The Phoenix Lights

"The Phoenix Lights," for all its importance and for all the obvious conviction behind it, gets itself all twisted into a pretzel because neither the visuals nor the witnesses seem able to distinguish between two entirely independent events.

Near sundown, a giant V-shaped formation of lights, perhaps a mile across, passed southward over Henderson, Nevada, interrupting a Little League baseball game. Hundred of witnesses stared up at the thing. It moved slowly and silently out of sight at low altitude. After dark, it passed down I-10 and flew over Phoenix, continuing southward towards Mexico. There is no question about its existence or its properties. It was witnessed by thousands of people, including law enforcement officers, professionals of various types, air traffic controllers, and military and civilian pilots.

Later that night, some Air Force Warthogs apparently dropped a series of bright flares during an exercise. The flares were in a series and disappeared one by one behind the mountains into the target area. The flares were photographed by numerous people, many of the good folk of Phoenix having been alerted to and excited by strange happenings in the sky, by this time.

Nobody knows what the first thing was. So the response of the public becomes, by default, the more interesting story. Somehow, the original story bled into the second. The huge triangle is dismissed as "Air Force flares." A Phoenix councilwoman, entering her office, was asked the morning after the event if she knew anything about the triangle. She'd heard nothing about it but she brought the subject up at the meeting, where it was dismissed with a single joking reply. Her question made it into the media, however, and her office phone lit up. When her answering machine could no longer handle the volume, the phones of other offices were called into play. She estimates the number of phone calls from eyewitnesses to the original incident at a thousand. She managed to respond in person to several hundred of them. In its description of the reports, the media singled out one, from a young boy who thought they were airplanes. Thereafter, the sightings were described as man-made objects mistaken for something else. The governor's response was to make a public announcement dismissing the affair, while accompanied by a staff member dressed in an extra-terrestrial costume.

The film was organized by a married couple, both doctors, living on the outskirts of Phoenix. Both had seen the giant triangle with its quiet amber lights. But although the movie was written by one of the docs, it couldn't be more confusing. She evidently saw lights on several different occasions and there were times -- long moments -- in which I didn't know which sighting she was talking about or which picture of which sighting I was looking at.

Too much time is wasted on "ancient visitations" and that sort of irrelevant stuff. And all the witnesses, including the two docs, seem convinced that they observed something from outer space. In the film, the witnesses describe the triangular orange lights as having a calming effect, almost deliberate. One likens it to a parade designed to show humans that "they" have no destructive intentions.

I'm a kind of scientist too, and I'm not so sure about all that. It's too much akin to Kierkegaard's "leap of (or to) faith", the "faith", in this case, lying in what Alan Hyneck called the extra-terrestrial hypothesis. It seems undeniable that something was there -- but what? Sure, it could be a space ship with aliens inside, or a kind of drone, but other explanations are possible. We now believe that matter can take four forms -- solid, gas, liquid, plasma -- but suppose there are others that occur more rarely and take forms like triangles or spheres. Suppose the objects aren't objects at all, but neural impulses in the mind of some cosmic intelligence? Can we be sure they aren't? Every explanation seems as absurd as any other.

The film is screwed up and that's too bad because we need to know more about the thing and its movements than we do about feelings of awe and visits in Biblical times. I'm personally convinced that something is going on because when I was in high school, at three in the morning of a bitterly cold night on an empty rural road, a friend and I witnessed the antics of a moon-like sphere in the crystalline atmosphere. It was fuzzy and bright, flew against the wind, wobbled slowly from side to side, made not a sound, and did a right-angle turn. I don't know what it was, although I waved and shouted at it. Nobody knows what it was. But if you're going to speculate, I would hope you would organize a film better than this.