![]() ![]() On the night of March 13, news of the 8:30 pm sighting traveled fast, so a large number of people were outside with video cameras when the second and unrelated event, at about 10 pm, happened in the sky southwest of Phoenix. After my story, the Arizona Republic also found his story credible and wrote about it. (For the inexperienced: a Dobsonian telescope is much easier to move than the typical department store scope it’s child’s play for an experienced observer like Stanley to get a good look at passing planes at altitude.) And he had a witness: he had told his mother, who was standing nearby, that the lights were planes. I was the first reporter to talk to him, and, as a telescope builder myself, I made a thorough examination of his instrument and his knowledge of it. But there was no doubt, he told me, that they were planes.Īfter his sighting, Stanley tried to contact a Phoenix city councilwoman who was making noise about the event, as well as a couple of UFO flim-flam men working the local scene, but he was rebuffed. The planes still looked small in his scope - suggesting they were flying at high altitude - and he didn’t know what type they were. Using a magnification of 60X - which essentially put him 60 times closer to the vee than people only using their naked eyes - Stanley could see that each light in the sky was actually a double, with one light under each squarish wing. ![]() These images show the flares in an arc over the Phoenix cityscape, which is sometimes confused with the earlier, overhead “vee.”Īs I first revealed in the Phoenix New Times, a young man with a 10-inch Dobsonian telescope, Mitch Stanley, spotted the vee from his backyard, and saw that it was a formation of airplanes. Most of the photos and video of the lights were taken of the second incident - the flares - as people came out in response to the first. This film was never promoted by UFO enthusiasts, perhaps because it doesn’t show the famous optical illusion of the “dark triangle.” Only one video seems to exist, and since it was shot of an overhead object it does not show a cityscape. The first incident, the original “vee,” passed overhead with almost no one photographing or filming it. The images of the Phoenix Lights presented on the web further confuse the fact that two different incidents happened. This kind of image is widely assumed to be the “vee” or first incident. Simple physics, however, suggests the vee was high in the sky and moving very fast, even if it looked like it was moving slowly due to the altitude. As the months passed, more and more elaborate - and ridiculous - claims were made by eyewitnesses who were clearly trying to one-up each other.) As I’ve pointed out many times, the eyeball is a poor instrument for judging the altitude of point sources of light in a night sky. Some early eyewitnesses perceived that it was high in the sky, others swore it was low and moving very slowly. That’s 200 miles in thirty minutes which means the vee was moving at about 400 miles per hour. and traveled south to Phoenix at about 8:30 and then passed over Tucson at 8:45. The mysterious “vee” configuration of lights that so many people across the state witnessed was seen over Prescott at about 8:15 p.m. I wasn’t disappointed.įor starters, there were two separate events on the night of Maover the skies of Arizona. ![]() In most cases, those explanations were actually pretty good, and the “UFO experts” for the most part came off as yahoos.īut when I realized that they were saving “the #1 UFO event caught on tape!” for last - the lame Phoenix Lights, the 1997 event that I helped debunk years ago as a reporter in Arizona, I prepared myself for yet another time that so-called journalists wouldn’t get even the most basic facts right. To its credit, the NBC program at least made an attempt to provide prosaic explanations for each of the events it presented. UFOs make great ratings, so it isn’t surprising that NBC’S Dateline aired a special on Sunday, May 18, entitled 10 Close Encounters Caught on Tape.
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