Phoenix Lights, Twenty-Seven Years Later: New Witness Comes Forward
A retired air traffic controller breaks a decades-long silence to describe what he saw on radar the night of March 13, 1997 — and what he was told not to say.
For twenty-seven years, he told no one outside his immediate family. Now, in a lengthy written statement provided to researchers, a retired air traffic controller assigned to Sky Harbor the night of March 13, 1997, has described what he saw on radar as the Phoenix Lights passed overhead.
'The returns didn't make sense,' he writes. 'We had a formation, big enough to be five separate craft, moving at maybe thirty knots, no transponders, no communication. And then it merged into a single return — a single contact — and kept moving.' He says he was instructed by a superior, who had been on the phone with a number he did not recognize, to log the event as a weather anomaly and not to discuss it.
The Phoenix Lights remain one of the most widely witnessed unexplained aerial events in modern history. Thousands of residents across Arizona, Nevada, and Sonora reported seeing a V-shaped formation of lights glide silently over the desert between 19:30 and 20:30 local time. A second event later that evening — a string of lights that hung over the Estrella Mountains — was attributed by the military to flares dropped during a training exercise.
The former controller's account does not dispute the flare explanation for the later event. But he is adamant about the earlier formation. 'Flares don't merge,' he writes. 'Flares don't hold a V at thirty knots for two hundred miles.' He has provided his name and credentials to researchers, who say they have independently verified his employment records.
The Air Force has not responded to requests for comment. The witness, now in his seventies, says he is coming forward now because he is 'tired of being afraid of something I can't even name.'