I belive iv u.f.o.s do you.
are alins real?
i am a girl and i am 9 years old.
kayla, sebastian florda
February 28, 2008 6:31pm
hey, what will u do if a U.F.O came in to your home and they could attack you and lights flashed in your room.
viviana solis, nampa,idaho
March 13, 2008 3:04pm
Hi Brian, thanks for the very informative podcast on this and other goofiness that goes on in the world.
Robert Clary, Tillsonburg Ontario Canada
April 25, 2008 11:19am
Sorry, but the "flare" explanation has been thoroughly debunked. Come up with something else please.
Andy, Chicago
April 28, 2008 9:35pm
"Sorry, but the "flare" explanation has been thoroughly debunked. Come up with something else please."
Really? Because it seems entirely logical that they are flares based on this... I know you only have like 1500 characters, but could you provide even a tiny bit of evidence that there has been any systematic debunking of the flare theory? Maybe a link?
eric thorn, Seoul, ROK
June 22, 2008 1:13am
I read your theory. You advised that the flares last about 5 to maybe 8 minutes. For argument, let's say 20 minutes of flare time. Why did the sighting last so long? Also, how can a flare burn out and ignite it self again after 5 minutes? I watch the documentary, "The Phoenix Lights", and trust me, I'm a skeptic, but I watched this DVD over and over. The video footage was not flares. Anyway, feel free to email me at craig_finn@yahoo.com.
Craig, Austin, TX
October 19, 2008 8:59pm
if alien did came to invade us! for one thing expect in all out extermination from orbital bombardment or something much worser then that! another thing if the inhabitance of phoenix where to preparer for an invasion, they just be fools in the process, if a UFO where to invade, for one thing anything within the Phoenix area would disappear without a trace or turn into creator from intense orbital bombardment. even the US would consider surrender if not the world, because a war with them, we have already lost before the war has ever begun! if not Earth could could be turn into a desert planet exactly like Mars, with a thick atmosphere like Venus, either way it could be inhospitable to life. until we are ready for such an event we are doomed toward an alien Apocalypse, and unfortunately Phoenix would be its first sacrifice!!!! :) good luck!!!
pablo caballero, dublin, ca
December 11, 2008 6:30pm
Whatever happened to the comparative video footage (shot I believe, by Mike Kryzston). It showed the lights at night and video shot at the exact same spot the next day. It very clearly shows (when lined up together)that the flares disappeared behind the far mountain ridge. Has this been conveniently covered up by the "True Believers". I am 100% sure of this footage because it is what convinced me that this was a bunch of ****. I want to believe in these things, but, I am not going to blow a dollar on a bottle of water and call it Perier (I'm not gullible if you don't get the joke). Come on peeps.
D.F. Skinner, Missouri
December 13, 2008 2:00pm
Dear Fools, I'm not an American. I am writing this from Mumbai, and twice i've seen UFOs with my own eyes. I live on the outskirts of mumbai. The first time, i saw it at noon. Came from the left side of my view. I ran to the balcony to get a better look. It was saucer shaped and silver, slightly wobbling for some time. I saw it move to the right of my view, stop for a few minutes, and then take a perpendicular route to a place called panvel which is mostly uncultivated land. Second time was at night. It was a black triangle with lights at the three ends. The lights were subdued. They were hazy and ethereal like nothing i've seen before. I saw it very clearly against a very clear summer sky.
We dont have a UFO craze in India, so no one bothers about such things. But you cant get away by tellling me they're flares. I've seen them with my own eyes.
Chris, Mumbai, India
December 24, 2008 8:29am
Dear Chris from Maumbai
We're not fools, we're skeptics. Take a picture, get it confirmed by your local air base / radar station, get witness statements. Then we'll review it.
I for one would like nothing more than for UFOs (alien or otherwise) to be proved to be true. The key word here is 'proved'.
Steven Digby, London, UK
January 06, 2009 6:42am
Thank you for a straightforward and scientific explanation of the Phoenix lights. I thoroughly believe your theory! I am however puzzled by the earlier sightings that evening of a huge triangular object flying through various towns that night...
Thanks for the science & skepticism...
Gary Krauss, NY NY
April 07, 2009 8:58pm
i wanna believe but i never saw some real prove.where can i find a site with real proves and explanation of realy eyewitnasses?
i need to know because i was been taken
ali, belgium genk
May 12, 2009 5:25pm
have you seen a alien
adrian, phoenix
May 15, 2009 10:28am
i was in aliean shipp and waz given being a drink made ffrom aliean blood
i waz so scaard and they beet me to
john honeyfield, new plymouth NZ
May 18, 2009 6:59am
There is a simply way to settle this huge controversy; just run the flare exercise again, exactly as before. Invite dozens of witnesses from the last sighting to participate and compare now, and then. I'm sure some TV producer would be willing to pick up the tab, to present this as a TV special. Think of the size of the audience!
Wes, Long Island, NY
October 08, 2009 7:16pm
Wes - That's been done a couple of times by television news and documentary crews. It changes no minds: most hardcore believers consider the reenactments to be part of the government coverup and scoff at them.
Brian Dunning, Laguna Niguel
January 30, 2010 12:41pm
I'm a public affairs officer in the Maryland Air Guard (in fact, I was the one who took the query from the Arizona Republican and connected the reporter with Lt. Col. Jones). I wasn't with the guys during this Snowbird deployment, but the what I was told after the fact was that when the reporter called to check with DM on whether they had any flying going on, they only checked the schedule of the active duty wing stationed there and didn't even think about us Guard guys who were just visiting. Understandable mistake, imho.
Kudos on this write-up. It's one of the few I've seen that sticks to the facts. I continue to be fascinated by how this story has taken on such a life of its own, and people are so committed to it, despite both evidence and common sense. I mean really, it's easier to believe in a mile-wide, radar-invisible UFO hovering over major city than in an optical illusion from illumination flares dropped in the night sky? C'mon!
Wayde, Elkridge, MD
February 20, 2010 11:32pm
One appeared again last night. We saw an extremely bright light at high altitude looking West over the city of Phoenix from Mesa. It drifted very slowly West until by 9:20 pm, about a half hour, it was gone.
Nearly a year ago in June we saw another one. Similar path and description but we saw it closer and looked at it with 16X field glasses. It was shaped like a hot air balloon but much brighter and higher. It passed behind high altitude cirrus. At times it sparodically pulsed a very bright light and even appeared to throw sparks. The news (local channel 5) last year reported that it is an experimental balloon produced by a Phoenix company for use in lighting strategic terrain. This was June, 2010 and not the same story about the crackpot with the helium ballons and flares nor the Air Force high intensity flare experiment.
I enjoy your articles. It is nice to hear logic and reason. Keep them coming!
Dr. David T. Mulhearn, Mesa, AZ
May 15, 2010 8:26am
I would like you to do a story on "Triangle Alley" that was the topic of an hour long show on UFO hunters on the History Channel I believe. I was living near Turlock CA when I was 15 (1990) when I saw a free falling "Triangle" that stopped abrubtly from the free fall, rotated a few times at the same location then sped off in an unimaginable speed. I love your site, I'm a true skeptic, educated (BBA, MS) I'm an athiest, I live in a cultured liberal place in Manhattan, NYC. But if you could do some more research on this phenomenon I would appreciate it. I was floored when I saw the special on UFO hunters some 15 years later describing exactly what I saw where I saw it. Thanks and keep up the great work!
Brandon Felix, New York, NY
May 17, 2010 5:08pm
The explanation of the flares is a slam dunk. Anyone who's driven on I-8 to San Diego from PHX at night enough times has seen them. But there was a completely separate "light event" above NE Phoenix that night.
I saw it as a formation of high flying planes, but your story made it seem like the flares to the SW and this plane formation were one and the same event.
No alien craft indeed, but not the same UFO reports. The "V shaped" aircraft formation and the air force flares were separate events.
Chris, Tempe, AZ
June 28, 2010 1:18am
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This is just a piece of junk!!! Just because no human has actually made to another planet to get proof doesn't mean that there's no such thing as aliens! I know we have those robots and all to investigate but those things aren't technological at all compared to the inventions of these extra terrestrial creatures you mistakenly call flares!
anonymous, anonymous
June 18, 2007 5:03pm