On April 21st, 2008, less than a week after making appearances over the Jersey coastline and northern Indiana, the "Phoenix Lights" returned to Phoenix, Arizona.
These lights, which many observers take to be UFOs, first appeared over Phoenix in March of 1997. This time around they’ve made their initial Arizona appearance over Deer Valley.
According to diarist Bill Knell: The bright objects morphed into various shapes and sizes, eventually forming a triangular and square shape. At least three U.S. Military jets chased the lights as they moved west to east in the sky. Officials from Deer Valley Airport officials said that none of their aircraft were responsible for the lights.
Officials from the local FAA base at Sky Harbor as well as numerous Phoenix residents, including Arizona Republic journalist Anne Ryman, reported having seen red lights in the sky Monday night. There source remains shrouded in mystery, and so far nobody can offer a "reasonable" explanation for their appearance.
But as usual with possible UFO sightings, there have been plenty of debunkers with ready-made answers offering a perfectly terrestrial, commonplace explanation for the mystery–including helicopters flying in formation (which seems to this journalist like something that FAA officials would easily have recognized).
The original Phoenix Lights of 1997 were explained away by being interpreted as U.S. Air Force flares that had been dropped at the Goldwater Range southwest of Phoenix. Those lights were viewed by many thousands of people.
This time around, such a debunking won’t be so simple, as Luke Air Force Base officials have already come forward to say they don’t know what the lights are but they have nothing to do with any U.S. Air Force activity.
The new Phoenix Lights have been sighted, and in some instances videtaped, just after the weekend-long X-Conference was held in Washington, D.C.
The X-Conference is an annual symposium on "exopolitics": the governmental, social, and cultural impacts of UFO sightings and close encounters of the third kind.
According to authoritative UFO researcher Grant Cameron, it is exceedingly difficult for the public, and for most people in the federal government, to access whatever information the feds or the military have on UFOs because there is "a government within the government" that has complete control over all the information–much like the FBI division headed up by the sinister "Cigarette Man" of the television show X Files.
According to Ryman, the lights were red and were visible for approximately 13 minutes beginning at approximately 8 PM local time.
FAA official Ian Gregor said that there will be no government or military investigation conducted into the lights because there is "nothing to investigate", althought the lights remain inexplicable thus far.