Apr 23rd, 2008
What on Earth were those lights over Phoenix?
There were absolutely four lights. They appeared to hover in the sky.
They looked red or white, and they flickered. They were visible for nearly 15 minutes on Monday night.
The lights were seen by, among others, a Phoenix police-helicopter pilot, air-traffic controllers and a reporter. There was even an extended videotape.
But the lights were a mystery. A mystery that generated a lot of interest.
By Tuesday afternoon, there were 125,000 page views of the story on azcentral.com, 600,000 page views on the photographs and 40,000 viewings of the video.
The story was on the Drudge Report, FoxNews.com, ABC News and newspaper Web sites across the country.
Almost immediately, there were theories about what the lights might be.
Perhaps they were high-altitude flares that were visible from a great distance in the clear Arizona sky.
Or maybe they were airplanes or helicopters or weather balloons.
One Phoenix man said he saw his neighbor launching small flares attached to helium balloons.
The mystery couldn’t be answered by civilian or military authorities.
And perhaps, although this would have to be considered fairly unlikely, they were spaceships piloted by aliens.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command, which monitors the skies for security threats, said the organization did not know where the lights came from.
Luke Air Force Base officials said that they didn’t have any aircraft in the sky Monday night and that the lights were not part of any Air Force activities.
No agency thought it necessary to investigate the matter.
It’s the mystery of it all that makes people a little bit anxious.
“We are in the Age of Technology; we assume we can know anything we want to know,” said Chong Ho Yu, director of Arizona State University’s Applied Learning Technology Institute and who has a doctorate in psychology.
Tags: arizona, lights, mystery
9 Responses to “What on Earth were those lights over Phoenix?”
I’ve heard that story myself, and we saw no sparks falling or anything else to indicate flares. Also, I’ve seen flares, and this was not a flare.
No noise at all, totally silent. They never really moved from their relative position in the sky, just rotated around each other.We live in NW Phoenix, on the Glendale border, and this was directly east of us, about 35-40 degrees in the sky. We tried to get the telescope set up, but it was done and over too quick for us to get it all set up and in place. Too bad.
They were flares attached to helium balloons.
sorry, but that is pretty retarded to assume that the military has super-high tech stuff as you describe just because they’ve designed some pretty interesting conventional aircraft. If they are of this planet, they are most likely flares; though I don’t think flares move that much… or are red. Who knows, and who cares? It’s not going to affect anything.And the military doesn’t scramble fighters to escort experimental aircraft.
i want to believe
I heard it was swamp gas and the reflection of Venus.
It already wasn’t?
I see formations like these when looking straight on at the approach paths for Sky Harbor (one from the north, one from the east) in Tempe. Not saying these are the same thing, but the pictures i see on the web or newspaper look exactly the same.